Knitted black-and-white cat Jess

I completed my most recent knitting project just a few days before my almost-three-year-old grandson (and his family) come to stay. He's a great fan of Postman Pat, so a few months ago I ordered 'The Postman Pat Knitting Book' by Joy Gammon. My aim was to knit a sweater, and that's nearly completed, but I also rather fell in love with the black-and-white cat Jess, and have been knitting that as well.

Here's the final product, which, I realise, is similar to the original Jess in the 1980s/1990s series, but doesn't really look all that much like Jess in the 'new' Postman Pat books and TV show:

But I hope he'll like it anyway.

It's been quite a project. The book suggested using brushed yarn, but I couldn't find any easily, so I decided to use ordinary double knitting wool.  It wasn't until I was over half way through that I realised that the main body, head, legs and tail sections are all 'inside out', as it were. the bumpy (purl) side of the double knitting shows, rather than the smoother, more normal side. That's not entirely clear, other than a note at the start that Jess is knitted in reverse stocking stitch; and, from the photos in the booklet, it was clear that the ears, eyes and nose have the more usual side outside.

One of the options in the book is to knit it as a pyjama/nightdress case, with an extra gusset and a zip at the bottom. I am glad I didn't decide to include that extra complexity.

Knitting the body was hard going at first, as there's a lot of rapid increasing, from 7 stitches to 112 in just eight rows, doubling on every knit row. I knit fairly tightly anyway, and it was remarkably difficult on the final increasing row.  The rest was easy, and I finished with relief, only to realise that the head piece is made in exactly the same way!

Still, eventually I had all my knitted pieces finished, kept together in a large bag.  The part I don't like so much is the sewing, and worst of all is the stuffing.  The head and body took huge amounts of foam stuffing, and I had to push it in by the handful or it would have taken hours. Unfortunately that meant that there was foam everywhere by the time I was finished... and black isn't this kind of black-and-white cat:

I thought about using a vacuum cleaner, or vast amounts of sellotape to remove it, then thought about our Ikea cat fluff removing tool:

It was effective:

When I had sewed the knitted parts of the face in place, I felt a bit discouraged. It didn't look at all cat-like:

However, the ears, mouth and whiskers made a lot of difference, even though the facial features are rather wonky. But I wanted to embroider whiskers rather than anything that might detach, and with something this squashy, even with marking pins, it was very tricky. And I'm not good at embroidery!

Sewing the limbs in place wasn't too hard; I pinned them to the body in the right places first, and then used the lint roller thing to remove excess foam.  The biggest problem was attaching the head to the body; the head is large, and very floppy. I didn't want to make it too rigid, but ended up sewing the back of the head further and further along the back.

It was quite a relief to finish it at last!

Despite reading the dimensions (30cm tall), I hadn't expected Jess to be quite as large as he is.  Here's the comparison with one of our cats: