{made} — vanilla berry baby hat.
Over the holiday weekend we attended a fun baby shower for our friend who is expecting a little girl in a few months. I wanted to make something cute with only a touch of girly, I like to keep things more simple. I decided on crocheting up a hat, I know LA is warm and babies don’t need hats as much, but this pattern worked well I thought because it was pretty open and airy. I used a cotton blend yarn so that too will help keep her cool.
I modified the pattern a tad, I eliminated the few rows of single crochet around the brim, just left the shell edging because I thought it was daintier for a little girl. Also, did the last two rows in a contrasting rose color.
Congratulations Kelli and Mike!
The pattern is available for free on ravelry.
{made} — princess in pink set
A fun baby set I made for a friend who is expecting a little girl. This is a super cute pattern and works up fast. The pictures provided in the pattern really did help figure some of the steps out. Thank you for including those. This bootee pattern is available for free on ravelry and can be found here. Also crocheted up a pretty little flower headband to match using this pattern.
{made} — for the horde! baby bib
Our friends are expecting a little girl so I wanted to make them something special. They are nerds like us and play World of Warcraft so this cute red bib will start the baby off right on the horde side :)
The pattern was super easy to follow and can be found online for free here.
{made} — something manly.
My dear cousin just had her third child and first son this past November. To welcome Henry, I made a cozy blanket to keep him toasty warm during the cold Michigan winter. It needed to be manly enough to compete with all his sisters stuff, but still have a baby touch… this is what I came up with…
I modified this pattern I found from purlbee, instead of just using a garter stitch, I did a simple slip stitch pattern that is a multiple of 4 sts plus 3.
Casted on 143.
R1(RS) K1, *sl1, k3*;rep from*, end sl 1, k1.
R2 Purl.
Rep rows 1 and 2.
32 rows of grey on both ends and one in the center. 16 row stripes in between.
Really wish I would have built in the border because the blanket really curls, but hindsight is always 20/20. I added a crochet border and it works to finish it off nicely. I picked up every stitch on both ends and on the sides I picked up the slipped stitches, which is basically every other stitch. The sides lay pretty flat and the ends are a little more ruffled to give it some character. The edging is #41 in the book: Around the Corner Crochet Borders. I used a G hook for the base round and round 1, then a E hook for round 3 and 4. I eliminated round 5, just too “girly” for this manly blanket :)
{made} — petal baby bibs.
So many friends and family having little ones this year! I’ve been busy making lots of baby related things, here are two knitted petal bibs that I made in a light sky blue and grass green.
Learned a lot from this little bib pattern, was the first time I’ve done short rows with wrapping stitches, also making an I-cord. So, it was a great learning experience and it ended up turning out quite cute. I did pick up the tails of all the ends and knitted them in with the working yarn for a few stitches, even when joining the petals together, this made for hardly no ends to weave in which was wonderful. This is a great fast pattern when you don’t have a lot of time or if you have a lot of baby gifts to do…
The pattern is from the book: One Skein by Leigh Radford. {photography: Jill Cannon}
{made} — watermelon baby mary-jane’s
Whipped up another cute pair of these, I’m so in love with them.
The pattern, Baby Mary Jane Skimmers, is not free but available to purchase at HookCandy. There are a few options on her site because there are multiple sizes from baby all the way up to adult.
This time around they went a lot faster. I did end up having to make three of them due to the fact that I made one really loose (must have been less tense for that one), so they didn’t match size wise. But even with the extra one made, it only took a few hours to make them.
{photography: Jill Cannon}
made — peanut the elephant
It’s pretty crazy how many people I know right now that are pregnant, over 13… so that means you’ll be seeing quite a few baby related things on my blog in the months ahead.
This little guy was a challenge, but so worth it in the end.
I’m sad to see that the author took this pattern down off of Ravelry, I’m glad I had grabbed it before she did. I understand her reasoning, but really it wasn’t a bad pattern I think it just needed a little more detail to guide the knitter through it better.
First off, I really didn’t grasp from the pictures that it was so small! My final elephant is only 3 inches tall and 3 inches wide (by the ear span). It’s amazing how much time small projects take!
The following are the modifications I made to the pattern if you were one of the lucky ones to have saved it before it was taken down.
The only thing I really had an issue with was figuring out how to do the increase rows. The M1’s fell in between the dpn’s and doing them the right way kept messing them up, being way too lose or they would fall off the needles. So I added a row of just knitting before the first row in the pattern (on the head and body) so I had some normal stitches to work with. Then, I would use all four dpn’s for the project except when I did the M1’s in between the dpn’s… I would just use three needles. This made them much tighter and they looked better.
The only other change I made was adding one row of knitting to the top two legs and two rows to the bottom two legs. I liked the bottom two a little longer to balance out the larger ears on top.
I also used a size D hook for the ear border instead of the B hook suggested, it was the smallest size I had and I don’t think it made a huge difference.
It really is a cute pattern, I’d love to see a larger version!
{photography: Jill Cannon}
Made - knitted baby bootees.
Original pattern (free)
One of my good friends is expecting their baby right around Christmas time this year and I wanted to make a little something for the baby. I haven’t done too much baby knitting, but thought how hard could two little baby bootees be? Well, I learned that what I thought was going to be an afternoon project took up a week of re-knitting and cyphering.
It took a little time to get these cute little baby bootees completed, ran into quite a few snags but eventually figured it out. I learned, though, that I wasn’t the only one that had issues with this pattern, I found a whole tutorial/blog post dedicated to figuring it out.
I did make an alteration to the pattern for them to work out right. For each of the straps I did 3 rows of knitting instead of the 2 listed on the pattern (rows 26-27 on the right and left straps) and then binded off. That way the ends fell into the right places – you needed two yarn ends on the end of each strap to do the button hole loops. Also, this way left a tail right at the joint where the strap disconnects from the main body part and I used this tail to reinforce that joint because no matter how hard I tried it was a bit loose.
I used size 2 needles instead of the 1.5 she called for because wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be too small -– I’ve had issues with making baby stuff too small in the past :)
Most experienced knitters probably know how to do the double tail cast on and the button loops, but I had no clue and found that these two sites really helped me figure it out:
Hope this helps if you venture to make these cute little bootees!
Happy Knitting!
{Photography: Jill Cannon}
