Baby – Hopefully Creative

Duck and Slobber

Two baby gifts, a stuffed duck and some spit bibs.

Some time in the past, I was asked by a friend if I could reproduce her sister’s stuffed duck that had seen some wear. So I looked around, found the Crazy Duck Sewing Pattern and thought I could make it work. She was very happy and asked me to make another for a new family member that should be arriving. So I asked for preferred colours and we settled on yellow with orange details. Since it’s for a young baby, I didn’t use safety eyes but embroidery to create his face.

Bottom of yellow duck with orange feet and beak

Top of yellow duck with orange feet and beak

I also found some precut slobber cloths or spit bibs in my hoard when I was reorganizing. I figured I should put them together and they could make a nice set. So I located some white terry cloth that I had no idea existed and cut out the triangles. They were sew together and the snaps were added. I had some leftover triangular terry cloth, so I also made the mice one. That one I’ll keep for future additions. I love these, such quick and fun projects.

Two white, triangular spit bibs one showing the front and one showing the back.

Orange dinosaur wearing a white, triangular spit bib with a pattern of orange girls jump roping and yellow boys on skateboards.

I hope babies necks are about the same size as my dinosaur’s..

Baby Zebra Hat

Little Zebra hat for a little baby

To add to the little Giraffe gift, I wanted to make an animal themed hat. It needed to be a safari animal and my Ravelry searches unearthed a zebra version. Baby Zebra by Marji LaFreniere, a cute little hat in black and white with a mane down the back. I didn’t want to make it too complicated so I knit the body of the hat on the knitting machine. Since the yarn was very thick, I cast on my 74 stitches (72 + 2 for seaming down the back) by putting 2 needles in work and skipping the next one. Once I reached the length, I pulled the knitting off the machine and onto 4 mm needles.

Since a hat needs to be smaller on top, I did the decreases by hand. Once it was done, I sewed the back seam, leaving space for the tufts of the mane. I made the ears mostly according to the pattern (either the maker can’t count or I can’t because the row numbers didn’t match up) and attached those to the hat. I then cut lengths of yarn and knotted those in the seam of the back for the mane.

I have No Idea whether or not this hat is actually baby sized. I’m notoriously bad at this, generally making baby hats sized for like 1 to 2 year old kiddos. We’ll see on which end of the spectrum this one ends up. The bottom of the hat rolls a bit, but I think it still like it. You can also still see the skipped needles in the body of the hat, it almost looks like ribbing. However, I still think this thing is stinking cute!

Safari Animals

Making the little safari themed animals that dangle beneath a mobile.

It’s been a while, but I have been making things every now and again.

My colleague is going on maternity leave soon and she wanted to make a little Safari themed mobile for the crib. She asked me if I could make some safari animals and she would assemble the mobile. So I looked around on the internet and found a lot of options. I was especially inspired by the Puzzle Animals from ‘Felt with love designs‘ but I didn’t really like those specific patterns. So down the pinterest rabbit hole I went. The plan was to create some puzzle animals with two different colours of felt, with one colour being the main outside colour, and other being the middle layer that would appear in some small area(s). In the end, I made a lion, a giraffe, a zebra, an elephant and a rhino.

There was still a large amount of felt in the stash, so I looked around for the colours that seemed most suitable for each animal. The lion was of course yellow, with an orange mane. The giraffe was brown with less bright orange spots on its back. The zebra was white with black stripes. Since I didn’t want to double colours, I had to make some less realistic choices for the elephant and the zebra. The elephant ended up in a darker grey with blue ears, and the rhino was light purple with light grey horns. There was some faffing about with cutting outsides and insides and adhering them together. Then I sewed around the outline for some extra strength. The legs and elephant ears were connected to the bodies with a little extra thread, for security. Those can still be removed if someone wants to play ‘exchange the legs’.

The example mobiles also had some leaves, so I looked around for leaf templates. Luckily there are a lot of those around and I found some cute ones. Some monstera leaves were cut from a light green felt. Some more temperate leaves were cut from dark green felt. All the little green strings you see were there to indicate the midpoint, weight-wise, for the little leaves and critters.

