A few months ago I started seeing posts on Facebook from a friend/ former zoo co-worker about one amazingly cute baby hippo named Fiona. She was born prematurely at the Cincinnati Zoo and subsequently had to be hand raised by their amazing care staff. The zoo was posting photo and video updates regularly to let everyone follow along and cheer Fiona on. Thus the hashtag #TeamFiona was born.

I was a zookeeper for 11 years and saw many zoo babies born and a few of them hand-raised.  It is a monumental task and the public rarely realizes the scope of what is involved. The countless overtime hours, the constant communication, collaboration and adjustment of care is intense. I am so proud and in awe of Fiona’s care team and the amazing job they are doing.

I decided to try my hand at a Fiona tribute and right around that time the zoo posted a video of Fiona wiggling her ears….. SHUT… THE… FRONT…. DOOR! I could die of the cuteness overload….. well it’s the ears, said I… the centerpiece they shall be!

The only cowl design I had made thus far was “Through the Stones” and it was fingering weight yarn. It took a solid 2 months to make and I felt like that set up wasn’t right for Fiona. She’s a hearty, husky girl now so I decided to make a shorter, stockier cowl that would have more body on its own. And I chose worsted weight yarn which mean much larger needles than I had been using. Such a nice break!

As soon as I got the idea for the Fiona cowl I realized that the ears needed to be 3-D and separate from the face so that they could stand up and move of their own accord.

This hippo cowl was a profound lesson in  patience for me- and I had to remind myself that when you change all of the dimensions of something you’ve done before, that basically means you haven’t done it before and if you realize there’s an issue, it’s best to take the time and work through it now instead of ending up with a finished product that’s not what you envisioned- especially if you’re going to publish the pattern. You really can’t scrape by and just say good enough.

I drafted a chart of her face that would take up about half of the width of the cowl and started knitting… and I got about 1/3 of the way through before I realized that it was WAAAYYY too wide- to the point that you couldn’t even see the whole face in one look if you were wearing it. No good….. I ripped it back to row 1, swallowed my gall and tried again.

I looked at the cowl to see what the maximum width would be that could be seen while wearing it and then narrowed her face chart accordingly. Starting again… The chart was 68 rows tall at this point (quite a few less than “Through the stones”, even presumably accounting for the difference in yarn weights) because I figured it should be nice and tall and could be scrunched down a little to keep the neck warm. Well this time I got ~80% done and looked and… DRAT!… now the face was okay side to side but the cowl was going to be WAAYYY too tall, to the point that you would have to scrunch it down so much to be usable that you would no longer be able to tell what the design was…. so I ripped it back to row 1 again (which, incidentally, I was getting really good at by threading in two circular needles as lifelines- one on the front side and one on the back side- silver lining I suppose). Oh how great was my sorrow and general frustrated-ness!

I measured the absolute height the cowl could be on the 2nd attempt before ripping it out, reworked the chart and started again! Third times a charm. This time it was a good height and you could see the width of her face without having to rotate the cowl.  

I made two ears by basically knitting a rectangle and then decreasing on either end to round the edges- though, again, my first draft ear was way too big and bulky. Then I folded them over and, as a last minute add on, I crocheted around  the ears with the contrast color to highlight the edges so you could see the fold more clearly.

And Voila… the Happy Husky Hippo Cowl was born… after many failed attempts and much weeping and gnashing of teeth!