Tag: lovie

The Best Laid Plans

Leave a comment

I know better than to say I’m going to get something done quickly. Or I should, by now, anyway. No more than an hour after I posted about needing to finish the gift I was knitting, it looked like this:

No, I didn’t turn it into a hedgehog instead. I frogged it. For those unfamiliar with the term, I ripped it out. All of it. Well, all except the head. That I went back to and closed up at the bottom with a ridge of purl bumps for attaching it to the “body” later.

The original body was nice and square at the top, but the bottom half got very elongated and not so pretty. So I tried again, this time aiming to knit the body as two separate squares with the “tummy patches” created by a color-work circle in the middle. That didn’t work out so well, either. Finally, I came up with crocheting the center circle and knitting the outer edge around.

Ok, first I tried to crochet the whole thing from the center, but turning the circle into a square without adding giant holes at the corner didn’t seem like it was going to happen. I made the front and back, color-reversed squares separately and then sewed them together with a blanket stitch and whip stitched the head in place:

After the party, of course. But, being a party for a 1-year-old, presents didn’t get opened until the next day so I snuck it in the bag right before it was opened.

Plugging Along

Leave a comment

I’ve been fairly project-monogamous, if you will, lately. Mostly because I have until Monday (not Sunday, as I thankfully found out yesterday) to turn this:

into something a bit more like this:

(random lovie picture from Amazon)

Okay, I don’t really have to take it from ball form. It’s quite a bit past this stage:

But that is the last time I took a photo. Still, I have to finish the body, then crochet the edging, then add the black detail patches to the face. So, a lot to get done. It doesn’t help that I managed to injure my finger with the size 1.5 needles.

Which leads to a little impromptu review of the Knitpicks Options fixed circular needles. These things are great. The tips are (obviously) very sharp, so you can get through those tiny stitches that are made on size 0-3 needles. Plus, the cable is very flexible and the joins are smooth so there is never any fighting with the needle when you are trying to move stitches around.

Okay, enough talking about it. I’ve got to go finish the lovie so it can have a bath, a dry, and a possible de-linting, before Monday’s party.

Works in Progress

Leave a comment

I usually write about my projects once I’ve finished them, but I constantly have many different things going at once. Kind of a creativity ADD, if you will. At the moment I have three different things on the needles, plus a sewing project in the “pile of fabric stage”, and some painting projects in various stages of completion/planning.

My carry-along project this week is the same one I was working on at the Hollywood Bowl. I’ve been naming this series of Earlybirds after appropriately colored birds, but I can’t think of a purple bird name. Any ideas?

My big project for this month is this little guy, a panda bear lovie for a certain Little Bear’s birthday on Labor Day. I’m just about an inch from the halfway point, where I will be able to start decreasing to make it go faster again. Don’t worry, once I’ve finished the body this little guy is getting black eyes and a nose.

Remember how I said I was going to remake these bags from the Hollywood Bowl night? They are currently my fabric pile. I’m also going to make some snack-sized bags to go along with them. If you want a tutorial to make your own, I got my general idea from this site. I made my own pattern based on the measurements listed on my plastic bags in the kitchen, though.

There are a few other things lying around my room that I am not currently actively working on, but I think this is going to keep me busy at least for this week.