Taking a Tiny First Step

Another interest in my life aside from knitting, crocheting, handcrafting, etc., is going to auctions and yardsales. This has complicated my life a bit, as I have years of aquisitions in storage which are collecting dust and costing storage fees.  Recently I leased a booth at  The Scranberry Coop , a cooperative for dealers in Andover, NJ. Wednesdays are my day to go refill the blank spaces in my booth; to replace the sold items with new offerings. It is always a little scarey to do this as I am never sure how much will have been sold. I want there to be a lot of blank spaces to fill in, of course.


I had my selections all tagged and packaged to take to the Scranberry Coop (not a typo, really!) But as I was looking at the newly completed pink alpaca baby outfit somthing came over me; a little voice in my head started nagging at me to take the plunge, put my toe in the water, etc., etc., and package this outfit and put it up for sale.


I had one immediate problem; no hangar to put the sweater on to hang from the side of my booth.  Who has baby hangars if they don't have babies in their househould? Well, I for one, do not. But necessity being the mother and all that, I found a plastic hangar that came with a recently purchased blouse and which I was going to recycle, and snapped off the ends to make it small enough for the sweater. Not very attractive, to be sure. So I padded the hangar with polysester stuffing and crocheted around the stuffing and the hangar to prevent pulls (and to look less like a snapped off hangar....).


I decided I needed more than the normal white price tag, too. So I created a tag using the bird, the needle and the yarn on the pages of my Weebly blog. It was a quickie tag, but I intend to revamp it and include the addresses of my knitting blogs. It seems like a cool thing to do.


My last addition to the packaging is a picture of my friend, Lilley, modeling the outfit. I surmise the size is approximately for a six month old baby but I thought having a picture showing Lilley wearing the sweater and hat (not the booties, alas. Her feet are not baby proportioned ) would help indicate the size more clearly.


I pinned the hat and booties to the sweater , enclosed the whole shebang in a clear plastic bag, added the various tags on to the hangar with ribbon and voila... ready to go. I thought it looked professional enough in a hand-crafted kind of way to display for sale in my booth.   Now to see if it sells.. Keep your fingers crossed, please.

A Pink Sweater with Booties.

I wrote last of a baby outfit I have completed for a child soon to be born in my extended family. The pattern that I followed was called  The Five Hour Sweter by Beverly A. Qualheim, Jennifer Cox, Beth Koskie. (I have since seen that this pattern, with variations, has been floating around the net for years.) Be that as it may, I came across a pattern for bootieshttp://suzies-yarnie-stuff.blogspot.com/2011/06/5-hour-matching-booties.html to match this sweater. The pattern advised the booties were knitted in the round. I tried to make the booties on the size 6 circular needles that I have, but that proved very cumbersome (read "impossible for me to do") because the flexible strand between the needles was very long. I checked for a smaller length on size 6 needles and found some where the overall length was 9"; 2" for each of the needle and 5" for the flexible strand.

The first pair of booties I made were for the baby set for the soon to be here child of my nephew by marriage. The yarn was baby yarn and the needle worked well.

I had some pink alpaca yarn which I decided to make into another Five Hour Sweater. This is not specifically for any baby, but to have on hand in case. Here it is being modeled by Li'l SisterLilley.

The alpaca yarn I used for this set is heavier than the yarn I used for Casey's baby's sweater set. It worked well and the sweater and beanie  turned out  just fine. When I made the booties with the alpaca yarn I discovered how difficult it is to work with such a tiny needle on thicker wool. 

Pushing the needle through the yarn was rough on my fingertips I tell you! However, I learned an important lesson; I will need a larger flexible strand to do thicker wool. I hope there is a circular needle out there that has a larger span than 5 inches and a smaller one than 16 inches. I am on the hunt....

A New Baby Outfit

A New Baby Outfit

My husband comes from an even larger family than I do. His siblings are having grandchildren now, as opposed to my family where the siblings are having great grandchildren.  His youngest nephew will be having a baby in October.  I know I am a little ahead of myself, but that is a rare occurrence for me; I generally wait until the last minute to do everything. When you knit or crochet as slowly as I do, though, last minute is not an option.  I would like to thank Jennifer Cox, Beth Koskie and Beverly A. Qualheim at  http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/kp3.html  for the patterns. I would also like to thank my sister Barbara for the yarn;0)

 I have a wonderful nephew-in-law, the son-in-law of the very same Barbara who gave me the wool.  He and I went flea marketing this past Sunday. I wanted a doll who might be a model for the baby sweaters I have been and will be making in the future. I came across this cutie, a Playskool doll name L'il Sister.  She is a little too chubby to be a bootie model and the sweater has to stretch to get over her wrists, so I will be on the lookout for a more life-sized model.  But she is a sweet and having her model the outfit at least gives an indication of the size.  

