Christmas presents 2018

I was a little forgetful this year in picture taking.  I finished the Christmas presents way last summer sometime and just put them away until I needed them.  I forgot to take the pictures first, knowing that I would not need to post them until Christmas was over.  I ended up taking pictures of them after they opened them for Christmas this year.  Makes it a little more fun because now I have them wearing the present.  I don't have them all, though, because I didn't get pictures of my oldest son's family.  They are basically just the same as the ones that I will show.  All the girls and the ladies got socks.  The boys and men got hats.

Here are all my sweet little granddaughters wearing their socks with their legs all tangled up.
L. to R: Zoe (9), Dot (9), Mabel (17 mo.), Lucy (8), Lexi (8), and Annie (4) Missing my 7 year-old Portia and Nnenaya (14)

A sideways look at the ladies socks. Missing Shana and my best friend Nancy.

Three of my grandsons in their hats.
 L. to R: Ezra (6), Jackson (8), and Joey (9). Missing Ellis (11), Dawud (16),
and an exchange student from Chili (not sure age)

Four of the men wearing their hats.  My oldest son is not in the picture with his hat.
It looks much like the two on the ends in this picture but with gray as the main color and
black as the alternate color.  My husband's hat is pushed way back so you can't really see what it looks like.
It is basically just a black hat with cuff much like the little boys' hats.

This was the first pair of the tipless finger
gloves with the mittens that I made
for kids.  Just found the picture.

This is a hat that I made for the festival
but had left over so I gave it to
Dawud for Christmas and gave the
one I made for him to the exchange
student, Matias, since I didn't know about
him when I made the other Christmas gifts.

This little fox hat was my final festival order that I needed to complete for Christmas.  A good friend of mine wanted me to make this for her son.  I finished this in just two days, a much easier project that the gloves.

Holiday Festival complete

The Holiday Festival is long over and I need to catch up on the last items I made and some things ordered from the festival that needed to be finished.

Some of the display for the festival

More of the animal toys for the festival

Center section of the toy display

This is the whole display at the festival

This is my second elephant pillow pet made for an order
from the festival

This is the pillow form of the elephant pillow pet

Also second rabbit pillow pet ordered from the
festival

Pillow form of the rabbit pillow pet

Just before Thanksgiving a lady called me that was a former customer.  She wanted me to make some capes for her granddaughters that I knitted hats for several years ago.  When she heard about the festival she became excited and wanted to know what I was making for it.  I told her that this year I was switching to making mainly toys and kid pillows.  I told her about a new thing I tried this year which I had just completed.  It is the tipless finger gloves with the mitten that goes over.  I made up my own pattern by looking at one for kids that I found in the street that some neighborhood kid had dropped when trick-or-treating.  I'm not sure if I have blogged it or not, but I do have pictures of the ones I made for her because after hearing about them she wanted me to make some for her.  She ordered twelve pair of adult gloves.  She sent the yarn and I had to begin right away to get them all done for her to pick up for Christmas.  She wanted to give them to the ladies in her doctor's office.  Not an easy task to accomplish but after 177 hours and knitting literally every spare moment I had in my day, usually starting between three and five in the morning and ending at about eleven or twelve at night, I finally had them all done.  They needed to be striped and I had just enough yarn to knit the twelve pairs without making any big mistakes that would require wasting any of the yarn.  Each skein was to make three pairs and she sent me eight skeins, two each of four colors.  I started with a three stripe pattern using two colors.  I made six pairs with this stripe pattern.  Then I switched to making a four stripe pattern from two colors.  I made four with this pattern.  I was running out of yarn and very worried that I would not have enough to make two more pair with the four stripe pattern with two colors so I made a new pattern.  It still consisted of four stripes, but each stripe was from one of the colors so that each glove had all four colors.  I had to make these gloves slightly smaller to be sure there would be enough yarn left.  I had to be sure that I used the same amount of yarn of each color so that I would have enough yarn of each color to finish three pairs from each color.  I must have done it pretty evenly because I managed to finish all the gloves and had probably about 24 inches of yarn left from each color.

This shows the four stripe on the left and the three stripe
on the right made from the purple and blue.

This is the three stripe on the left and the four on the right
from the yellow and purple

Three stripe on the left and four on the right with pink and blue.

This shows my fourth pair with four stripes and I made a big
mistake.  I had put the first glove aside when decorating for
Christmas.  I used the right color combination for the pink
and yellow for the the second glove of the pair, but I started
with the wrong color first so the color pattern was wrong. 
She loved this pair and said it was not a problem.  Good thing
because there was no taking it our once it was finished.

These are the extra two pairs with just the three stripes.

These are the two with the four colors.

All twelve pairs complete and ready on schedule.  I finished
on Dec. 15th and she picked them up on the 16th.

