I've got a bag of fiberfill and I'm not afraid to use it

  

Otto Owl from Lucinda Guy's And So to Bed... in Rowan Cashsoft DK
wee one's birthday babe from Knitted Babes in Jaeger Matchmaker 4ply
Tiger and Lion Bendy toys from Sirdar's "Things to Make" in Debbie Bliss cotton dk
Baby Bobbi Bear from Blue Sky Alpaca

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Yesterday, while I was snapping pics of her in her new turtle top, wee one was, as usual, carrying her dolly around. At one point, she even insisted that I take a picture of dolly. She laid her down on the floor where I always lay out my knitting for pictures and then stood over by me behind the camera and pointed at her. How could I say no?

Little did wee one know that her new dolly is almost done. When she took her nap, I pulled out dolly number 2 for a quick comparison photo.

Wowza. Old dolly totally looked just like that. Once. Well, here's hoping that new dolly, when she's all done, will become just as loved and just as dirty as old dolly.

(Wait, wasn't the point of this whole thing to get the dolly clean?)

Poor little dolly has gotten soooo dirty. This picture can't even capture how dark and crusty her little face and dress have become. If you look close, right above the neck of her dress you can see something like the original pretty pink her face used to be. Oh, she gross.

"she looks fine to me"

But, I can't get her away from wee one long enough to clean her. (The picture above was taken seconds after I snapped the first photo. "Hey, give me dolly back.") I think wee one and I could actually have a fun time washing dolly together, but my real worry is that she won't be able to wait until dolly is dry to get her back. So, it's looking like I'll have to knit a whole new dolly.

Step one: make dress. Some picot edging and I should be able to take off dolly's old dress and slip this new dress right on her. I'm hoping that if she wears the new dress a while, it'll get some of that nice dolly smell on it that I'm sure wee one is attached to. In the meantime, I can wash the bejesus out of dress number one.

Step two (to come): make new dolly. I should have juuuust enough yarn left over from the first dolly to make a second one. Yes Virginia, you can make two dollys from one ball each of three colors of Classic Elite Bazic.

The boys' lion and tiger stuffies are finally taking shape! I decided that I'd better start seaming and stuffing before I ended up with 15 pieces and 40 ends for each animal and no desire to sew them all up. And again I am amazed at how such odd pieces can come together and look so good. (Remember the pile o' legs?!) Let's just hope the same magic works on the insane face and muzzle pieces!

TrundleBot waits

Last night's game of RoboRally had to be paused on account of it being 9pm and way past bedtime. I could only get the boys away from the table if I promised to snap pictures of the game as we left it so we could set it up again and continue it today. B's TrundleBot (above) is way ahead, but S and I still have hopes of getting our little robots all the way through the maze of conveyor belts and lasers safely.

the factory floor where the robots race!

After putting the game away, I got to work on this.

wtf is that?

Also awaiting their continuation are the boys' lion and tiger toys. (Started last August. Progress made in January. Forgotten until now. Heh, heh. The last time I worked on and blogged about these, I joked that they probably wouldn't be done until July. Whoops. That's not going to happen.) Anyhoo, these little buggers are pretty complex, with shoe uppers and intarsia tummy patches and separate face muzzles (also with intarsia, natch). The yellow bit above is the head. That long flap folds down, then you flip it over, fold the sides in, sew the muzzle on and it's supposed to be an animal face.

Ya-huh. Now you can see why I'm always taking month-long breaks from this project. Thank goodness the boys are more anxious to get back to the robots than they are to have the stuffed animals!

Sorry about the bad pun, I couldn't help myself, this pink baby bobbi bear is just so beary beary cute!

I'll admit that I was more than a little worried about the how the hot pink Blue Sky organic cotton would look in a big bear (yes, it's about 15" high - and this is the baby bobbi bear!). I sort of started this on a whim to see how it would come out and was completely surprised and thrilled when she came out so well! I added a little brown nose and eyes with some scraps and she's simply adorable. Blindingly pink - you're not going to misplace her anywhere - but adorable. And the yarn is soooo soft. With the addition of the stuffing, you can't help but squoosh her all the time.

The pattern was truly a blast to knit. I had lots of fun flipping and working in one direction, then in another, adding short-rows for the bear butt and the cutest little ears ever. This is one of those patterns you could really enjoy making over and over. It may seem confusing when you first take a look at it since you're working in all sorts of different directions all the time but you can read through Blue Sky's helpful notes about the pattern for some additional explanation about working each section.

This beary pink little cutie has gone to live with another newborn cutie, Shannon's baby. It's just cuteness overload down there these days!

