Flippers!

Today I knit and blocked the whale's pectoral fins, or flippers. Minke whale flippers can be up to about 1/8 of the total body length, so my whale's are 3 and a half feet long, and 14 inches wide at their widest point. Minke pectoral fins are also generally dark on either end, with a light strip in the middle, which is how I knit mine.

I knit a rectangular piece for each flipper that, once it's blocked, I'll cut into the correct shape. I think that once the flipper shape is cut out, I should have enough of the dark knitting left over to make the dorsal fin.

I had done a tension swatch for the light grey wool when I was knitting the throat pieces, and just worked off of that information to knit the flippers without doing a separate swatch for the dark wool. Mistake. The dark stuff ended up knitting at a tighter tension than the light grey, and the flippers turned out a few inches shorter on either end than they were supposed to... 

Fortunately, with a bit of semi-aggressive blocking, they ended up the right size!

Outline of flipper shapes on the blocking table

Blocking the flippers