Brown – Page 2 – Hopefully Creative

Magnetic Sloth

The little magnetic sloth that can hang on nearly anything

I’ve now finished all the plushies I cut out that one Sunday some months ago. This last one is a sloth, again a free pattern from Sew Desu Ne / CholyKnight. I chose to use brown for his body and off-white for his face and his claws. This one is the largest of the free patterns that I’ve sewn up. I was almost debating putting a zip in his neck so he could be a bag. In the end, I figured he’d do better as a plush.

It starts with fusing the face pieces and stitching those down. I sewed down the full face with a zigzag. He’s not completely symmetrical, but I think it gives him a little character. Next, the pattern asks for velcro on the claws for him to hang, but I wanted a more invisible solution so I opted for some magnets that I harvested from a broken fly-curtain. The claws require topstitching which turned out to be exactly wide enough to hold my magnets. Score!

After that, you sew up the arms and legs while putting the claws in the middle. I forgot to read all the instructions and didn’t put any stuffing in his limbs. So he’s a little floppy in his extremities, but I’d already completely finished him before I figured that one out. Droopy he will stay. Because of his little magnet claws, you can hang him on nearly anything. In this case, I chose to use a giant L-square to demonstrate this. I think he’s pretty cute, and the cover images show sloths with longer fur that are a lovely option too!

Turtle

Who could say no to that adorable turtle face, even if he is a bit head-heavy.

It might have been a while, but this little turtle has been finished since June 6th, but my motivation for writing has been lacking. This turtle is, of course, a free Choly Knight/Sew Desu Ne pattern. This one was a little bit more difficult because the shell requires stopping before the end of the seam in order to have everything fit together nicely. I also sewed a wrong side to a right side in the ‘shell edge’, which meant a lot of unpicking invisible thread in high pile fabric. Not my favourite activity for sure.

The pattern has a few different options. You can choose nostrils or a smile, I chose the nostrils. You can also choose what shape the extremities would have, either flippers (my choice) or arms/legs, which basically are very similar to the tail that I used. In the examples, the shell is empty or embroidered. I chose to leave it empty because embroidery wouldn’t show up on this fabric when I tried it before.

I do think his eyes and nostril combination is particularly cute. Up next might be a frog? I think? I put eyes one of the remaining cut patterns, but I forgot which one it was. There are so many projects on my to do list that my word file ‘Projects’ has 20 separate projects listed, and it’s not complete. Curse my overactive imagination!

Familiars Brought to Life

When your memory keeps failing and you try to help it by crafting a literal reminder.

I play DnD 5th edition with a friend of mine over Discord every so often. My character is a Kenku, a bird-like creature that cannot fly but can perfectly recreate sounds it hears, think Lyre bird. Her name is Rustle Crowe [sound of a piece of paper rustling, sound of a crow] and she’s got a familiar: Kevin. Kevin is an owl most of the time and he’s dumb as a rock. Still very helpful but I regularly forget he exists. So when the DM said: “why don’t you get yourself a reminder?”. That was reason enough to start making a new plush.

I used Sew Desu Ne/Choly Knight’s free owl pattern to make this plush owl. When googling owl, I found a picture of an Eastern Screech Owl that I really loved, and he became the main inspiration. I looked through my stash and was limited in the colours and fabrics I had. So Kevin doesn’t look like an Eastern Screech Owl, but he’s still pretty cute. I made three deviations from the pattern. 1. His head tufts are supposed to have two spikes, but I made a continuous one. 2. His feet are a little smaller than the original because I couldn’t get them symmetrical so just resewed them entirely. 3. He’s got a tail feather that isn’t included in the original pattern and I drafted myself. As usual for the Choly Knight patterns, it came together easily and the instructions were marvelous. I have now also amassed quite a stash of this type of wellness fleece fabric, so I will need to make more plushies in the future!

