Toy – Page 2 – Hopefully Creative

Sir Octopus

The pattern designer from the previous knit gift had a sale on buying three patterns at the same time. So that is what I did, next to GOGEE, I also got a pattern for Dandy Sir Cephalopod and Bonbon. DSC is an octopus with a top hat and a monocle, I had to have it. Bonbon is a cute little rabbit, it will probably see my needles fairly soon.

On to DSC, I used the same yarn as for the GOGEE and got to work. First you knit the eight tentacles, which you finish with a three needle decrease. Once all eight tentacles are knit, you start the body, at some point, the tentacles are three needle decreased onto the existing body. This is a really easy join that only leaves you with eight tails to weave in (YAY!). The remainder of the body is then knit up, eyes are added a moustache is sewn on and then the head is closed up. Before finishing, a length of yarn is glued around one eye for the monocle. The pattern is wonderful and easy to follow. I really enjoyed knitting him.

The most difficult part came with the moustache. I didn’t have a moustache button available. It was Sunday, he had to be completed by Monday and all shops in the vicinity were closed. I had no choice but to bust out my trusted fimo clay. The (metaphorical) cobwebs were wiped from the pasta machine and it was put to work. I drew a moustache on some paper and traced it on my flattened fimo clay. Holes were punched and the clay was baked. I also decided that none of the safety eyes I had in the stash were large enough (see above, he just looks silly with tiny eyes). So with the remaining moustache clay, I made some half domes that I squashed onto smaller safety eyes. These cover-eyes were also baked and then glued to the smaller eyes. I learned again that I cannot be trusted with superglue since I got some on my finger.. again.

Once the eyes and moustache were added, I closed him up and knit the top hat. Since the octopus itself was quite .. busy in his colour scheme, he needed a neutral hat. So I got out some grey and got to work with that. When he was finished he couldn’t really stand on his tentacles, but if you perch him just right on a cup, he looks ever more wonderful. He’s currently living in the office on the desk of the birthday girl, so I still get to see him. She’s still deciding on his name, but it’ll definitely start with Sir.

Knit GOGEE

So, since the interchangeable knitting needles arrived, I’ve been longing to knit again. Just looking at other people’s projects in Ravelry is not sufficient to curb my knitting cravings, or so it seems. This meant that I have started knitting again. I’d already started on a rabbit, which is now packed up in the corner of shame since its body is way too large for its head and I’ve not been in the mood to unpick. I’m also knitting a hidden dinosaur scarf that it still waiting on more yarn (I was an idiot and didn’t read the instructions on how much yarn to use). But I recently finished two different knit gifts. Today we’ll discuss the first.

Now, you may have wondered what in the world a GOGEE is, I don’t blame you if you did. GOGEE stands for Guardian of Good Energies Elf, it’s a pattern created by Susan Claudino-Aguilar. The idea is that you knit it with purpose so that it catches all the good will you knit into it. It’s a little creature with arms, legs and a pocket on its front. I thought it was super cute and if I made it, it would be a wonderful opportunity to put in some good energy and a positive message for a friend of mine.

From the pattern page, I’d discovered that this was an updated version of the Voodoo, You Love Me pattern. Since I really like the zombie-esque-ness of the Voodoo pattern, I decided to make some modifications to the GOGEE to get the best of both worlds. I knit up its arms, legs, pocket and body exactly as described in the pattern. I did not knit the ears, since I didn’t really like them and when I came to the last couple of rounds in the head, I decreased quicker without additional knit rounds to create a rounded head shape.

Once the knitting was finished, I sewed a little mouth and added a felt heart on his front. A little message was written and put into his pocket for any bad times. He’s quite cute if you ask me, if a little floppy. For some reason his head is larger than I expected, even though it’s the same size in the pattern pictures. In any case, he now has a new home and I hope that the recipient can look upon him with some fondness!

