christmas bat

Okay... before you start thinking that we must have some weird Christmas traditions here in Australia... let me just say, that the Christmas Bat is not something you would commonly see here. In fact, I'm pretty sure he is a one-of-a-kind!

I made him for my swap partner. She received him yesterday, and got a wonderful surprise.

Usually when I am participating in a swap, I like to make the gift as personal as possible. Do you remember the crochet hook holder which I made for Daphne? Well... she adores (and I mean ADORES) all things peacock... so, it was very easy to choose a theme for that one. Click here if you haven't seen it before - I'm really proud of the way he turned out.

Unfortunately, I haven't ever met Wendy, so I was starting with nothing. I decided to do a bit of a rav-stalk (you know... where you check out someone's profile on Ravelry, in the hopes of finding some useful personal information). I discovered that she is MAD ABOUT BATS... which I already suspected, since her avatar is a bat, and her rav-name is batwing57.

So now all I had to do was combine the bat theme with the Christmas theme... easy enough to do, right???

Into the planning stages... I had visions of Holly Bats hanging on a Christmas Tree - that's HOLLY bats, not HOLY bats!

Can you imagine little bats, with their green holly leaf wings and red berry bodies?

Nah.. I was having trouble with that one, too! I couldn't see them coming together, without looking like mutant holly, assembled by a three-year-old child.

So I decided to make a regular bat, and give him a Santa hat for the Holiday Season. The hat is only pinned in place, so that he doesn't have to wear it all year 'round.

I remembered that bats can be a bit hairy, so I crocheted the body using a strand of dark grey yarn, and a strand of black eyelash yarn worked together. As you can see, he looks pretty boring at this stage...


Then I assembled some embellishments... I cut some wings and ear pieces from a couple of felted jumpers, and added a few buttons for the nose and eyes.


Everything was hand-stitched in place.


By this stage he was looking very much like a bat... but not very festive... so along came the Santa hat.


And here he is, ready for Wendy...