Tag: toy

The Best Laid Plans

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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.

Everyone Needs a Minion or Two

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My mom works for a non-profit agency as an administrative assistant. Once a year they hold a gala to raise money. That gala happens to be coming up in March, so everyone has been overworking themselves.

I decided to help out. By making a minion for her. Not real help, but cute help.

We’ve wanted minions from the first time we saw the commercials for Despicable Me. Now I have made one.

I didn’t use a pattern for this one, but Just Crafty Enough has a similar pattern here. Mine is a mix of crochet and knit, but the pattern is knit in the round.

What other characters do you find yourself wishing you could have for your very own? Anyone else made a Minion?

P.S.- Exciting news on Thursday. You may already know if you follow me on Twitter…

Ollie The Owl

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Meet Ollie. He’s my first knit owl. I have arbitrarily named him Ollie because it sounded good paired with the word “owl” and I have no clue whether he currently has a name beyond “Owl”. This little guy was a Valentine’s present for another little guy that I watch three days a week.

Ollie was made from the “Little Black Owl” pattern posted by Kat on Just Crafty Enough. It’s a top-down pattern with the ears and wings picked up later when the body is finished.

I tacked down the wings like the original, but I chose to sew on the eyes and beak. I did way too many glue gun projects back in middle school to even tough a glue gun right now. And that was almost ten years ago. (Seriously, way too many. We made them every month for old people who were kind of like our “pen pals.”)

I figured an owl made a perfect companion for the Valentine’s Fish. Who says predator and prey can’t get along on a day that’s all about love?