Tiny Knits

I had to travel about 7 hours this weekend, so in preparation for such a trip, I downloaded a number of tiny animal knitting patterns. I figured it was more fun to bring a number of different balls of 5-10 grams in different colours, rather than one big ball in only one colour. In the end I managed to knit 5 little ones on the road and a pentapus before I left. The knit critters were a crab, a whale, a crocodile, an alien and a pig.

All the instructions were followed completely, apart from eyes which were all made with a thick yarn knotted twice.

Teeny Crab by Amanda Berry and Teeny Whale by Amanda Berry.

Baby Gators by Anna Hrachovec

Mini Alien by Barbara Prime and Tiny Piggy by Amanda Berry

The whole gang together! I have some more patterns, so chances are that a mouse or a sheep or a chicken will join the flock…

Mini Bunny

Sometimes you just really want to do a quick project. So about one episode of Castle ago, I cast on a little bunny. It’s 15 stitches wide and knit in stockinette to a square. Using the Bunnies from a square pattern, I knit up a tiny bunny. I’m claiming it is for Easter, but I just wanted to try out the pattern.

It’s quite cute, and it was a really quick project so that was nice. Who knows, he might get a family in the next few days…

Stegosaurus!

Do you know what happens when you end up with an overworked arm while knitting the body of a Stegosaurus? Said Stegosaurus ends up in a corner, in a plastic bag, for quite a long time…

A, mounted skeleton in right lateral view and B, laid out with missing elements reconstructed before mounting. Images copyright The Natural History Museum.

I did work incrementally on some of it’s yellow parts, the big purple parts mostly being completed in the session that finished my arm. It still took over a year to complete this Jurassic monster. According to the Ravelry, I started it in August last year. However, after knitting a big scale here and there to get back into knitting, I finally managed to get all 35 parts finished today! Then it took all afternoon to stitch the scales to each other and to the body of the purple giant.

Since it didn’t seem to be completely symmetrical, stitching on those scales was quite.. annoying. It felt like I stitched each one on at least twice, to much chagrin. However, they are fairly equal now, even if you can’t really see that on the pictures. I think a real Stegosaurus is also not supposed to sit like a dog, but since its legs move, I wanted to position them in an alternative way. It’s still pretty cute, so perhaps I’ll start a new dinosaur in the future still.

Toothless Gift

A friend of mine seemed to fall in love with my Toothless when I finished it last year. She implied or asked (long time ago, I don’t really remember) she would like one for her birthday, and I decided to try and do that. I failed in having it finished on the birthday, but it is done by now. It took slightly less than a year in little increments, but still a substantial project. I made a few changes compared to my own one. This one has a semi functional mouth with a stomach that can house a fish. His eyes are also a little different and the face does not look the same. However, it is still quite cute, I think.

And here he was, hiding on my chair during construction.

VIKINGS!

Sunday marked the fifth day in a row that I finished a project. On Wednesday the graduation dress, on Thursday the shrug, on Friday the purple Viking, on Saturday the red Viking and on Sunday a dress/sweater (which you will read about once I get the person who will be wearing it (hopefully) in it). Let me now explain why we made two Vikings.

The University I work for has a very nice international recruitment officer who happens to be my friend. She travels around the world spreading the word and talking to lots of nice people. She regularly takes pictures of the places she is at for us to put on Facebook, but the umpteenth picture of obligatory brochure stand was getting a little much. So a while ago we thought up the plan to have her take a little Viking along on her travels. Why a Viking? The student association has a Viking as their mascot, since, apparently, the Vikings landed close to here when they first arrived in the Netherlands. Fine with us, a Viking it is.

Now, trying to find a nice Viking proved to be a little more difficult than expected. On Thursday they googled Viking plushy and I was tasked with creating a pattern to make a nice Viking. Turned out that playing with paper and tape trying to create a Viking was a lot of fun! So in the end we had 8 or so pattern pieces and a shopping list of felt colours to obtain. Returning with off-white, light grey, darker grey, beige-ish and red felt, black fuzz, black eyes and a school pin, we planned to create the Viking on Saturday.

