No dogs allowed at your digs? No worries! Thanks to British knitwear designers Sally Muir and Joanne Osborne — the clever chicks who created that famous bright red “black sheep” sweater sported by Princess Diana back in the 80s — you can knit your own faithful companion.

The patterns in Muir & Osborne’s spiffy book, Best in Show: Knit Your Own Dog, put a well-behaved pet well within the reach of every fairly capable knitter. Choose the dog breed that’s closest to your heart, from 25 available patterns.

• Afghan Hound
• Basset Hound
• Border Collie
• Cocker Spaniel
• Corgi
• Dachshund
• Dalmatian
• English Bulldog
• English Bull Terrier
• French Bulldog
• German Shepherd
• Jack Russell
• Labrador
• Miniature Schnauzer
• Old English Sheepdog
• Poodle
• Portuguese Water Dog (isn’t that the official Obama family dog?)
• Pug
• Red Setter
• Rough Collie
• Scottish Terrier
• Siberian Husky
• West Highland Terrier
• Whippet (size it up for a Greyhound, maybe?)
• Wire-haired Fox Terrier

Clear instructions and beautiful photographs, as well as useful tips on selecting yarn and giving a real personality to your knitted dogs, make the book a real pleasure. Be aware though, that although the dogs are toy in size, these do requires a lot of shaping and piecing together of miscellaneous bits, so you probably won’t want to give the finished product to a kid to play with. Think “collector’s item” instead, for admiration and display.

Just when you thought it was all over, at last… the bacon obsession is back!
(You can blame Diane for this… again.)

High Society Bacon

Be the envy of some when you sport the original Uncle Oinker’s bacon-scented bacon print tuxedo ($99.95 at McPhee.com).

The bacon tuxedo is cunningly tailored from chemically treated latex print fabric to smell “just like bacon sizzling in the pan” and comes in four sizes.

Dry clean only, of course — heaven knows what this could do to your washing machine!

Archie McPhee’s your one-stop shop for bacon-related dental hygiene items, too, to make sure you’re ready for a big night out among the most snobby of carnivores. Grab bacon-flavoured toothpicks, bacon mints, and even (new!) bacon dental floss. Slip on a fashionable unisex bracelet as the finishing touch, and you’re dressed up to sizzle!

Kay Turple is a Canadian artist who makes amazing 3-dimensional dog portraits — all sorts of dog breeds, like this gorgeous fluffy Old English Sheepdog — working from your photographs to make a tiny true-to-life model in felted wool.

How does Kay make her miniature pets? She gives an overview of the needle felting technique at KaysK9s.com, but simply put –

Simply put, needle felting is the process of taking raw wool roving and using a barbed felting needle to sculpt it into shape. The sculpting is done by poking the wool thousands of times until the fibers interlock and felt together. This process is extremely time consuming, and each dog or cat normally takes 10 – 25 hours to create.

Indulge an urge, add something very special to a collection of dollhouse-scale miniatures, or commemorate a beloved companion animal. They run from 1″ to 4″ in size, or are made in standard 1:12 dollhouse scale. (She does cats and other creatures, too.)

These are true art pieces, not toys — and are priced accordingly, reflecting the many hours of skilled handcrafting that goes into each felted dog.

Best yet, a portion of all proceeds is donated to support the Ontario SPCA and local animal shelters. As well, Kay sponsors a shelter dogs — see a picture of Chico, the Chihuahua mix who is her current “foster pup,” at www.kaysk9s.blogspot.com. What more could a dog lover ask?