I'm squeezing in a little computer time here at the end of another day of doctor and dentist appointments. The last few weeks have been a perfect storm of ear infections, pink eye, check ups, orthodontic work, and even teeth extractions and today and tomorrow are the busiest of all. Wee one and her brothers are, I hope, finally on the mend. Despite a cold, teething, and the pink eye, wee one still manages to be a busy girl, playing with her toys including Sally her birthday babe.

Her favorite thing to do is to find Sally, remove any clothing she has on and drag her around by one of those long limbs, her hair, or her funny floppy neck.

Her mommy's been busy too, of course. But despite countless hours spent in the car ferrying kids back and forth to various medical professionals, I've actually managed to squeeze in quite a bit of knitting and sewing. Stay tuned this week for a parade of finished projects!

It's toy time again!

yes, I'll admit it, I am too lazy to wind hanks anymore

I've started Blue Sky Alpacas' baby Bobbi bear in their incredible dyed organic cotton. I'm using the hot, hot, hot pink color because it's what was in my stash and I kinda got a kick out of imagining this cute bear in such a shocking color. We'll see how it turns out!

The pattern is a bit wacky. It's right enough and clear enough, but you never quite seem to know where you are or what's going on. I suspect that I'm not the only one who's felt like this because the Blue Sky folks have posted some helpful pattern clarifications on their site. A few tips from knitbuddy Terri, who has made a ton of these (here's her ravelry page), helped me see what was going on. You knit the body first in the round, then divide and do some raglan shaping to make openings where the arms go, then you flip everything around and pick up stitches to make legs, then flip back, rejoin the front and back and begin the head. See why it might be confusing?!

My favorite thing is the cute little short-rowed butt. There's actually a pattern section titled "Butt". Oh, the boys would love that!

As usual with toys, none of it really looks like anything cute or cuddly right now. The stuffing and finishing touches always make the difference. Until then you just gotta wait for that toy knitting magic to happen!

It's Sally in her new psychedelic a-line dress! Babe and dress pattern are from Knitted Babes and fabric is from RJR fabrics' So You Sew Fun line. The pattern was so fun to make - just like a little dress I'd make for wee one, only muuuuch smaller. It has a little muslin facing on the inside to make the armhole and neck edges nice and neat and a double turned hem. It was great practice for improving my skills at dressmaking. And it fits her wonderfully. The babe body is so narrow (S insists that the naked babe looks exactly like a wooden spoon!) that I can easily squash it up to fit through the neck opening. Then when I let go, she fills out just enough again to keep the dress on. I had read that some folks had problems with clothes not fitting or staying on, but this one and the other dress work fine on Sally. And her little panties are also still on - even though I was too lazy to add the elastic to the waist!

Wee one got Sally on her birthday. She spotted her right away during Sally's photo session.

And fell in love.

By the way, that cute fabric on the chair next to wee one is from a doll quilt that wee one/Sally got for her birthday from knitting and quilting buddy Carol. Isn't it precious?!

preeeeetty

Introducing Sally, wee one's birthday babe (from Knitted Babes).

I named her Sally because it was the first name that popped into my head after I realized that "dolly" and "baby" were already taken by wee one's other dolls. Plus, the doll's floppy arms and legs instantly reminded me of the cover picture of the Silly Sally book. I also have this Dick & Jane fabric and the little girl Sally makes me think of wee one playing with her older siblings (well, if she would grow some hair!).

I put blond hair on the babe since I'm guessing wee one's hair will be blond (I also gave her some bright blue eyes like wee one's). The hair is actually Aurora 8 yarn left over from the braids on wee one's viking hat. I guess I've started just thinking of that as her hair now!

I LOVE how the stitches to hold the eyes on look like eyelashes!

Clearly though, I'm no hair stylist. The instructions in the book for the hair were also extremely vague. But that's okay cause I'm imagining wee one will just drag her around by the hair anyway.

And this book is really about all the doll clothes! Sally's first dress is a striped sun dress, which I knit in some cotton glace left over from my crinkle shrug. It took forever to knit! Well, the doll was pretty quick, so I suppose it only took forever in a relative sense. But it's a lot of garter stitch and all in a fingering/sport weight yarn, so the next couple of dresses will be sewn. A psychedelic a-line dress is already cut out and ready to go.

look at that cutie patootie pattern piece!

Oh, I'm having way too much fun with this!

lace undies for wee one's knitted babe finished just as they announced Best Picture

What did you do during the Oscars?

