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.