Mix n Match Madness

Thank you, everyone, for your happy comments and emails upon the launch of Super-Scary Mochimochi! I can’t believe that this is my third book of knitting patterns—how lucky am I that this is what I get to do?!

The book was really a team effort, involving everyone from my editor Betty Wong to my photographer Brandi Simons to the professor who let us have a photo shoot in this chemistry lab, Robert Sheaff. And a whole group of testers helped make sure the patterns were clear and usable—a vital element in the book’s success!

Thinking about the testers for this book reminds me of the fun monsters I saw from them when they were testing the “Mix n Match” section…

This part of the book includes five body shapes to choose from and a menu of deliciously weird body parts to cobble together any way you please. The guys above look something like this when you take them all apart.

When I was writing the book, I asked some of my testers to each knit one of these monsters. Because we were on a tight schedule, the simplest way to do it was to have them each knit one of the monsters I had made, putting the same parts together that I had, but I was still wowed to see the wildly different resulting monsters.

This is Marianne’s squash monster. He doesn’t want to be made into a pie!

Jenna’s colorful tall monster has a tattoo!

And Kelly made a cute and huggable robot monster.

I love how they’re all so different from the originals just by using different colors and eyes… imagine the possible combinations that will happen when knitters start mixing up body parts and inventing some of their own!

Thank you to Marianne, Jenna, Kelly, Denise, Jennifer, Jenny, Jessica, Joan, Kari, Kristen, Lisa, Marilyn, Mary, Marti, Rikke, and also Bonney for contributing their testing help for this book. It couldn’t have happened without you guys!