#adventures with knitting

[vashti-lives]

Yarn crimes.

Never forget to zip up your project bag kids.

[delicourse]

end of spring🌸🧶🌱🧵

[jaubaius]

Welcome to 2023 by Frog and Toad

Source

[suzuberto]

You got booped by Panini the wanderer frog

He likes you very much and wishes you good booping day

(or only day if you aren't into booping)

He also documented it on his little journal

Image ID

A photo of a green and white belly hand knitted frog wearing a lavender hat and yellow hoodie carrying a little crossbody bag and booping to the camera (frog + clothes are bought but handmade from local ladies, the bag is made by me)

The same frog as before but with an upper photo. He's holding a pencil on his left hand and a journal over his little legs that has a frog hand with "1 apr 2024" and "boop" written on the left page and a "today i booped strangers on tumblr ♡" with a little self portrait below on the right page. At his left side there is a pen holder with other pens and a calendar, and oh his right a plate with cookies and an empty mini cup, he already got his morning tea!

(frog + clothes are bought but handmade from local ladies, the bag + journal is made by me, the other thingies are from sylvanian families sets)

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

second bout of blocking, which means I got to measure it and it's at 170 cm! longer than ME!

[chicorystreetcoffee]

finished knitting a whole pullover sweater, looked at the flaws and said, "now that i've done it once, i can do it better the second time around" and then i frogged the sweater all the way up to the collar.

i think. maybe if i look at the next four years as "i've done it once, i can do it better the second time around" maybe my heart wont sink any lower than it already has

[truthandshadow]

Doing fibre arts in public is always very funny because no one except other fibre artists ever has any clue what I’m doing.  Like, I thought it was common knowledge what knitting and crocheting looks like?  But people keep asking me if I’m knitting or crocheting when I’m doing cross stitch or tatting.  I don’t expect anyone to know what tatting is or looks like but I did expect them to know it’s not knitting.

[cutearose]

froggy socks :)

[candycatstuffs]

Ford: makes fun of Stan for partaking in old man activities

Also Ford: Partakes in the exact same old man activities

If its not clear, in the first one stan is knitting mabel a sweater and in the second one ford is repairing stans beanie :]

[satans-knitwear]

Knitted dress with a thigh slit 😍✨

(she is both cosy and delicious)

Treat me ~ Tip Me ~ More of me

[hotcinnamonsunset]

x’s and o’s and hearts all around💕

[vashti-lives]

The making of a woolfellow

Last weekend I decided I would loose my mind if I didn’t make a quick easy project I could hug when I was done. I realized a pattern I was already comfortable with had a very familiar silhouette and couldn’t resist taking some inspiration from @sleepnoises clayfellows!

The base of this guy is literally just Purl SoHo’s Big Snowy Owl as written. As long as you are comfortable knitting small tubes either via magic loop or with double pointer needles this is a super super easy project. I used magic loop for the base, ears, and eye plate because when I young poor beginning knitter I absolutely could not justify buying a bunch of double pointed needles when my interchangeable circular set could also make small tubes, and now I’m very proficient at magic loop and and cannot be bothered to get good at DPNs. But either will work.

I knit as directed until I hit the point in the pattern directions where it tells you to stuff the body at which point I started making minor adjustments for the eventual wool fellow. I added a poly batting liner at the same time the instructions tell you to stuff the body. I always do this in plush toys knit with big yarn because there’s not really a way of knitting big yarn tight enough that stuffing won’t fall out, but in this case it’s also extremely necessary because it gives an extra anchor when you’re sewing in the buttons.

Once I had lined it and mostly stuffed it I took a break from the main project and knit and embroidered one half of the faceplate, for measurement reasons. I’ll put the directions for how I made the faceplate below, for now it just matters that you know that I did this because I wanted to know how big it was so I would be able to place the buttons. For the record my plate was… roughly 8 inches. I cared enough to check but tbh by this point in the project the election was over and my willingness to be precise was basically zero. As you will see. This was also when I rummaged through my button collection and found buttons small enough to be pressed through the plate fabric but big enough they wouldn’t immediately fall back through. Probably 7/8 of an inch??? Idk. Might have been better off with slightly bigger buttons. More on that later.

I didn’t do a great job sewing the buttons on symmetrically because I figured it didn’t really matter and technically this is true but also it would be easier to put the plate on nicely if the buttons were symmetrical.

A naked woolfellow!! Avert your eyes!!!!!

To work out where to put the buttons count ten stitches, put a removable marker, count 8, removable marker, count ten and put a removable marker. Basically you want the buttons (and eventually the face) to be in between one of the 8 stitch sections because the ten stitch sections become the ears/horns.

I pulled random cheap buttons from my stash and sewed them on with a thread shank, but using buttons that have an existing shank would be easier.

As a completionist and because when I finished knitting the body I wanted to be basically done I also knit and embroidered the second plate here and sewed them together using a lazy faux mattress stitch/ladder stitch. Once that was done I went back to the directions and finished the head/ears as written!!

The faceplate is knit almost identically to the bottom of the body save for the fact that there’s no need to purl. I also swapped out kfb for m1L (save the first row) for texture reasons but you could kfb the whole time if you wanted.

