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While small, Extensis is a company with roots all over the globe. We recently relocated one of our talented professionals to Australia to better serve the market. John Parnaby relocated with his partner Eileen back in May 2012.

Recently, we flew John to the US for company meetings, and he brought along two, cute little friends, with some pretty savvy attire!

I had to ask John to tell me a bit about how they were created, and this is what he shared with me.

The stuffed toys themselves were bought – they are common gifts for tourists as mementos of a visit to Australia. Europeans (at least) mostly think of Australia as being populated by kangaroos and koala bears. Their outfits were knitted by my partner Eileen.

I made a grid in Illustrator and pasted the .eps of Extensis logo over it, then coloured in the squares on the grid to get a block pattern. Rather like bitmap fonts, the higher the density of the grid, the better the image is – especially with curves. However, a dense grid means you have to use thinner wool and the toys were very small so we had a fairly coarse pixel ratio to work with.

A skilled knitter like Eileen only needs this basic pattern to indicate when to change stitch to get the pattern on the little sweater.

That’s the tricky bit done – then it was just a matter of knitting a front and back incorporating the logo on the front (and text on the back). The size is determined by trial and error – and experience of knitting many, many jumpers for soft toys. The front and back are essentially two rectangles with a scoop for the neck. There wasn’t time to knit sleeves so the sweaters are AFL style - sleeveless. They took a couple of hours each to knit but are more of a draft than a final version.

Thanks so much John. These little guys are now with us here in the Portland office. We are happy to welcome them to the rainy Pacific Northwest.