A little more than two weeks to wee one's first birthday! She certainly wouldn't notice if there weren't any presents for her, but I got it in my head to make her something. She'll have her new birthday cake hat of course, but although she likes sucking on the candle, that hat is really more for the adults' enjoyment, you know. So what would wee one really like? Perhaps another knitted dolly. She LOVES the dolly I made when we first found out I was having a girl. That and her blankie are her two must-have cuddling and thumb-sucking items. So... how about a little more grown-up doll for my little more grown up girl?

A student of mine from my pinwheel sweater class brought in a doll she'd made from Clare Garland's Knitted Babes and it was awesome! I bought the book right away and was thrilled to discover that except for one pattern for "the babes", the entire rest of the book is patterns for knitted and sewn babe clothes! Love it! What a fun way to use up little leftovers of yarn and scraps of fabric. Oh, I hope wee one likes her. I want to make this, and this, and....

Why, that looks like another pinwheel sweater! Yes, I've just finished teaching a knitting class at my lys where we made pinwheel sweaters - what fun it was! Because the sweater has such a unique construction, I had to make a little sample mini-pinwheel along with my students. I was just going to rip it out, but then we discovered that it was the perfect size to fit on a Baby Bobbi Bear (and, what do you know, I'm teaching a class on that pattern next month!). So I'm finishing the thing off for baby-Bobbi-bear-on-the-way and am now just at "the loopy edge".

And here's the baby hemlock ring blanket I'm finishing up for best buddy, Shannon, and her upcoming arrival. I'm at... wait for it... the loopy edge. So let's compare loops, shall we?

For the hemlock ring's loopy edge, better known as "87th rnd", we work four stitches and a yarnover, turn, make five new stitches in the yarnover, turn again, and bind off seven stitches. Net loss of stitches: four.

For the pinwheel sweater, we work three stitches onto a dpn, then work 6 rows of i-cord on those stitches, and finally place them on top of the next three stitches of the sweater and knit them together with those stitches (sort of like a three-needle bind off but without the binding off). We're left with three stitches on the dpn ready to make 6 rows of i-cord for the next loop. Net loss of stitches: three.

So, which do I prefer? Well, I like the big fat loops of the pinwheel's loopy edge a lot, but having dpns and the original needles all dangling about at the same time is a bit annoying. The lovely curved loops of the hemlock ring's loopy edge remind me of pretty flowery crochet edgings, but that work-turn-work-turn thing always feels a little one-step-forward-two-steps-back to me. So, I like 'em both about the same. And I'm kinda liking doing them both at the same time. When one starts to feel tedious, I switch to the other. So I don't end up completely loopy!

They've completely forgotten about the tiger and lion stuffed animals I'm supposed to be making for them. I started the little animals in the summer, put them aside for a while and promised to finish them for Christmas. Since I'm actually still not done with all my Christmas crafting, I figure they're not really late yet. But as technicalities like this are usually lost on the boys, I've tried to sneak in a few days work on them so there's some progress to show in case they happen to remember!

The pattern has you work your way up the little animals' bodies, starting with feet and shoes (oops, forgot them for the picture!), then legs and back and the pieces I've just finished up, the arms and tummy. Next comes the head (in two parts) and the ears. Then the nightmare of sewing all these tiny pieces together.

I think they're going to turn out to be pretty cute though.

In July, that is, when I'm finally all done with them!

Wee one has a new stuffed friend - it's turtle buddy from Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing. This pattern looked so cute and I just happened to have a fat quarter of this Kaffe Fassett print that seemed perfect for a turtle. Two hours later and it's a turtle!

I love his funny little turtle butt. But man oh man, was it hard to turn that tiny tail piece right side out! Oddly enough, the entire pattern was both more and less difficult than I was expecting. Amy has bent the rules alright, so anyone with sewing experience, be sure to follow her rules. Don't go tracing your pattern pieces and then cutting them all out before reading the pattern like I almost did! Karol uses this clever technique of sewing two layers together along the pattern outline, which goes faster and makes things much less fiddly but it means that the pattern pieces don't actually contain any seam allowances. But not all the pieces are done like this: the body pieces are cut out and sewn together normally with a 1/4" seam allowance. So naturally I got all confused and was never quite sure I was doing things correctly. And then I had all these questions, like how much should I stuff the pieces, and how far in should I sew the basting line, and where exactly should I position the legs and tail and head, and how big of a stuff/turning hole should I leave open in the bottom? There are are lots of helpful drawings in the pattern, but not a lot of specific details. Again this may only be a problem for folks like me with enough sewing experience to expect these sorts of instructions, but not enough experience to know that you don't really need them. After making the thing, I can see that if you just use your best judgment on all those things, it's gonna look adorable!

