FO: Tower of Owls

I couldn't just give my nephew one owl for his birthday, of course, right? lol. He wanted owls of all colors. While that's a fine idea, I just didn't have enough time to make multiple large owls. Thankfully, Stacey Trock has designed a pattern for just such situations ...

I made 3 tiny owls instead! I used the Nel the Tiny Owl pattern from Fresh Stitches. I've had this pattern for over a year and I never made it up before! What a crime.

So, all the owls are made with Vanna's Choice for their white areas and the Mustard color for their beaks and feet. This purple guy has I Love This Yarn in Grape for the main color and Vanna's Choice in Wild Berry for the eye circles. I bought the wild berry yarn because I loved the color over a year ago (again - it's a theme) and I've never managed to use it until now. This was the first owl I made.

I made the next two owls simultaneously. The green body color is I Love This Yarn in Christmas Green and the eye circles are Red Heart Super Saver in Spring Green. It's funny - I have I Love This Yarn in several colors, but I very rarely use them on anything. After using the green and purple for these owls, I want to use it more often - this stuff is so soft! It was really nice to work with.

This final guy has a mystery acrylic yarn for the orange body (I got it at a thrift store - full skein, no label) and the yellow is Red Heart Super Saver (also thrifted, so I'm not sure of the color name). All of the owls have 12 mm eyes which I found surprising. I figured they would use smaller eyes since they are smaller owls, but the 12 mm really does look best.

The only difference between the larger owl and this little guy is that it doesn't have a tail. I kind of miss the tail! They're still cute without one, but I think I may come up with some little nub next time.

So there's the little owls. I had fun positioning them for these photos :) I love the top picture - I stuck a chopstick through them all to get them to balance on top of each other like that.

Just like with Red Bee, Luke loved his little owls. This picture was taken just as he opened the present. I couldn't resist posting this shot even though my sister was talking just behind him and was captured making a very unfortunate face (sorry, Kelly). So pardon my fancy editing, lol.

Isn't he just the cutest 3 year old?! He had a Curious George themed birthday party, and we had a banana hunt and pin the yellow hat on George and we made pinwheels. Good times were had by all.

So now Luke has a whole multi-colored owl family :) They all sleep in his bed with him every night, and I'm told that he enjoys arranging them just so. I'm really happy with how they all turned out, but I'm mostly just happy that Luke likes them so much. Yay for owls!

FO: A Rattling Shadow

I had a baby shower to attend a few weeks ago for the daughter of a coworker of mine. I've known their family since I was a kid, particularly their love of horses. They have a few horses of their own and used to let us come and ride them as kids. We always loved to visit :) One of their horses in particular is their oldest and he was the soon-to-be-mother's horse, so I knew exactly what would be the perfect gift to make: a small version of her horse, Shadow.

My youngest sister still visits their horses once a week, so I started by asking her for pictures of Shadow. He's 29 years old, and getting a bit gray. He's mostly all black but with some gray-ish splotches on his legs and face. I decided to use the Giddy-Up pattern by Monster's Toy Box since it's just so cute.

The yarn was a hard choice. I couldn't recreate those little spots in crochet like I could with knitting, but I didn't have time to knit the horse. I had popped in a local thrift store the previous week, and randomly bought a mystery ball of black-ish yarn not knowing what I would use it for (I mean, you can't pass up 50¢ yarn, right?!) and it just happened to be the PERFECT yarn for this project. It's mostly black with little flecks of white and gray throughout. I couldn't have found better if I trolled the craft stores (which I wasn't able to do). I used the whole 80 gram skein of this yarn, so talk about this being meant to be! The only draw back to this yarn is that it's definitely some type of wool, and it shed quite a lot. Oh well, it looks great so I had to use it.

I used come Vanna's Choice in black for the hooves and hair. I also had to use a tiny bit of the black on the base of the ears since I just barely ran out of the body yarn. The black hair covers this part of the ears anyway, so no one will know. I embroidered little nostrils with the black as well, but it's incredibly difficult to see, lol.

I put a rattle piece inside Shadow's belly, just since it's for a baby and I figured it would be extra cute that way. My only regret is that I didn't weight the hooves with something since he's a bit top heavy and wants to tip forward if you don't get him standing just right. Other than that, he came out super cute :) I even made baby safe eyes.

To add to the adorable-ness, I made up a little "Hello My Name Is.. " tag and printed the washing instructions on the back. I tied it on with pink yarn since it's for a baby girl (in case you couldn't tell, lol).

Here he is with the mommy to be! He was a big hit :) She even carried him around the party for a while afterward. My coworker even told me that my gift was the best (sshhh... don't tell the other party guests!) I love that it was a meaningful gift and they liked it so much. Now this new baby can have a Shadow of her own just like her mom did.

FO Friday: Meet The Wormsleys

Last Friday night I was struck with the desire to finally make something from one of my Japanese pattern books my sister sent me for Christmas. She had a few favorites from the book and these worms were at the top of the list, so I thought they would be a great place to start.

I actually tried to find this book on Ravelry with no luck. I've found a seller on Etsy who sells it though (check it out here). The book is almost entirely in Japanese (only random English words like "how to" and "artist" are there), but the crochet instructions are diagrams which are a kind of international crochet language, so once you know the symbols you can make up these cute animals :) Reading the pattern did take some getting used to, but the nice thing is that the book begins like most English craft books and shows detailed photos of how to do each stitch. So even if you couldn't find a key to the symbols online, you could still look at the beginning of the book and decipher what stitch it is (I had to do that with HDC for the hat). 

You are left on your own for the sizes of eyes you need and the felt accessories (unless you can read kanji). Luckily with the shape of the head on these guys, I was able to make the head pieces and then add the eyes after. I just held up a few different sizes and went with 9mm. I think they were pretty close to the ones used in the example from the book. Here is the inspiration photo:

Pretty cute, huh? I did add a great deal of accessories to these that I normally wouldn't do - all in an effort to look like the originals. First off, I added pipe cleaners into the body pieces to help the bodies want to curl - next time I think I will use something stronger like garden wire since the puny little pipe cleaners can't quite coax all that fiber fill into a good curl like the worms in the book. I embroidered the mouths, and added felt pieces for the bow-tie and the red band on the hat. I even gave Mrs. Wormsley a pearl necklace, lol. The hat is stuffed with poly-fill to help it stay round and stand up. 

They are even cute from the back :) My nephew really likes holding these and he smiles when I hand them over. He treats the bodies like handles, lol. 

In light of being my first ever amigurumi with a pearl necklace, I just had to name this little lady June - in homage of June Cleaver.

And of course June would not be complete without Ward :) Isn't he dapper? I just love the little bow-tie. It was such a simple addition, but it really did make all the difference in how cute he ended up. 

I'm really excited about the new possibilities of using Japanese patterns! After all, they are basically the home base of everything super cute - they did come up with amigurumi after all :) I can't wait to make more from my book! The world is now, literally, my oyster!

That's all I've finished this week. To see what other fantastic things have been made, go to Tami's Amis' Blog.