Ok, so I did a lot of cutting the ends to get the colorworking in the round down.

I used 3 needle bind off instead of all the kirchetesejlriaesilfjie (ok so I can’t spell it so I didn’t even try) stitch.

Stitch markers lost: About 15

Counts are wrong-totally fudgeable. Details below:

POOF. I knew that intarsia in the round was a pain in the rear…but honestly, it is kind of worth it because I didn’t want a giant seam on my whale and I also wanted the pretty color working, it really makes the thing look authentic. The only thing worse than intarsia in the round is counting stitches while doing intarsia in the round. I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and recount my purls and knits. ugh. BUT I don’t care. He’s awesome.

I also had an issue with the majority of my counts-the last three stitches were missing from the majority of the first half of the whale…not sure if it was from me or a pattern error, but I just kept on going anyhow, and ignored the last three stitches until I began the decrease part of the bottom portion and then I fudged it to make it coincide with the first decrease row (meaning I didn’t do that one decrease).

3-5-15: This is taking a lot longer than I expected. I used a baby yarn thinking it would be smaller, but it isn’t…BUT I don’t mind, I love how it looks, really lifelike. Just a longer project than I anticipated.

3-6-15: Oh lord this is turning out to be quite the project haha! I was thinking it would be a ‘little’ whale. It’s a whale of a whale, and that is my tale. So I’m headed to the store today to get MORE yarn. bahaha! DD is really excited though, she keeps telling me that I should be working on it for her when she catches me doing something like, ‘gasp’ CLEANING! haha!

3-9-15: The counts on the fins are wrong…It doesn’t really matter, they are totally fudgeable. I used magic loop so it was really easy to figure out where to increase and decrease-either on either end or at the center (which would be on either side of the needles). I finished both fins today-while working on the first I got a little idea…I decided to make my daughter’s initials in the colorworking for the second fin. I didn’t bother with a chart or anything, so it could have turned out better, but considering I was winging it, it turned out pretty good!

3-11-15: I will finish this sucker today. I just have a teensy bit to do on my last tail fin. He’s wonderful. This is such a wonderfully planned pattern-very true to life. There are mistakes in it-a few wrong counts here and there-totally fudgeable. If I ever make it again, however, I will scale down the pattern by a LOT. Unless someone needs a GIANT whale, I think a nice small one is a little more my thing. I really thought the baby yarn would scale this thing down enough. BAHAHAHA!

I try to always give 5 stars in my ratings if I can make something start to finish without too much drama….There are a few stitch count issues, and because of that it made the pattern a little harder than it needed to be in a few places. So I deducted a star. The pattern really has a brilliant conception though-and a great life-like end result-for THAT I give it an extra star so now it is back up to five. I did give it a medium difficulty though only because of the errors, without those-it would have been a pretty easy knit (ignoring the colorworking)

I decided to stuff my fins a little…just a teensy amount of stuffing and then I smashed it flat…just to firm them up a bit.

UPDATE: DD loves this stupid thing-STILL! Here we are, three months later, and she has used it as a little pillow this whole time-not sure why it hasn’t broken down yet. We went on a four day band trip and she brought this stupid thing with her to use as a pillow on the bus. All the kids were most impressed with her very awesome whale pillow. :) 7th and 8th graders are not usually impressed by anything. haha! NICE!