One Finished Legwarmer

One legwarmer down, one to go! I’m about 25 rows in to the second one. Only 125 more rows left!

Advertisement

Completed: Bags

I was sewing up bags for this weekend’s Natural Living Expo, and decided to go ahead and make up my two bags while I was at it.

The one on the left is corduroy, the one on the right is fake leather. Both have shorter handles to enable me to carry them without them dragging on the ground.

This is the fun lining fabric for the corduroy bag.

My current bag that I use for carrying stuff around is starting to fall apart, so now I have two new bags to replace the old one. I think I’m going to add an external pocket to them both, since I failed to add any internal ones.

Toddler Doll

I’ve been wanting a toddler-sized doll for a while, to use in babywearing demonstrations. After reading all sorts of complex directions on how to turn a regular doll into a toddler-sized doll, I decided to just sew one up from scratch. I don’t need realism, just something that’s the right size, has some weight, and has jointed arms and legs.

So I used a pattern for a Raggedy Ann doll, made it completely out of muslin, then made a little dress and pants. I added a do-rag to hide the doll’s misshapen, bald head, lol.

But instead of stuffing her with just stuffing, I made little muslin bags to fit inside the doll’s legs, arms, head, and torso and filled those bags with old aquarium rocks. I surrounded those bags with layers of quilt batting to make the limbs and body soft on the outside, then stuffed the little rock-and-batting packages into the doll.

She doesn’t weigh nearly as much as I had originally planned – rocks are not the most efficient way to add weight to something – but she has enough weight in her to make putting her into slings fairly easy.

So, yay, another item crossed off the list!

Knitted scarf, mittens, hat

OK, I think I’m finally done for real. The scarf was pretty easy. I did it with two rows of knit, then two rows of purl. The color stripes are actually in kind of a code using dates that are important to our family – birthdays, anniversary, etc. Kind of cheesy, but kind of fun.

The hat was done following a free pattern I found online and have since lost, sorry. I hate doing that. I altered it quite a bit to make it long enough to cover my ears completely.

The mittens were originally made using Bev’s THE Mitts pattern. But I found that the increases for the thumb started way too early and were too gradual to fit me well, so after trying a few things, I ended up cutting the mittens apart just below the thumb, and reknitting starting at the top of the ribbing. I did NOT increase right away after the cuff, but instead knitted 8 or so rows in stockinette without any increases, then added in about 7 stitches on the next row, to join back up with the rest of the mitten using kitchener stitch.

And after all that, I realized I could have just simply left out those 8 stockenette rows, and simply joined the ribbing directly to the top part of the mitten and saved myself some work. But oh well.

First Knitting Projects

Wow, well, I have completed my first knitting projects – a matching scarf, hat, and mittens for me. Here is the hat, which caused the most trouble. I followed a pattern I found online, and I can’t remember which one, I’m so sorry. But it called for about 5 rows of k1p1 ribbing, and after I got the hat done, I found it just wasn’t enough. Plus, the hat kept sliding up my head because it was too tight and cone-shaped. I blocked the hat over a balloon, and that helped the sliding problem, but the ribbing still was not satisfactory. I like hats that cover all of my ears, and this hat left my lobes out in the cold.

I ended up knitting new ribbing – this time k2p2 and about 10 rows. I cut the old ribbing off the hat (scary) and then attached the new ribbing using kitchener stitch. I’m very pleased with the end result.

Wally took this picture. The mittens are drying on the radiator this evening, and I will photograph the whole set tomorrow.