Forefeet and Hindfeet

Frogs have thumbs (and I’m a zoology geek), so I knew immediately I wanted to modify the “hands” in the original pattern from 3 fingers to 4. However, I also wanted to keep within the bouncy, cartoonish aesthetic of the rest of the pattern. So inspired by several other people’s I-cord finger mods, I came up with what I’m calling “Calvin Hands”, since they remind me of the wonderful four-fingered hands Bill Watterson drew in Calvin & Hobbes.

With the newly 3-dimensional hands, I felt like the feet needed to be more substantial to balance things out. I departed from zoological reality a bit here (most frogs have 5 toes, on a sometimes significant slant) to do more of a cartoon frog foot. The feet use double-knitting, then end in I-cord toes again. I think they’d also look good if you took a stitch or two to tack the two sides of the heel together underneath the foot, for a more triangular (and 3-D) look.

Color Markings

I love playing with color, so of course I had to spice the frogs up a bit!

Green & Speckled Frog

“…sat on a speckled log, eating some most delicious bugs (YUM YUM!)”

One of my all time fave songs as a kid (the Raffi version, of course), and still gets stuck in my head whenever I think of it. :-) The “speckles” on his back are duplicate stitched. After trying it both ways, I think it’s easiest to do this after the body and head are finished rather than before adding the tennis ball.

Poison Dart Frog

This is more of an interpretation than a faithful rendering — I based the color markings on a real frog (Dendrobates auratus), but a more realistic version would have much higher contrast markings, with a bright color on a black field.

The markings on her back are duplicate stitched from a chart I drew — due to the challenges of matching my flat chart with the spherical frog head and body, I had to make some adjustments on the fly but it came out pretty close to my plan.

The arms and legs were knit as striped I-cord, carrying both colors all the way up (the color not currently being used winds up hidden inside the cord).

Construction

For the Green & Speckled Frog, I followed what many others have done and started the head right from the last 9 stitches of the body (Rather than knitting two separate balls and sewing them together). However, I felt the result was too bobble-head-y for what I wanted, so I wound up whipstitching the head and body together anyway, to make them look a bit more “merged” and make the connection more secure.

On the Poison Dart frog, I tried starting the head when there were 18 stitches left on the needles (after Round 5 of the body decreases), therefore starting the head instructions at Round 2. This resulted in a slightly squatter head shape, obviously, and a less distinct break between head and body. I ran a line of straight stitches around the neck to cinch it in a bit more.

I like both effects. The Green & Speckled frog is a bit taller, and the Poison Dart a bit more squat — but I thought these body shapes matched the personalities of the different faces I embroidered for them. The markings for the Poison Dart frog would have been a lot harder to negotiate without the merged head/body construction, since one blotch crosses between head and body.