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Little Boy Blue Revisited

Our family is expanding unto the fourth generation. The newest addition will be born this summer. He will be my Great Great Nephew. On the shower invitation was a request to replace the normal baby shower card with a book. The family of the soon-to-be GGN are really appreciative of hand made/home made presents which fit nicely into my plans since I was in the process of  knitting a blue baby outfit (sweater, soaker and booties).  I decided to press my luck and create a 'book'. I thought of  making the book out of linen and make t-shirt transfers and press them on the cloth. However, I couldn't find linen close to home. There might have been some at Joann Fabrics, but Joann Fabrics was in  the middle of moving from one location to another and I didn't feel courageous enough to face the commotion of the move.  I rethought the process and decided to use a photo album and turn it into a book. To coordinate the book and the outfit I determined that an expanded edition of Little Boy Blue would be appropriate.

I had an enjoyable time making both the outfit and the book. I hope my GGN and his family enjoy them as well.

Bride and Groom Dolls

        

I am very new to blogging  and recently new, again, to knitting and crocheting, since I hadn't done either in twenty years.  I took up hook and needle this time  in October of 2012 in order to make nice Christmas gifts that didn't cost $20.00 a pop, as I had over 40 gifts to give. It was down to the wire on Christmas Eve day before all gifts were completed but I felt like Super Knitter when everything was wrapped and ready.
It felt very strange not to have a crochet hook or a pair of knitting needles in my hand when the new year began, so I kept on, looking for any reason to browse through wool stores and web sites with yarn for sale. I made a baby blanket and sweater for a friend who had just had a child,  a few hats and scarves just in case...
Then I got an invitation to the bridal shower of my niece. What can you possibly knit or crochet for a bridal shower? I remembered that, back in the day (way back in the day, actually )  someone would dress plastic dolls to resemble the  bridal party dresses and suits and they would be attached to the cars in the bridal party.  Knowing nothing of colors or styles for the BP *, I thought further and decided to knit/crochet just the  bride and groom.  I doubt they will be placed on the hood of the bridal limo, but I am hoping they will be a keepsake that is precious to the bride-to-be.
When I decided to try my hand at creating the bridal pair, I looked on the net for patterns. I found a blog that featured a Dr. Who David Tennent doll, including the jacket, at  http://snuffykin.livejournal.com/39857.html . It was great fun to do and turned out well, but when I started the bride I used a different pattern, Lovely Lucy, from Red Heart, http://www.redheart.com/free-patterns/lovely-lucy-doll and the sizes were incompatable.  I am an avid Dr. Who fan, and David Tennant  is one of my favs, but he just isn't cut out for a groom, I guess.  So I redid the groom, clothes and all.
The clothes were a combination of patterns, resized to fit the completed dolls, and I used the following patterns as guides:
Groom
Groom's trousers - http://bitstobuy.blogspot.com/2013/01/another-free-knitting-pattern-in-dolls.html   Groom's jacket - which I modified a great deal, not using the knit/purl borders on the pattern, which made it look too much likea sweater and not a jacket  http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/L10640.html?noImages .  For the groom's vest I used the top that was included in the lovely lucy doll patterns noted above.
Bride
The bridal dress was mostly my own in-my-head pattern. I did use the dress pattern in the L10640 Lion Brand pattern as a guide,  making it on straight needles, not ciruclar, and sewing the whole outfit together  once the top and bottom were done, but I used a pattern of stitches called the granite relief stitch, found at http://www.jfcampbell.us/anne/patterns.htm .
Shoes
The shoes, which probably could have been crocheted but aren't, are made from craft foam sheets,  such as the kind found online at http://www.craftkitsandsupplies.com/foam-crafts-c-5.html or a craft store; Michaels, AC Moore , Walmart or even Joann Fabrics. I measured the feet on the dolls and used the pattern below to create the shoes.
Knitting blogs, crocheting blogs, any blog from a crafty, sharing person, are a wonderful source of helpful hints, information  and inspiration. I hope I will become one of those bloggers. 
There are many free patterns to choose from on the internet. A few sites I have found are:
http://www.patonsyarns.com/pattern.php?NEW_PATTERNS=1
http://www.knittingpatterncentral.com/#gsc.tab=0
http://www.yarn.com/webs-knitting-free-pattern/
http://www.lionbrand.com/freePatterns.html
http://www.redheart.com/free-patterns
The Paton site, the Lion Brand , Red Heart and the yarn.com site also have yarn and patterns for sale. They are four  of my favorite window shopping sites for yarn. 
 *Bridal Party

Shoe Directions

Another view of the dolls