Spock Knit Doll

What a busy week!  Mom came to visit me here in Cape Cod, all the way up from Maryland, so I didn’t get much knitting done over the weekend.  Now that she’s headed home, I was able to finish one project that’s been on my table since the end of February…

I was very sad to hear about Leonard Nimoy’s passing, not just because I’m a fan of star trek and sci-fi, but because he sounds like someone I would have liked to know.  I channeled that into my knitting, and surprised myself by how quickly he came together.

Here’s my rough sketch…

Unfortunately, during construction I didn’t stop very often to take pictures.  The first ones I thought to take were his hands, because I knew right away I wanted to alter my traditional “mitten hand” to do a mitten version of Nimoy’s “Live Long and Prosper.”  Here are a couple of pictures of me making his left arm/hand, which is the non-LLAP hand…

Fairly straight forward… I work in the round on the arm until I come to the hand, and then separate 6 stitches out onto a stitch holder for the thumb.  You get something like this…

At this point I hadn’t chain stitched the bronze pattern onto the bottom of the sleeve yet.  On the show, Leonard’s sleeves looked like this, with wavy lines, but after some experimenting, I decided I liked the minimalist look of just one straight line of bronze chain stitches.  You’ll see them later.

For the LLAP hand, I made it pretty much the same way, but then for the fingers portion of the hand, I split it again into two sections, and ended up with a monstrosity on 5 needles… Yikes!

Almost ready for LLAP-ing!

The ears were a bit of a challenge, I eventually decided that I wanted to make them in the round, and it took some trial and error to get them shaped the way I wanted.  There’s a good close up shot at the end of this blog entry of what they look like from the side.

Chain stitched where the blue changes to skin tone…  Starting to look like what I want 🙂

All of the guys in Star Trek have their little insignia on their shirts, here’s a good shot of them…

At first I tried embroidering the insignia on with a duplicate stitch, but it came out heavy and unwieldly looking, and it didn’t quite have the shape I wanted.  In the end, I finally just cut it out of felt (printed it out on paper at the size I wanted, so I had a pattern to cut from).  I had a hard time deciding if I wanted to include the little star on the inside, but I eventually decided to go with the minimalist approach again.  I like how clean it is.

Here he is again, all completed!

I wanted to pose him for the photo with his hand holding up the LLAP gesture, so I stuck a needle through his arm to keep it raised temporarily.  Without the needle, it lays flat like his other arm.

Here’s a few more shots, including the ear (sorry it’s a bit washed out… I only ever really knit the evenings, and I’m too impatient to wait until daylight to get a better photo, so I end up with these weird ethereally lit pictures…!)

In this one you can see how I popped a needle through his arm to prop it for the photo…

Oh, and here’s a banana for scale.

And apparently Spock likes knitting too!

Thanks for all the years of fun, entertainment, and adventure, Mr. Nimoy!