Down the Toilet?

I recently started working on a toilet design, because Tubby the bathtub needs a friend! I hadn’t given it much thought before, but it turns out that toilets are much more complex than bathtubs, what with the bowl and the tank and everything in between.

To figure out the design, I started by sketching what I think a toilet looks like. Then, I did a Google image search to see what actual toilets look like. (Yes, I was too lazy to walk across my apartment to the bathroom and look at my own toilet.) Then it was back to the notebook for more sketching. Maybe because I’m not so skilled with a pencil, my technique is slapdash: basically, doodle toilets over and over again until I begin to like what I see.

Here you see I’ve finished knitting a bowl, and I’m trying to decide how to do the rest of it. I’m happy to say that I finished up my toilet over the weekend, but—oh no!—not before seeing Katie Boyette’s blog post about the knitted toilet in her upcoming book, More Knitwits!

Katie’s design is pretty genius (especially because it seems to solve the balance problem perfectly), but I’d rather not have my project go down the toilet just because she had the idea too. Surely there is room in the knitting world for more than one toilet, right? Plus, Katie’s super cool and she seems OK with my going ahead with it.

I still have some little bits to finish up with my design, then it will take a while to create the pattern. (It’s not as complex as Grouchy Couch, but it comes close…) If all goes well, Flushie the Toilet will be out and about in a few months!