Big Brother, Baby Brother

I just have to have something to work on.  I got the idea the other day to make a hat for Joey's teacher's four-year-old son.  I had already made the sweater for the baby to be and gave him the elephant hat that I made ages ago, but was too small for the intended baby.  I don't like the older sibling to not get anything, so I thought about making him an animal hat like I had made for my grand children for Christmas.  When I was deciding which hat to make, I came up with another idea to make the hat for the big brother and a matching toy for the baby brother.  Since I had patterns for a frog hat and a frog toy, I chose the frog hat and made the toy frog to go along with it.

The hat turned into a nightmare. I forgot when I made this hat for Ezra, that it was much smaller than the other hat patterns.  I got away with it with Ezra because he is so small, but I needed a bigger hat for this boy.  I started in making the largest size the pattern gives, but after getting well into the top of the hat, I could see that it was going to be way too small.  I measured across and it was only about twelve inches.  A hat needs to be at least twenty inches to stretch around a four-year-old head.  I took it all out (not without many struggles).  I was using double strand yarn and two different colors.  That meant that I was carrying across eight balls of yarn, just to get the changes needed in the two colors.  It is hard enough to knit with so many balls of yarn, but taking it out is even more of a challenge because of all the times the yarn is crossed to keep from having holes where the colors change.  Also, when you pull out double strands of yarn, they get all twisted in such a way that it is almost impossible to separate them.  Well, I managed to get it out, readjusted the stitch count and started in again.  Once again, after getting far enough along to see how wide it would be, I found out that it still would not be big enough.  Out came the work again.  This time, I almost doubled the number of stitches, but when I got done, it was what I needed.  Lucky for me, when I increased the stitches, I had added the right ratio of stitches to meet the decreasing needs.  Since eight stitches are decreased in a decrease row, I needed to add a multiple of eight stitches to get the pattern to work correctly.  Totally by accident, I had increased by a multiple of eight, so it was easy to make the decreases for the crown.  I was soooooo happy about that.  I couldn't even get all the face pieces on correctly the first time I did them.  The eyes were too high on the head and they were looking up, instead of forward.  They still are more than I would like, but I am not going to take them off a second time.  The nose buttons were supposed to be higher on the hat on the darker color.  I put them there, but they were almost invisible because the green was too dark for the black to show up on.  I took them off and placed them just at the top of the lighter green so they would be more visible. It took me three days to do a project that normally takes only one day to complete.

The toy was a joy to make.  It only took me half a day to finish it.  I finished the hat this morning and completed the whole toy this afternoon and evening.  The only thing I had to do over on the toy was the mouth.  I had done it in black like it showed, but again, because of the dark green color, the black did not show up.  I decided to just use the lighter green, and it looks better.  The two look very much alike, so they will make this project completed the way I had intended on having it.

Baby Brother's frog toy

Big brother's frog hat

Joey modeling the froggy hat

Big Brother, Baby Brother

Who knows what I will do next.  I know I will soon be converting graduation robes into "Rocky" robes for something Marty needs done for a high school production.  I think I need to do about seventeen of them.  I already made one to see what I would need to do.  By using the material from one robe, I can cover the white yoke of the gown so that it looks more like a boxer robe, than a graduation one.  I also made a hood, belt, and belt loops with some more of the material from that robe. When finished, I think it looked pretty good.  He needs to show it to his colleagues, to see if they like it.  When he brings me the robes, I will get to work on them.  He doesn't need them till March or April, but I never like to wait when I have a project to do.

Baby Afghan Finally Finished

I started making a baby afghan quite some time ago.  I was going to make it for a lady at church, but it was taking me too long, so I put it aside and decided it would be for someone else that would be having a boy.  I started in again after Christmas, intending on making it for Joey's teacher.  I took a trip to Maine and needed something to work on, but since the afghan needed to carry six balls of yarn across for each row, I knew it would be too much to try to keep straight in the car.  It is hard enough to keep six balls of yarn at once working without getting tangled, even when I have lots of room to do it in.  Anyway, I decided to once again abandon the afghan project for that baby, and made the sweater I showed last time, instead.  After I got back home and had finished the sweater, I decided to get back to the afghan, this time intending it to be for my friend's daughter who is having a boy.  I designed this afghan on my own.  I am quite pleased with the outcome, but it was a little difficult to do with so many balls of yarn being used at one time.  It took awhile to figure out, but after doing it so many times, I finally found a way to arrange my balls and cross them as I was going, to be sure they would not be tangled in a knot when I got to the end of each row.

Afghan is done all in once piece, except for the shapes.  I made them separately and sewed them onto the blocks.

 My biggest challenge with this was to make the shapes.  I had intended on making a circle, square, triangle, and rhombus.  However, when I finished my first shape, it was an octagon, instead of a circle.  I soon realized that it was easier to make straight edges, so I proceeded to make these shapes.  I was still going to make the square, but decided it would cover up too much of the background, so I changed it to the pentagon.  The rhombus was the only shape that turned out as I had envisioned it in the beginning.  The triangle had to be changed to the hour glass shape, using the two triangles, because I couldn't figure out how to get it tall enough with the number of stitches wide that I was limited to.  All in all, I think it looks fine this way.

Post Christmas Projects

Christmas is over, so I have a few pictures to post of people wearing some of the things I made.  I have also finished two more projects since Christmas.  I made a fox hat for Ellen and a baby sweater for my grandson's teacher.  I think I forgot to take a picture of the fox hat, so I may not be able to show that.  It really came out nice, so I wish I could show it.  However, it is in Maine, and I am not.

Zoe wearing her bunny hat as she checks out her other things from Grandma.

Joey in his monkey hat while he plays with other things from Grandma.

Isamu thinks his elephant hat is awesome.

Little froggy Ezra checks out other things with his mom.

Lucy makes a pretty cute little koala.

This little cat (Portia) and mouse (Dot) look like good friends.

This is the Iron Man costume I made for Ellis for Halloween.  He makes a powerful Iron Man.

Ellen modeling her Christmas sweater.

"Meow," says kitty Portia.

Sweater for Mrs. Bettencourt, Joey's teacher.

As I figured, I did forget to take a picture of the fox hat.  I also did not get pictures of all the ladies wearing their sweaters.  I should have because they all put them on to show me, but I wasn't thinking at the time.  I didn't get a picture of Ellis wearing his dog hat, but it was cute.  Jackson wouldn't let me get a front shot of his cow hat, so I didn't show it, either.  I already blogged a picture of Lexi wearing her chicken hat when I thought it was going to be for Portia.  It ended up fitting Lexi better, so I gave it to her instead.  That concludes the hats.  I know that TW and Tony got good use out of their slippers this past week while Tony and I were in Maine visiting.  It was really cold in the house because all they have is one wood stove to heat the whole house and the water pipes are frozen for the base board heat.  Temperatures were anywhere from ten above to twenty-five below zero outside.  The house never got above sixty degrees, so it was nice to have something warm on the feet.  Both of them wore their slippers constantly in the house.