 Luckily she said I did not need to do the capes yet because I told her that I needed a little break from knitting.  I will get to them soon after the new year, but that was an intense knitting order and I was so tired.  It took an average of fourteen hours to make just one pair.  They were made with four needles and had no seams at all.  It was so difficult to go around any of the fingers, but around the pinkie finger was almost impossible.  My needles kept getting tangled up and sometimes twisted so I would need to take them out and do them over.  It was also a little tricky where the mitten started.  The first pair took about twenty-two hours to do because I needed to learn the pattern and I kept making mistakes and needing to take sections out.  After about the fourth pair, I no longer needed to look at the pattern except for the point where I had to split for the mitten. By the time I got to about the eighth pair, I didn't even need to look anymore.  I was on a roll,  Another thing that I didn't mention but you can see in the picture, where the thumb changes color for the tip, it also has an opening so that the thumb tip can open just like the fingers when the mitten is flipped back.  That was a little tricky also.

Early Festival Order Filled

A past customer of mine for the Holiday Festival gave me an early order.  I decided not to wait until the festival to fill the order.  I showed her some of the things I have finished for the festival and she liked a couple of things but wanted something different in that kind of item.  She has a friend who is going to have a little boy and the theme is going to be dinosaurs.  I had already made the stegosaurus which she liked but wanted a blanket with a dinosaur theme rather than the one I had made with crocodiles.  She also liked the pillow pets but wanted an elephant.  Here is her order.

Elephant pillow pet as a pillow

Elephant as a pet.  I just used the same basic pattern
for the pillow as I used for the other pillow pets but
I didn't have a head from the patterns I used for the
heads, so I used the pattern for my miniature elephant.
To make it the right size, I used a 1/4 - 1/2 inch graph.
It ended up being a perfect size.

This is the dinosaur quilt also showing
the knitted stegosaurus. I was lucky to
find some dinosaur print fleece to match the
green I had used for the spines on the
stegosaurus. The back is also fleece in the
light green like the dinosaurs in the print.
By using a slightly darker border ribbon it
makes a nice contrast to the front and back.

Toys Completed

I've finished all the toys, pillows, quilts, backpacks, and Christmas things that I am going to use at the Holiday Festival. This year I decided to mainly do things for kids.  I wanted to have different stuff this year so that is why I chose to do these items.  Here are the latest creations.

These child backpacks were totally new this
year. I used a simple drawstring type backpack
pattern and added the toys from another toy
pattern. I love the way they turned out.

This is the older child version of the backpack

Next are the latest of my toys sewn on the machine.  These adorable animals have huge heads and little bodies.  To keep them standing, I put a rice pack in the bottoms to weight them down and keep them upright.

The horse from the front looks more like rodent but cute.

Horse from the side.

Giraffe from the front.

Giraffe from the side.

Unicorn from the front.

Unicorn from the side. This shows the little wings in the
back and the tiny horn beneath the mane.

Zebra from the front.

Zebra from the side.

Another new project this year is the neck pillow pets.  I have had this pattern for several years but never really used it.  I once used it but changed it a bit and made it into just a stuffed monkey for my first grandson.  This time I made the neck pillows.  I used the very same colors that showed on the pattern front.

The cat.

Love the lion.

The monkey is my granddaughters favorite. She wants
it if it doesn't sell.

The dog.

I also made a large pillow and two baby blankets with accompanying toys.

This is my big dolphin pillow.

Girl's blanket with the little knitted bunny to
go with it. The bunny is made with the super
soft yarn.

The boy's blanket. I had two complete crocodiles
from the fleece back print that I cut out
and sewed together and then stuffed it to make
a little toy croc to go with the blanket.

Next are the rest of the machine sewn toys.  Most are the miniature toys that are so difficult to make because they are so small for sewing the seams.

These are the miniatures. The bear, duck, cow, elephant, cat, and dog in the back and the purple fish with silvery fins in front.

These are the simple animals with no detailed
parts to be sewn in like with the miniatures.

Perhaps the ugliest little bear. I loved the material
I used, but it didn't look as good as I thought
it would when finished. I had to glue the nose
and belly and it didn't look good so I added a
ribbon to spice it up a bit.

The rest of my projects are of a mixed bag so I will just finish with all of them here.

I just made two new tree ornaments this year out of plastic canvas because I had some left over from last year.

This Santa door hanger is very large and
was made with four connecting parts. It
took a long time to make but it looks nice.

This is my chef plastic canvas wall hanging.
The center of his face does not show up as
much as it shows in photo but I had to overlap
two pieces for the head so it is thicker there and
shows here. It is also made of  six parts but is
not as large as the Santa.

Granddaughter's ladybug costume. Just made a
backpack style shell.

Front of ladybug. I just bought a nice hooded
pants suit for the body and found a ladybug
kit for the antenna which also had gloves
and a chocker necklace.

The one knit thing I have made like before.
This is my favorite hat and I make it each year.
It sells well. I am now back to knitting more
things like for past years.

Grandson's birthday cake. Pretty simple to make cause he
just wanted it to be a football. He turned eleven.