Isn't it cute how the wonky seam line gives him a funny little frown?! It's so cool making things from this book and seeing how they come together. My favorite part was after the top and bottom were stitched together (right sides together, of course) with the head and all the legs all tucked inside, you turn the whole thing right-side out by pulling all the limbs through the turning hole - it was just so turtley!

School doesn't start for another week, so I'm spending my days juggling three kids. When the baby sleeps, the boys immediately ask to play games and we spend her whole naptime and any other awake time she'll let us playing Mille Bornes, Fluxx and Set. The other day I managed to talk the boys into letting me sit by them and knit while they played Highly Suspect just with each other. I had to knit on their lion and tiger animals, of course. And I only managed to make four little shoes before cheating and accusations of cheating stopped the game. But I did knit.

So that's legs, feet and shoes done. There's still the back, a front (with intarsia patch), two arms (thankfully, the hands are knit straight down from the arms), head (with intarsia and muzzle sections), two ears, and a tail to go. At this pace, I should have them done by the time the boys start school. Next year.

And there'll be no knitting today. B wants us to go to Toys R Us to buy him a new transformer. It's all he's talked about for 24 hours. They've dressed themselves and are right next to me waiting for me to finish on the computer so we can go get the transformers. And so we're off to fill another day....

S has been asking again. "Weren't you supposed to be making our tiger animals?" Riiiight. Honestly, I've got too many other things on the needles that need to be done sooner, so I'm about as focused on these stuffed animals as the boys are. That is to say, I work on them a little bit every two weeks or so, which is just about the same time that the boys remember that I was supposed to be working on them.

Instead of knitting on them today, I'll blog about my progress. The boys love seeing the pictures of the things in the house on the computer. The pattern is from Sirdar's booklet "Things to Make" and they're called "Bendy Animals" because they're supposed to be kinda posable.

They call for you to put those little bendy hair rollers in the body so the limbs don't just hang down. Isn't that a neat idea??!! I'm not sure I'll be doing that, but the tiger's still cool. S thought it was so cool that upon seeing the picture, he instantly wanted me to make it. "I want that. Just like that. Exactly like that." And B didn't want his animal to be any less cool, so we're adapting the tiger to be a lion for him (ie - yellow body, no stripes and a bigger mane).

And here's my progress so far. Many little pieces. Ugh! What I actually have here is just the legs and the bottom soles of the feet. (Yes, I specified "sole" of the foot. There is also a shoe upper that I haven't knitted yet!)

Oh man, these are going to be a nightmare to sew up. Luckily, I don't have to think about that again for another couple of weeks!

The people at Webs are soooo cool! First, I got to be on their local radio show (which is also online as a podcast). They chat about their lives and their store. It's all very down to earth and fun to listen to. I really enjoyed being a part of their show.

Then, on Sunday, the big day, we had the book signing at the store. They set up a table for me and I put out all my samples from the book.

But that's not all, they had set up a whole potter party table with a Harry Potter cake, Bertie Bott's jelly beans, and "dragon snot" green sherbet punch too! This was like the 9 year-old Harry Potter party I never had!

check out the cake!

They raffled off house color yarn kits and gave away tiny bookscarf kits. There were at least 15 Knitsmiths there (I love you gals!), as well as lots of other Potter (and yarn) enthusiasts!

After chatting with fellow Potter fanatics, I got everything on my yarn list (and more!), including yarn for a baby shrug and baby pants for baby L, yarn for a dolly bag for a friend's daughter, and of course all the yarn for the boys' tiger and lion animals (yes, B has switched from a bee to a lion - he didn't want S getting anything that seemed cooler than what he was getting!). The boys actually greeted me at the door when I got home by yelling, 'did you go to the big yarn store?! did you get the yarn?!' Oh yeah!

Apropos of nothing, the boys decided that I need to knit them stuffed animals. I have no idea how they came up with the idea, but suddenly they were giving me details of how the animals should look as if it were something we'd been planning forever.

S wants a tiger and B wants a bee. Interesting choices, no? I've hunted through my kiddy knitting books and found a bug pattern (from Jess Hutchison's out-of-print Unusual Toys booklet) that'll do for the bee. Now that we have pattern, B keeps saying "can we go to the yarn store?" And I rub my hands together like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons and say, "yeeeees, exxxxcellent."

The tiger pattern is proving harder to find. Anyone have any suggestions for something cute and fun, not too literal, not too complicated?

Don't worry that baby L will be left out of the zoo pals fun. For my birthday, Dani gifted me with some super soft alpaca to make wee one the bunny from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. Love those little pink ears!