My colleague has since finished the mobile and I hope it’ll bring all of them much joy!

Yellow – Turquoise – Orange

Made some baby gifts from self-dyed yarn and other happy fabric.

Baby gift time again! First up, dyeing. On the last day of 2022, the second dye project was a single skein of Chester Wool DK 115 (Worsted) 50s. It is 100% merino and has 50 grams in a skein for around 100 meters of yarn. Since I still had soft yellow dye stock left from the other dyeing I did that day, I put 20 ml of the stock in my pot. Then I added several resists around the skein and dropped the thing into the pot. When it had simmered for long enough, I took it out and dyed the resists turquoise. I couldn’t resist adding some speckles and chose orange. All in all this meant that the skein turned out extremely bright and cheerful. If you ask me, perfect for a baby.

Since there was going to be a new baby, I set out to make some baby things and settled on these two patterns: Easy Peasy Baby Ball by A la Sascha and Tiny Tot by Kristen Rettig. One is a rectangle hat with tassels or pompoms and the other is a ball. I used up the entire skein in the making of these projects, so no leftovers!

I’ve also had a bit of flannel in the stash with a similar colour scheme. There’s also some additional red and green, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. The flannel was bought to make some poppies, so I set out to do exactly that. I tried to make these somewhat symmetrical with the plaid, so the scale was based on that. There’s some difference between these two poppies, one has a green stripe near the head, the other green. One has larger hands, the other smaller, but they are still very similar.

Both knitting patterns were quick, easy to knit and went smoothly. Of course the hat is way too big for the recipient, but I guess my track record stays intact on that score. The last item for the little baby was a spit scarf. Now with skateboarders, rope jumpers and a terry cloth back. It feels very soft even if the snap is on the wrong edge.

I hope the little one will have a marvelous and colourful life!

Dinosaur Coat Version 0.86

Making a tiny dinosaur coat for a little human.

I still had about a meter of my dinosaur coat softshell fabric left and really wanted to use it for something useful. Luckily, friends of mine have produced a little human and I decided that he needed a dinosaur coat too. The pattern used was a free one called Schnabelinas Softshelljacke that came in sizes 74-146 and three different versions. I chose size 86 and the ‘Gerade Teilung’. Yes, this pattern was in German. However, I managed it because it has extensive instructions with photography and google translate was a great help. I also made my life a little easier by not putting in pockets.

This Gerade Teilung has straight seams at the front instead of the curved ones from the other versions. The pattern gives the option for a short and a long version – I chose long. There is also a possibility to remove the shoulder seam by creating a back pass (?), so that happened too. The sewing went pretty smoothly apart from the finishing. The snaps in the hood were not having it at all. So I think this is no longer a removable hood, unless you want to pull the snaps off too.

I really like the zipper guard that’s made from a contrasting fabric (blue with white dots). I chose to use a separating zipper and put in dark blue cuffs. It’s a bit big for the recipient but he’ll likely still grow, probably a lot faster than I ever did! It feels nice that the fabric went to a lovely new home where it will be used instead of staying in my hoard languishing forever, as so many lengths are currently doing.

Dinosaur Tag Toy

Making a tag toy in the shape of a dinosaur for a little one.

With the friends’ spawn officially entering air-breathing life, time for a visit. One cannot show up empty handed, so I sewed a little gift. Found this project and decided that would do. Not only was it a dinosaur, but apparently tag-things are much fun for tiny humans or something. So I printed the pattern and got out some of the leftovers of making owl pajamas many years ago. I definitely don’t keep leftovers in my hoard for too long, nooooooo. I also found some ribbon-bits from eons ago and set to work.

It’s very straightforward, just pin loops pointing to the dino tummy along the backside, and sew those down on the right side. Sew the other dino-side to the loopy-side while leaving a section open. Turn, stuff and sew the hole closed again. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy. It’s also funny how all the ribbons feel just slightly different. In conclusion, easy and quick project that was fun to make!

Baby Bear Wear

Tiny sweater that probably will not fit.

This post was written on September 9, 2020 as I’d finished the project by then but couldn’t gift it because.. I had to wait for the baby. It’s since been gifted and therefore this post can go live.

