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.