On Friday after the ceremony, I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet, so I decided to test the pattern with some of my own felt (cheap felt, in horrid colours). This was the birth of the purple Viking. I learned a few things, like, sew the back of the bottom, not the side by hand for turning inside out. Clip close to the stitching on those horns or you’ll never be able to turn it. And, fuzz leaves more fuzz, especially pink fuzz on a dark blue skirt – not pretty. It turned out pretty nice so I was confident enough to try it on Saturday with the pattern we made.

Purple test Viking with pink fuzz, pretending to be in France.

The recruiting friend came by and we set out, first cut all the pieces, then sewed some bits together by machine and by hand, plucked fuzz of everything, inserted some eyes, sewed front and back together, turned the horns outside out and stuffed them, attached the oval bottom, turned it outside out completely, stuffed it even more, added the pin, closed the hole in the bottom and took some pictures. A Viking was born. He is a lot prettier than the first Viking I made. Now we just have to wait and see how he holds up to the wear and tear of travelling to at least 5 countries in the coming 5 weeks. And whether he’s received well in the (international) community. Fingers or horns crossed!

More Miniature Dinosaurs

I’ve discovered the benefit of preparing to move to a different house. You find all the unfinished projects languishing in a box. Some are a quick stuff and finish, like the mini dinosaurs I’ll show you in a minute, some are a case of straight into the old rag bin and some may be salvageable with time and effort. I have by now managed to reduce my stash of 6 boxes of scraps and UFOs to only one box. I’m quite proud of this actually. It also, in a way, frees you to put your mind to other things than the old projects still hiding away in a corner.

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During the big clean up, I found a bag with some old knitted mini-dinosaurs parts in it. Back in the day (here), I finished three of them, but apparently I didn’t complete the last two. So I took an hour or two and stuffed and sewed up that last pair. They are just the simple version of a toothless T-rex, but I still think that they are quite sweet.

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I’m still trying to get all my yarn, fabrics and sewing accessories into plastic bins that I already own, so wish me luck!

Toothless

It all started a long time ago when I watched the How to train your dragon movie. I immediately fell in love with the cutest dragon in the film: Toothless. A while later, I found a picture on Pinterest of a giant Toothless plush. I knew that I needed one of those for myself. The picture, this one, contained a free pattern of said Toothless from a DeviantArt user named nooby-banana. So in May last year, I printed it out, cut out all the paper pieces and put them in a folder. Only to have it stay at the back of a drawer until a few weeks ago, when I organised said drawer. Immediately, I felt the need to make the toothless dreams come true…

I’d already collected most of the materials and set to work last Sunday. I cut out all the pieces, for which I needed one fleece blanket and a tiny strip of another one and started sewing up my little monster. It all came together much quicker than I could have anticipated, especially for a critter that is 1.10 m long and with a 1.15 m wingspan.

The instructions were mostly clear and I followed them closely, the only deviation was that I sewed the top of the head first, not the bottom and that I added a little line of stitching above the eyes. I don’t think that the head order made a big difference in the final project, but it made my life a lot easier. I also followed most of the instructions for the eyes from Katy-A here. Although I used safety noses as I have a lot more of those hanging around that I won’t use very often.

All in all he was made from 1 and a 10cm strip of fleece blanket, a little left over brown fleece from a hood project, his nails were from my medieval dress fabric, polymer clay eyes, some plastic pellets (75 grams per foot in a bit of pantyhose) and a lot of stuffing. I think he’s really cute, and it’s real nice to cuddle with him as he is so big. He’ll probably live on my bed or on the chair as pictured below for a while.

The view below shows his wings and his wings lifted up.

I really like it, so thank you nooby-banana for making this wonderful pattern available to us all.

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..

Tag: Toy