More Stash Busting Projects to Pare Your Odd Balls – Knitting

It feels like for several years now the knitting community has been in the throws of its emotional support chicken era. As of this writing the original pattern for the emotional support chicken is the subject of nearly 14,000 projects on Ravelry, which is not even to mention all the people (myself included!) who knit it without sharing on Ravelry about it. 

The pattern came out in 2023 and still gets hundreds of visits a day on Ravelry. It’s now available in five languages, so people all over the world can knit their own chickens. 

And why not? We need all the emotional support we can get in these trying times (and that’s describing the times incredibly lightly). 

But maybe it’s time to retire the emotional support chicken, or at least expand our repertoire of knit comfort animals. 

If you’re in the market for a different kind of emotional support knitting project, Lion Brand would like to suggest a dog. 

A Dachshund, to be precise. 

The Comforting Dachshund knitting patterns uses two colors of DK weight yarn to make a doggie that’s about 13 inches/33 cm long and 5 inches/12.7 cm tall. You could of course use the same pattern for worsted weight yarn and make a bigger dog if that’s a thing you might like. 

Because as Dachshund is pretty sausagey in shape, this is a relatively easy knitting pattern with a skill level rating of easy. The face has some shaping but most of the body is just a straight tube, with the ears, tail and legs knit separately. 

In fact, all of the pieces are knit separately, including the head and the body, so there are nine pieces in all. They are all worked flat, seamed, stuffed and sewn together. Safety eyes were used in the sample project but you could also embroider eyes if you wanted to make this for a baby. 

The Dachshund pattern is available for free from Lion Brand, or you can buy the materials (excluding the eyes) direct from them. 

[Photo: Lion Brand]