When Kerin and I were faced with the challenge of designing fun, playful kits for a kid-and cotton-themed catalogue, we decided to imagine ourselves as kids again and figure out what kinds of things we would have wanted knit for us. It wasn’t much of a challenge, really. Sweaters??? Bo-ring! Scarves? Suh-NORE!!! The kids in us wanted something that would be really, truly FUN to play with, especially in the warming days of springtime.

Hobby horses! And for an extra fun spin on this old classic toy, we chose fantasy creatures to model the heads after. I was expecting a fight over which of us would get to design the unicorn, and Kerin was expecting a fight over the dragon, so it was pretty obvious which of us would do which.

As a child, I never liked to play that I was riding a hobby horse, rather, I liked to pretend that I WAS the horse. I might have been a little weird, but if there are other kids out there like me, then they will surely appreciate that the unicorn kit comes with instructions for a tail they can wear around their waists, to better pretend to be a unicorn with!

The Unicorn is worked out of Simply Cotton Worsted, a soft, machine washable, affordable yarn, and then machine washed and dried on high heat to pre-shrink the fabric before stuffing it. The Unicorn in the above photos was knit by one of our amazing and hilarious test knitters, Susan (aka NoKnitSherlock), and she and I had a lot of laughs over the gruesomeness of the disembodied horse head that would somehow become a loveable child’s plaything. She even made me a card around it:

Those of you who are familiar with the Godfather, or this episode of The Simpsons…

…can probably guess why we found that so funny 🙂

I know I would have loved a toy like this as a kid…I mean, I love it as an adult! I spent at least a week hugging the sample at my desk when we got it back. (I did some work that week too–my boss reads this blog!) I’m sure it will make a greaat gift that a child will get many years of joy out of. Happy Knitting!