Leather Thimble

A while ago, I discovered the YouTube channel of Bernadette Banner, a lady who sews all kinds of things. She tends to focus on historical clothing that she sews completely by hand, where appropriate. It doesn’t cease to amaze me that I’m able to watch minutes upon minutes of her hand sewing and chatting along, while doing it myself generally drives me nuts. Perhaps it is the way she speaks that just is completely enchanting.

Anyway, she published a video where she answers questions and sews a leather thimble. This had me very interested since I’ve never been able to figure out how to use a thimble to hand sew. It seemed to me that a leather thimble (essentially a little cover over your finger) would be easier to manipulate than a metal one. So I go out my stash of leather leftovers and got to work. It was pretty easy once I figured out how big the pieces needed to be.

I’ve been using the first version (lighter brown) for the past month or so on a English paper pieced hexagon quilt top. The one issue was that it was a little too small, and since the seam is along the middle, I sometimes did hit my finger through the seam. Then I found that you can also buy leather thimbles where the top is a lot smaller than the bottom, so the seam is on top of the finger. So I got back to work and cut out a new one. This one hasn’t been road tested yet, but if it doesn’t work, I still have a stash of leather bits to make a new one. For now though, at the very least partial success!

Cat Dungaree Dress

After finishing the blue plaid shirt, I set off to use the brown fabric bought in the same haul for some harem dungarees. So I set up to draft a set of dungarees based on pins like this, this and this. I sewed it all up and… I looked like a Teletubby.

It was very bad. So I cut off the bottom and decided it was going to be a dungaree dress. It’s still got the details from the harem jumpsuit from pinterest, with a large pocket on the front and a strap across the top. The pockets in the sides were drafted before construction. The shoulder straps, front strap and sides all close with snaps.

After effectively finishing the dress, I wanted to add a little more. So I decided to also add some pockets to the back. I got the pattern from the internet somewhere (cannot remember where) and embroidered some cats on the back, heavily inspired by this pin.

So now I have a cat dungaree dress that I’ve been living in for several weekends. I say it is a success!

Poppers on Plaid

At some point a while ago, I impulsively went to the fabric market in Utrecht. I’d woken up really early and got myself on a train by 7:25. The fabric market in Rotterdam was not up and running yet at 9 when I got there, so I decided to trek on for another hour and go to Utrecht. Met my parents there and had a good time with them. I also got a number of fabrics to play around with. Two of those were destined to be together, one blue plaid with brown stripes and a brown fabric.

I started with the blue plaid and made a shirt out of it. The pattern was the same as for Red Birds and Foxes, Simplicity Naaimode 9, model 59 (aka Simplicity 2255). I downsized the pattern to a size 34-36(ish) and changed the back darts. Once it was sewed up, it was decidedly too long, so I cut off about 5 cm. It closes using snaps (or poppers). Since I bought myself a snap-setting-tool, I’ve been trying to put snaps onto everything. There is little more satisfying then undoing poppers like the hulk when undressing.

For the next iteration (and there will be a next iteration), I’ll make sure to make the armholes smaller. For this version they are a little too big, in a sense restricting a little movement. The side seams on the pattern are not equal, and I might fix that on the pattern for next time. I do still enjoy wearing it, so all’s well.

O.O. the Octopus I

Sometimes you (re)find something that you just cannot ignore anymore.

Eye Right Eye

This happened to me at the start of April. I had found the free Octo the Octopus pattern on Ravelry (posted on Knitty here) way before this time, but I was afraid that it would take too long and would be too many stitches for me to actually finish. Since the first discovery I made some dinosaurs, some dragons and some other large projects. Then, my office wanted to have a knitting project for themselves. They really liked the Allosaurus even though it looked quite angry and wanted something for their own office that could be a group project. I suggested this Octopus that I’d found ages before. Everyone can knit a leg and I can join them to a head at the end with Kitchener stitch.