This is what I did but depending on your gage and how big your guy is you may want to adjust.

Faceplate: make two

Cast on 8 stitches and join in the round

Kbf across (16 stitches)

Knit

K2 m1L across (24 stitches

Knit

K3 m1L across (32 stitches)

Knit

K4 m1L across (40 stitches)

Knit

K5 m1L across (48 stitches)

Knit

Cast off

Close up hole in middle and embroider the eyes.

As far as embroidering the eyes goes my only advice is to take these three phrases and accept them into your heart:

It's ~rustic~

It's organic

It's a design choice

Some final thoughts:

On the base pattern:

I will note for the record if I was going to redo this— and I will almost certainly be making a second one— I would skip the diamond texture, particularly on this multi colored yarn. It looks fine on the finished guy but for the amount of extra work and wrist strain I don’t think it’s really worth the effort, at this in this context. YMMV and if you’re knitting in a solid color you might weigh things differently but it’s worth noting Purl SoHo’s own variations on this pattern— a bunny and pig— do not include any kind of texture or pattern.

On the button mechanism:

About the buttons and the double sided eye plate-- I do not know that this is the best way to accomplish this. It's the best I could manage while having an nervous breakdown but I suspect someone clever could think of something better. They are frankly fiddly and even with the batting they are not the most stable. I definitely wouldn't give it to a child like this, even if they're too old for the buttons to be a choking hazard, the whole thing is too delicate.

It would definitely be more functional for hardcore cuddling and squishing if you just sewed it on and didn't worry about it being reversible. I may eventually do this. The buttons might also be more stable if you lined it in a knit fabric instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the batting. I think it would be a good use for a worn out t-shirt.

On yarn and yardage:

Yardage first-- the pattern says the main body uses 180ish yards, but I definitely used at least 200, and maybe a little more. The eye plates also probably took 40 yards total? I'm not sure I didn't pay that close of attention. It was about one ball of Valley Yarns Valley Superwash Bulky. This also doesn't include the Hometown USA I embroidered the eye with. I have absolutely no clue there. 10 yard? 15?

For the curious I knit this out of Malabrigo Rasta which is. An insane choice for this project. BUT a few years ago I splurged and bought 5 skeins in two colors from my local yarn shop because it was shutting down and I wanted to help the owner recoup what she could. Also it was my birthday. I then very promptly ruined all this yarn by trying to wind it with my yarn cake winder and over spinning it. It didn't take me long to realize the gage was not going to be fully consistent with this yarn AND parts of it had way too much energy now and were going to create fabric that never really laid right. I cried. This was like, $140+ worth of yarn. It got stuck in a bag and shoved in the back of my closet in the hopes that I would forget my crimes.

When I was pondering what to knit last week the yarn psychically contacted me and told me it was ready to be a woolfellow. Or maybe I just saw the pattern and remembered it. Who can say. In theory the pattern should take 180 yards of wool, which is just shy of how much I had in this color, out of caution and in the hopes that I would have enough leftover to attempt arms I knit the bottom in scraps of gray yarn leftover from a previous project. I kind of thought the gray wouldn't show but TBH I'm not mad it does, it ends up looking like the bottom is unglazed which is cute. I like it so much that I embroidered my eye on the purl side to match it. Anyway-- as turned out knitting the bottom out of gray was a good choice because I used up almost all the Rasta as it is, I have maybe 1-2 grams left. It's probably because I didn't gage swatch, but it might also be because over-spinning the yarn did weird things to it.

It it is sad the original cropped jacket was not to be but I would absolutely never have bought this yarn to make a stuffed animal and it is so nice. I love it so much. I am absolutely turning the second color I bought into a second guy. It's all got a very pollyana life lesson feel. Sigh.

If you're wondering this guy's colorway is Solis (the other yarn I have is in Azul Profundo, which will also be very nice.) To me the nearly 60 dollars I spent on this yarn is so so much money but I will say that if you want yarn that is a) a natural fiber b) very very very soft and c) hand dyed Malabrigo Rasta is about as cheap as you'll find and it is absolutely beautiful in finished products. You miiight want to get 3 skeins just to be safe.

That said I have absolutely knit this pattern in much cheaper yarns and also gotten nice results. If you're ok working with acrylic yarns I knit it in Hometown USA to make a Totoro-- with some minor alterations-- and it was very cute. I also used K+C Luxe Alpaca Solid from Joann (technically it was under the buttercream line at the time, but it's the same yarn) to knit the bunny version of this pattern. There's also plenty of cheaper wool yarns online that are very nice.

If anyone other than me ever makes a woolfellow PLEASE tag me!!!

[justpeachyknits]

It’s done!!! Behold my bubbline sweater 🍬🦇

Top-down Aran construction, embarrassingly cheap yarn, and my new favorite thing

Bonus several more goofy pics:

[jayjournaling]

finn the human’s hat - knit balaclava pattern from made in the moment (ears freehand)

[missdeepdish]

Mr Crawling is cozy

He got a little cold after our first adventure, so I knitted him a little scarf.

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

scarf update: officially longer than my dining table and the end is in sight! By which I mean I still have a good 30cm (possibly more) to go which will take me about 2 or 3 more weeks lmao