Some family news

Wow, it's amazing time here in our little family! My parents came all the way from Latvia to meet Little Man. My mum was here when he was born and she saw him in his very first days - a tiny little creature with big blue eyes (well, not so tiny - 3.920kg, but small anyway) and now he is 10.24kg and 76cm long and totally not tiny anymore! And my dad haven't seen him at all! Thanks to Skype they both saw him quite often, but it's not the same thing. At least he knew their voices and faces, so there was no fear when he finally saw them both. Was a bit confused with his granddad in the beginning, but recognized grandma immediatelly. That's what the mighty Internet does!
They arrived yesturday night and today was a day of family fun, new toys and gifts for Little Man. And for me too, of course. Now for two weeks my mum and dad are here with us and it means a bit more spare time for me. At least I hope so :)

And the last news - LITTLE MAN STARTED CRAWLING YESTURDAY MORNING!!! Hurray! I'm sooooooooooo proud of him!

Every baby needs a teddy

Probably all the babies have their own teddy bears. And not only babies. I was collecting teddy bears myself a couple of years ago. My Little Man has his own teddy too. Actually this is the first toy he had, as it was given to me by my sister when she came to our wedding and brought that teddy all the way down from Denmark. Little Man was still inside me and had just passed his 20 week scan. after his birth my sister came to see him and started playing with him showing him the teddy bear and after she left I continued to do that - showing him the teddy and telling stories about his. So soom Little Man understood that teddy is his friend and he bacame a favourite toy.

That is why I decided that my little nephew needs to have his own teddy too. Little Man's teddy bear was my inspiration, but the teddy I made was crocheted from lovely soft cotton. This is another June project. Took me three days to make and a month to post about it.



Here he is sitting on my sofa right before I gave it to little baby Leon. He is not too small - just the right size for a baby's little hands. Compare him with my hand on the next picture :)



And here is the teddy and his prototype - our beloved Danish teddy bear.



My husband said this teddy looks like a little bee. So may be I'll make the next one with a body of black and yellow stripes so he really would look like a bee. A bee bear. Sounds good :)

Father's day 2012

On the 17th of June we had Father's Day here in UK. For my husband it was the first Father's Day in his life so I really wanted to make it special. And it is allways more difficult to make a gift for a man, they usually like something usefull, not just something pretty like we, women, do. So it was a challenge untill he mentioned that he really would like a hat. And not just any hat, but an orange hat with a ram scull. I sad that I'll try but can't promise and of couse decided to definetly make him one.
So I want to the internet and spent a day trying to find a knitting pattern for a ram scull. No results. Then I tried to find a cross stitch pattern to adapt it. No result either. And after all I had to make one myself. It was the first time I did something like that and here is what I ended with:

I made this apliqued T-shirt and a vest for our Little Man too, so everyone would know who they both are - dad and son :)
And I was really happy watching how proudlu my husband was wearing both the hat and his new T-shirt.
And I really like this picture. Aren't they just lovely together?

A big summer tote I designed for a wool shop.

June was a really busy month for me. I've done so much stuff that had no time to write any posts about it. But it is just wrong to neglect my own blog for the whole month! So now I'm back with some pictures and stories about my June.
One of the things I made in June was a big summer tote. Actually I was asked to design one for "Knitters World Scarborough" (it's our local wool shop), so I had to make it and make the pattern of what I did. And here is the result:



And here is me with the tote full of apples in one of the bright sunny days after I finished it. Well, the face expression could have been better, but the sun was shining right into my eyes.



I've used 100% mercherised cotton, a total of 150g, and a crochet hook Nr.3 (yes, my favourite one:)) and the pattern is now available at "Knitters World Scarborough". They are working on their web page so hopefully it will soon be available on-line too.

This makes me proud of myself and I kind of feel like a designer. And I must admit that this is a cool feeling :)

Cussion for grandma

My grandma had her birthday on the 5th of July and I made her a present. So here is a little story about all of that.
My grandma is a person who teached me to knit back in my childhood. She was doing a lot of sewing, knitting and embroidery and even now she still is making cross-stitch, despite her age, pains in her neck and bad eyesight.
As I remember, she allways used to have some handmade cussions on her sofa in the living room and I thought that she would love to have another one made by me. So I searched in the Internet and found a project I liked:

http://www.crochet-world.com/printer.php?mode=article&article_id=1182

So we ( me and My Little Man) went to the wool shop to pick up some yarn for the project. I decided to let him pick the colours for his grandgrandma. And all the colours he was choosing were pink or a mix of pink with something else. And it wasn't some dusty pink or purple pink, noooo it was really bright pink, pinky pink, I would say. In the end we agreed to take a colour changing yarn, that had pink in it, but some other colours too.
In the process of crocheting I discovered that in DK that I was using the cussion would be too small, so I had to make 5x5, not 4x4 squares as in the original pattern. I also changed the back and just made it plain white with treble crochets.
Then I had to soak all the squares in the water, pin them to a water resistant surface and let them dry naturally.



Tons of pins and an hour later it looked like this:







It was actually a good thing to do so the squares would really look like squares. Then I joined them together using this method from lovely Lucy from Attic24, added the back part and inserted a cussion inside.

The most stupid thig is - I forgot to take a picture of the finished cussion and a birthday card I made. But I'm really glad my grandma really liked this cussion :)

About the pattern - it's really easy and, even working slowly, you could finish this in a couple of days. But, if you are going to use double knit yarn like I did, I would advise to make it 5x5 squares, otherwise you'll end up with a really tiny cussion.