Starting this project in the office gave me some real craving to make one for myself. I didn’t want to make it in the same colours as the office one, but they had picked all the fun colours: blue on top but the entire rainbow for the bottom of the – legs? arms? – tentacles. This meant that I had a choice to make!

Flat Spread

I decided to buy a grey and brown ball of yarn and make a striped octopus. I googled ‘striped octopus’ after I’d already knit 4 stripes and found that there is a striped octopus, but it has white too. So off to the shoppy I went again and got some white. The stripes at the top were very regular, so I sewed in a line of white stitches to break it up a little. Then I just went and did completely irregular stripes. All the tentacles follow the same stripe composition and the bottom of the tentacles and his belly are blue. I followed the pattern closely (including errata), however, I did not want to knit with fingering weight yarn. So I substituted with some thicker yarn not knit double and changing the knitting of the eyelids. Google pictures told me that there is an octopus with white eyelid edges, so I chose to do that to get an even edge.

It went a lot quicker than expected. I finished him in under three weeks with most of my free time knitting him. You can find my notes on Ravelry here, they are quite limited *cough*. The reason why this post is posted a little bit after he was finished was mostly because he didn’t really have a name yet. After extensive discussion, we have come up with something…

We are pleased to hereby introduce O.O. Octopus I, Otto Octopuff Octopus The First, to the world. He was finished on April 21, weighs 539 grams, and measures 88 centimeters from head to tentacle. He will rest throughout working hours.

To scale

Otto will live on a stool in my living room, actually the black one you see on the left of the picture above. In the picture I’m holding him for scale (note, I am 1.58 m tall), he is quite big! Right now, I do believe that O.O. and the Dragon tie for first spot of most awesome knitted animal..

Leather Revanche (and Dinosaur!)

Remember the first watch from my Watching the Watches post? If you don’t remember that doesn’t matter, just know that it was a new concept but somewhat of a failure, unfortunately. So I needed to make something that would allow the pointy concept that I had to work. During the end of a day-long workshop I doodled part of the design. A few days after my return from the workshop I managed to copy the bottom part such that I had a continuous and symmetrical design. It took a few more days for it to be executed, but I finally have a pointy watchband that actually works!

Design and front Design and back

You can see the design on the right. I stuck that on my leather and just cut the paper and leather at the same time. This worked remarkably well actually. I reused the buckle from an older attempt where I used smaller rivets, which made my skin turn green, not a useful band as such. I hammered in the rivet, punched a hole in the strap and called it a day.

Top Bottom

The defining element was only added 20 minutes ago during an attempt at cleaning up my room. I’d finally pulled the ‘I give up’-box out of its corner to clear away the contents. The ‘I give up’-box is used to hold all the little bits and bobs that take to long to clear away to their rightful place when in a hurry. If at some point I feel that I need to clear up and quickly, the ‘I give up’-box appears and stuff that needs to be moved from whatever space it is currently occupying gets put inside and the whole box goes in a corner – Instant Neat! It was time for sorting out the box and I found a dinosaur earring. Now, without holes in your ears, dinosaur earrings don’t really have much use. However, a dinosaur on a watch, that is the ultimate awesome. For evidence, see below!

Dinosaur

Tadaah! Dinosaur! I also accidentally made the watch band completely skip the protruding wrist bone which makes it wear nicely. So happy accidents all around!

Now, let’s try to finish those pesky jeans and the sweater I started almost 2 weeks ago for which there is only one more skein and about 15-20 cm of ribbing to go!

Watching the Watches

You may recall my first self-made watch-band (here), which has been in constant rotation since first assembly. I did change out the watch face at some point for one with clearer numbers on it. Now, what I found out was that watches that have non-movable supports, in the picture below the one on the strap and the middle and bottom one on the right side, fit perfectly fine in this. They don’t slide around and stay put. However, the watches on the left, weren’t so keen. They would move and therefore I never really put them in this band.

