Author's Angst at Aardvark Appeal

When I named Arborville High School's football team the Aardvarks in DIED IN THE WOOL, I was obviously going for alliteration. This post is about the DIED IN THE WOOL aardvarks, so I decided to have a little fun with alliteration in the title.

In DIED IN THE WOOL, the members of the Knit and Nibble knitting club knit toy aardvarks as a fundraising project for the sports program.

I have to confess I left the knitters to their own devices to figure out how to do this. I had never seen a pattern for a knitted aardvark, let alone knit one. But the very talented artist who creates the covers for the Knit & Nibble series depicted the results of the knitting project quite marvelously.

Then last week I got an email from a reader inquiring where she could find the pattern to knit the aardvarks on the cover! I was quite mortified to have to tell her that they were not an example of the writer's dictum, "Write what you know."

But I also went searching online for knitted aardvarks and I actually found a pattern at Ravelry.com, available for $5. It's a wonderful rendition of an aardvark--very realistic if you can imagine a yarn creation resembling a real animal.

It's also quite different from the aardvarks on the cover of DIED IN THE WOOL, which are more what I would call "teddy bear aardvarks"--recognizable as aardvarks by their heads and tails but as unlike a real aardvark as a teddy bear is unlike a real bear. In DIED IN THE WOOL, however, they are supposed to be children's toys, so the cover artist's impulse to make them like teddy bears was a good one.

I emailed back to the woman who had inquired about the aardvark pattern to report on the Ravelry pattern and also to steer her to a few other online patterns that could resemble aardvarks with a few tweaks. She responded that she thinks she's figured out a way to do it. I asked her to send me a photo of the result for my website and I hope she does!