Last winter, my sister-in-law messaged me a photo with a message, “Can you fix it?”. Uh oh.

When my nephew was born I made both him and his older sister matching bunnies. I saw very few photos where my niece did not have this little guy near by.

Unfortunately, one day while they were all out, the dog thought that the bunny might be a good snack. They came home to this… My sister-in-law said she was heartbroken. I quickly went to look for the yarn to see if I could knit another one, but then on a second look I thought I might be able to fix it. I told the family not to throw it away, hang on to it, I’ll see what I can do the next time I see them. Theeeeen lockdown #3 (?) happened, so we had to wait a little bit.

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While I was on vacation in the month of August, I brought all my supplies to see what I could do. I had a “medical” bag full of needles, yarn of different colours, and stuffing. My niece was very close by and was an excellent nurse for the procedure haha.

I had never done anything like this for my knitting before, I haven’t been knitting long enough for something to get a hole in it. I looked at the damage, where it was, and compared it to the pattern. Of course the crafty dog chewed up everything at the start of each section so I would be working upside down haha.

In the end I opted to knit “patches”. On the body, I picked up stitches above and below the hole. I knit a new flap that was big enough to cover the hole, but stitched it into good stitches on either side of the hole (k2tog). Once it was long enough I gave the bunny a little more stuffing (with my niece’s expert help of course), and Kitchener stitched it up.

The head was a little more of a challenge. The holes were at the start of where the head was knit, so picking up stitches and finishing it off wasn’t going to work. What I did instead was start the head from scratch. I knit enough for it to be larger than the holes, picked up a row of good stitches and Kitchener stitched it shut. I was all out of the original yarn and couldn’t find anyone that sold it, so the colour is a little off, but I think that it still works.

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My niece was stoked to have her little friend back, she must have thanked me a million separate times over the rest of the weekend. It was really heartwarming to see how much that she loves the little guy, I am also super happy that I was able to fix it up as I had promised. Yikes!