Here’s #3 in the March of the Snakes – Ziggy. I wanted to use chevron crochet as it’s a nice snaky pattern, and to me the obvious way to do it was to make a flat piece and then roll it up and stitch it together.

Poor old Ziggy had a bit of a troubled creation, where quite a few things I was sure I had done really carefully and got right, I got wrong. He reminded me of a time years ago, when I did a woodworking course and had to make a sawhorse. It almost broke me. I did everything I could to measure it, mark it up and chisel it out precisely, but one of the joints was the worst I’d ever made. Luckily, I had amazing tutors, and I learned how to patch a wobbly, badly cut joint almost invisibly. I definitely learn more when things go wrong, even if I rail against it at the time. Learning to fix mistakes is so reassuring, as you don’t have to rely on being perfect to make something complete and good!

Here is Ziggy’s story (click on thumbnail for text).

Ziggy started out as a flat piece of chevron crochet. I knew I’d need to do something to taper the tail, but wasn’t sure what. It ended up a bit random. Also, I couldn’t be bothered to do the trig, so I took a guess and made the chevron twice as long as I wanted the snake to be.

Rolled up and stitched together. I had to do this twice, as the first time I did it inside out. The wrong side with yarn carries from one stripe to another was showing. Grrr. How could I have missed that? 1) Crocheting while watching TV. 2) Tired.

Wrapped the tapered bit of the tail round in a spiral as best I could. Luckily crochet is quite malleable, stretchy and forgiving.

Embroidered a bit on the tail to make the spirals join up better.

Top of Ziggy’s head. I started with the zig-zag to match up with body, so the rest of the had was a bit -er- improvised. Got lucky, head ended up with appropriate contours. Pure fluke.

Ziggy’s bottom jaw was also improvised to be roughly the same size and shape as the top.

Anoter view of lower jaw. Also, made body too long, so I had to double it over on the inside at the top.

Although I checked, after I stitched Ziggy’s head on, he was longer than the maximum 20 inches. Disaster!

I had to unstitch his head, and fold down the body a bit more.

Unfortunately, when I was unpicking the green section, I cut some of the actual stitiches. This is something crochet doesn’t forgive.

I had to unravel most of the green zigzag and re-crochet it back in, stitching over the remnants of green at the edges of the zigzag.

This created a ridge on one side of the zigzag on his head, so I put one on the other side too to make it a feature.

To summarise: stitched body twice (not paying attention), stitched head on twice (failure to measure despite measuring several times), crocheted head zigzag twice (failure in unpicking). Still, I’m pretty happy with the way he turned out. I hope Slither of Snakes like him! On to the next one. I need to get cracking if I’m going to send them a decent number of serpents by the end of the month.