Edie Haskin writes: I designed these puppets out of leftover yarn when my nephew Sam was a toddler. He’s 22 now and all grown up.

It was fun to pull my original drawing and notes out of the files. When I was designing these guys the first time around, I paid special attention to the contours of each animal’s face. I borrowed books from the library and even did line studies of the different head shapes. Then I translated the contours into paired increases, decreases, and short rows. The mouth shapes and colorings were interesting, too. I had never noticed that a zebra’s mane matched his stripes!

This generation of puppets is knit in a different yarn, and I had to adapt my stitch count to maintain a small size. Nonetheless, I remained faithful to the original shapings. I think this contouring - and the puppets’ pliability - is what makes their faces so expressive.

Volunteer editor note: when the instructions say “inc 1” it means knit 2 stitches where one stitch used to be. So an instruction like “k5, inc 1, k4” is 11 st not 10 st!