It’s time for another preview from Knitting Mochimochi! This one is the beauty shot for the Pigs with Wigs pattern.

The name of the pattern is pretty self-explanatory: it’s pigs. wearing wigs. Can you guess how I came up with the idea? I wanted to design a pig, but it had to have something a little special about it, and so I thought of words that rhymed with “pig.” And soon a design was born, including the wigs Awesome Afro, Buxom Bob, Magnificent Mohawk, and—of course—the Beautiful Beehive.

I wanted to show this photo because we (my photographer Brandi, my sister Leah, and I—but mostly Brandi) worked really hard on this one, and I think it turned out fabulous. Brandi’s friend Sandi runs a beautiful spa in Tulsa (Serenity Aveda Day Spa—check it out!), and she was nice enough to let us use one of her rooms and all the equipment in it.

The room had a cool retro-salon vibe to it, but it was quite small, and since we wanted to show all four wig-wearing pigs in the photo, Brandi had to get creative with how to do the shoot. First, we moved everything in the room into one small corner to shoot from one direction, and Brandi could only fit everything in the shot by crouching down under the sink! Then we needed a vertical option, so we moved ALL of the stuff from one side of the room to the other side to shoot from the other direction.

The photo above is the second composition that Brandi shot, with one pig in a mirror and the others watching. You can’t tell from the photo, but the pigs are sitting on a stool that’s precariously perched on top of a hamper, and the busts with wigs behind them are just barely balancing on the edge of the sink and the stool and the wall. I seriously thought everything was going to collapse! I was the one holding the mirror up, and you can see a little muscle strain in my wrist because I was pressed right up against the wall and I had to hold the angle just right for several minutes.

So this shot was hard work, but we were rewarded with a great photol The Pigs with Wigs themselves are a pretty silly pattern, but I thought there might be a few other people in this world who would like to make them too.

I plan to post one more preview from the book next week, so stay tuned!