Meanwhile, I treated myself to a little funny animal pattern book for my birthday. I was looking for books for the boys for their birthday and just happened to find myself in the craft section - heh, heh. Once I saw this book I couldn't resist!

Even if it weren't full of crochet amigurumi, which I simply adore, the title alone would have sold me. I mean, Mr. Funky's Super Crochet Wonderful - how can you put that back on the shelf?!

And so I begin to build a zoo: a bee, a tiger, a bunny, and maybe even mr. funky the monkey someday. Next, I'll be making an ark!

Meet Otto (from Lucinda Guy's And So to Bed...)! I made it through all those knitted toy finishing touches that magically transform something like this...

into this...

I'm always amazed at how well toys turn out. After I finished the knitting for the totoro hat and dolly, I never would have thought that the addition of some eyes and tiny embroidered mouth would make such a huge difference. And I felt the same way this time too. But attaching those wings and that scarf really changed the whole thing. I'm beginning to think that getting a toy to look perfect is a much easier task than getting the fit on a sweater right.

Otto also pleased me by taking a good deal of stuffing. We all know that stuffing only comes in those crazy giant bags the size of your bedpillow. And knitted toys usually only take about a handful of stuffing. Which leaves all of us knitters trying to pawn off our extra poly fiberfill on each other! But dear old Otto really holds a lot. A few more Owls and my bag of stuffing may be small enough that I could actually stuff it somewhere!

So goodbye Otto (he'll soon be winging his way to a little friend) and goodbye stuffing!

A school field trip kept me from getting online yesterday. The boys' classes went to a production of Winnie-the-Pooh at a local family theater. The boys got to see Pooh and Piglet and their favorite, Tigger, and I got to carry baby L in the baby bjorn for about four hours. Needless to say, I was a little tired when we got back. But so were all the kiddos and after they all went to sleep, I got to work on Owl.

His little body is all knitted and sewn together and he's just waiting on his stuffing. I'm really feeling like this is a great project for these newborn/infant weeks. The knitting is small, so I can do my 15 minutes or half hour of knitting and still feel like I've accomplished something. And even though there's lots of seaming, it too can be broken up into small sections for small sessions. Will I ever knit a life-sized sweater again?!

Lookie, lookie, Otto the Owl has eyes now! (Okay, all of you who have knit this pattern before, I'll admit it, I forgot to give him his nose. I know. I totally missed it on the chart. Doh! I'll go back and add it later.) Otto owes all of his progress to wee one, who did this yesterday.

Yes, it's a nap. Our very first I'm-laying-you-down-awake-in-your-bed-because-it's-naptime nap. Hallelujah!

Immediately after I started Otto the Owl from And So to Bed..., I realized that I didn't have enough of the main color yarn to finish him. No problem, between three local stores (including the one where I bought the yarn in the first place) and all the online stores out there, I should be able to get another ball. Or so I thought. Apparently, immediately after I started Otto everyone ran out of this shade of Rowan Cashsoft DK (appropriately called "donkey").

Finally, after weeks of waiting, the yarn came in at the Knitting Garden (love that store!) and I'm back in business.

Stripey body underway; scarf, wings and tail ready for seaming. This one's going to be so cute!

I finally came up with a reason to make this adorable owl toy from Lucinda Guy's book, And So to Bed.... (It'll be a gift for a friend's baby.)

This pattern was one of the things that really sold me on this book (I never would have thought that I'd find so many things I wanted to make in a knitting book with a bedtime theme, but as soon as I'm done with this owl, I'm gonna make the Lula doll for wee one, and then there's the cute kid's tank and the long robe sweater and the funny bunny doll with it's own clothes...). Just look at how clear the instructions are for these stuffed animals. Now that's a good pattern!

My only criticism is the standard annoyance that the British designers are all about knitting things flat and seaming them when you could totally knit them more efficiently in one piece. See all those pieces? You're supposed to knit two identical pieces for each wing, ear, etc. and then seam them together. Since I can't think of any reason to really do it this way, I'm not. Just call me another rebellious American!

The pattern calls for Rowan Cashsoft DK and as I happened to have leftovers of just the right brown from a design project, I jumped right in. Fellow knitsmith, Dani, helped out with leftovers of other colors.

I've got the wings (which look exactly like little Mercury spacecraft, don't they?), the tail, and the scarf done so far. But I'll have to wait for more brown yarn to start the body. Wouldn't you know that all the stores are out of this color right now. Grrrr. Still, there are plenty of tiny little "Otto" parts to knit and seam (yes, I still have to do one seam on each of them) and keep me busy until it arrives.