Watches

Thus, a new strap started to take shape in my mind. It is an alternative design, with the opening at the top of the wrist instead of at the bottom. I know this sounds weird, but the pictures make it make sense, hopefully. The buckle is attached to approximate middle of the band, then goes through a loop attached with a rivet on one side, then on goes the watch face, you put it on the wrist and pull the strap trough the riveted loop on the other side and through the buckle to close.

Open front Open back

The reason why I’m liking the idea and not the execution so much anymore is because I dropped the watch face every second time I put the watch on. Also, because of the heaviness, I ended up with the watch on the underside of my wrist more often than not. I want to have my watch on top. Left, the watch as it was when I’d just made it, and right after wearing it for a week or more. You can see the points splaying more, and that, and the stretching of the thin strap was most likely what kept pulling the watch down.

Front begin Top end

Below you can also see the bottom buckle and the side view.

Back Side

I do like the idea with the single rivet loops and I’m planning on making a band that opens like normal at the bottom, but does have pointy bits on the front. I wanted to make the new one today, but I got distracted by new ideas. What if I didn’t use loops or rivets to make the watches interchangeable but created built-in loops in the band itself?!

Looping

I created a sort of wave-ish design with pointy bits around the watch face on cardboard. Added slits for the thin strap to pass though and copied it all onto leather. Simply cutting it out, and riveting the buckle on, and done it was!

Front Back

Apparently there were two different types of leather in the bag of offcuts that I bought last time. I quite like the look of the back, although the front is similar colours. I’m going to have to wear it more to be sure, but I think that the movable support will stay put in this design.

Front Other loop

So that’s it, two new watch bands. My fingers hurt from cutting the leather so I’m going to postpone making the improved version of the top band. That way I can also test if the bottom version actually works to my liking.

Next up, a knitted gift.

Winter Sweater in Summer

The Wibra is a Dutch shop that sells loads of different things. They also have a cabinet with different types of yarn. The assortment changes quite regularly, so I stop in from time to time to check if they have something interesting available. Not very long ago, I went by and found some yarn called Bella. It’s characteristics are 75% acrylic and 25% wool, about 62 meters per 100 gram and it should be knitted up on size 8-10 mm needles. I took some balls of the brown/beige-ish colour way because it looked nice.

Then I went online to see if I could find a nice pattern in a super bulky yarn that I wanted to knit up. I stumbled upon this pattern, 135-23 Ginny, on ravelry here. These are the notes for my project. I’m not very good at religiously keeping notes though. The reason I chose the project because I always seem to knit up stuff that leave my neck cold. This sweater had a really nice collar, and was knitted in the round. I decided to make an attempt at getting it to work.

So I knit up a swatch on my new size 10 circulars, bought especially for the project, and found my gauge too big. So I recalculated the pattern to suit my gauge. I started with a provisional cast on, from youtube. I also made sure to decrease a little extra to get a slightly more fitted look. I didn’t do the stripes because the fabric is busy enough.

I knitted/’drafted?’ set in sleeves myself, as the pattern wanted sew in, but I don’t like seaming at all. I roughly based it upon the tutorial found here. After knitting the entire sweater, the cuffs and hem were knitted. I cast off using this and this very helpful tutorials. I used about 5 balls to make the entire thing. Above is what it looks like. You can’t really see the collar very well, so I’m thinking about knitting a similar one up in a more solid yarn.

These are some detail shots of the neck and cuffs. I’ve worn it once now when it was quite cold, and really liked it. It’s nice and warm, it covers the neck sufficiently, but it isn’t boring. While I don’t know if I’d call it flattering necessarily, it doesn’t look massively too large for my frame I think.

I wore it a while ago as we’ve been having an official heatwave in the past week. I thought I’d died and gone to hell, it was that hot. So I, of course, had decided that I needed to knit another sweater, from this yarn type but in blue/green shades. That on my lap was even worse, but I hope to show you that finished project soon too!

Tag: Brown