Last week I finished knitting a cute little bunny blanket buddy for my niece Lila.  It’s a free pattern from Lion Brand, and it was fun but pretty quick and easy.  Except.  I knitted the head and realized that I was supposed to then stuff the head.  But how was this going to happen when it looked like this?

As I was knitting the head (and this is another sample I whipped up because I didn’t think to take pictures when I was knitting Lila’s bunny), I thought well this is a neat stitch.  I was purling one and slipping one, and I repeated this across the row.  I’d never done anything quite like this before.  It was making for a really nice soft squishy piece of fabric.

So I got to the top of the head, and the instructions said to stuff the head.  How in the world was I going to stuff a flat piece of knitted fabric that looked like this on the needle?

I had no clue.  So I went to ravelry and looked at some of the pattern notes.  I saw that someone mentioned the word “double knitting”, and I then realized that this was what I was doing.  I’d wanted to try this technique out for quite awhile.  It makes a double thickness of fabric, or when you take the stitches off the needle you can do this:

The slipped stitches fall to one side and the purled come to the other. People who have actually done double knitting before will find this pretty obvious, but I was quite happy with my accidental discovery of double knitting!  I think there should have been a big note of it at the top of the pattern as well.  “In this pattern you will use a double knitting technique!” But then I would have missed out on the surprise! So then I was able to do this:

So that I could send it to my sweet niece who did this: