Wednesday 11 June 2008

Toy Box

I'm so glad to finally be posting this. For the past few weeks I've been working on lots and lots of knit toys. I had all of the parts finished, and finally got sick of looking at the unstuffed pieces and put them together. Here's a group photo:


The first, and easiest, was the Bella Luna Toys inspired Juniper berry rattle:


My best friend's new baby girl is named Juniper, so I thought this would be appropriate. All I did was knit one ball in stockinette with dark-ish blue yarn, then another in loose garter stitch with lighter blue yarn and sew them together. To make the rattle, I placed a 35mm film canister about half filled with rice inside. Wrapped up in the stuffing it's still nice and soft and has a good rattle sound.
Also for little baby Juni I made a few June bugs. For these my only patterns were pictures of the actual insects and my own creativity. They don't rattle, but I do wish they made a buzzy bug sound...






















The next few I made at the request of my boyfriend. Lately there has been a mallard duck couple hanging around our apartment building. I'm not really sure why, but he gets an unusual amount of amusement out of them. This is another pattern I just made up - both ducks are nothing more than two sets of rectangles sewn together. These in particular were a pain in the ass, and as you can tell from the picture, mama duck doesn't sit up very well on her own.















And lastly, also commissioned by my boyfriend, is the mighty Stegosaurus. I was extremely surprised to find how many stegosaurus patterns there are online, and after searching through all of them I decided I liked Jacob Haller's the best. I followed the pattern exactly and, for the first time ever, didn't mess anything up.





















Since this one's a boy I had to give him blue plates, but he'll have a lady friend with pink plates soon enough. Oh, and even though it's a great idea, I didn't add the guitar picks to the plates 1. because I didn't want to buy any and 2. because I wanted him to be cuddly.

That's all for now. I'm in the process of working on a pair of fingerless gloves for my sister's birthday and also a shawl for my mom's birthday. Whew! I'm going to be knitting like a crazy person all summer. That's a good thing, though.