Friends of mine are having a baby in December (turns out it was January), so I wanted to make some things. This is the first in what might just become a series. Baby things need very little yarn and fabric because they are so small, so that is quite handy.

I decided that I wanted to knit some sort of sweater, so off to Ravelry I went. The pattern that I went with is called Teddy Bear Sweater by Marta Porcel. The yarn was Zeeman Sophia in the Antra colourway. I used 62 grams of it to finish this little sweater. It was quite a quick knit too, started at 9:30 and finished all the knitting at 4:00. Then I assembled it the next day and embroidered the face onto the front. I’m debating whether it will actually fit because I have 0 sense of how big babies are and the sleeves look quite tight. If it doesn’t fit, that would be a little sad. However, I still enjoyed myself creating it which I think is an important aspect.

Baby stuff part 1 (wrong, seems it’s part 4), completed!

More Baby Stuff

Next to the spit scarf from last post, I also made some more baby stuff. A colleague is possibly interested in sending something to a recent born, so I got myself to work to increase my already sizeable baby-junk-pile. I started with making another Poppy, similar to the other plaid poppy. The main difference is that this one is slightly smaller and has a smaller head in comparison. It’s still cute though.

I followed it up with a simplified poppy. This was just two squares sewn together with a stuffing filled pantyhose for a head. Since this head was already in a point, it didn’t even need a hat. He is still really quite cute, if I say so myself.

All in all, I’m still surprised to have so many things for babies when I’m not the greatest fan of them. Who knows, perhaps someone will like these things.

Spit Scarves

A friend of mine had a baby recently, and I’d been wandering around the Zeeman and found some spit scarves that I thought might be nice. Things you put around a baby’s neck, I presume, to keep them from getting spit, snot and other bodily fluids on their clothes. I knew that I still had some dinosaur construction worker and little monkey fabric that would suit a baby beautifully.

The tag on the originals said that they were 18 by 40 cm, so off home I went and cut out 20 x 42 cm triangles from the cute fabrics and linings of flannel in a similar blue. They were stitched right sides together, turned out through the hole left along the top and topstitched to close the hole. Then I added two ‘male’ snaps on the one side and one ‘female’ snap on the other side to make it adjustable. I ended up with four of them, two went to the friend and the other two will probably find a home sooner or later.

And here is mr. sultana backpack modelling the two spit scarves. He’s faded significantly from sitting in the window forever, but still cute as a button!

Baby Booties

(This post was written on the 25th of March. Since it is a gift, I waited until it was received to post this account of the project)

You may or may not know that I have not really been able to knit for a long time now. My arm starts to hurt and it’s just not fun. So when a friend had her first baby, I wanted to see if knitting would be possible again. What better way to test than with a small project: something for baby. I searched ravelry for some baby booties patterns and eventually found one for Baby Hausschuhe. Now, just a boring booty wouldn’t work, you understand. I needed to.. do something to make them stand out just a little.

Cue some dinosaurs! What else?

I’d found a chart for a cute little dinosaur that I figured could work here. It transferred it to an excel file so I could work it. The dinosaur would be on the left outside of the first booty, facing backwards (otherwise he would get caught up in the toe decreases). But before I could start on the body of the shoe, I had to work on the bottom. So I cast on two booty soles in yellow and started knitting. Once the soles were done, I followed the first rows of the pattern until the purl how, then I knit 6 stitches and started my dinosaur pattern there. It all worked out pretty well. After following the pattern for the toe decreases and about 5 cm of ribbing, I was bored. My arm also hurt again – stupid.

On Saturday I felt like working on the second one, but I wanted a different pattern. I’d first looked over ravelry for a fun dinosaur chart, but I couldn’t find one. So on to google I went. Eventually settling on a pterodactyl. I found this picture of a Pterodactyl slipper that became the basis of my pattern. I made something resembling it in Excel and again kept my fingers crossed. This one also worked remarkably well. I knit until I got to the same hight as the other one and then transferred them both to a circular needed so I knew that they were the same hight. A few more rounds, some stretchy bind off and two booties were done! I think they are cute, but I hope the new owners also like them. We’ll see.

Tag: Baby