Mini guitar hero

When my friend Charli had a baby, I wanted to make her something suitable for her new little one. As she’s always been a keen singer and likes to play her acoustic guitar I thought I’d make a mini version so that she and her baby could play along together!

I couldn’t find a pattern so I just knitted two wide rectangles for the body and sewed them together in the shape of the body of the guitar. Then I made one long thin piece and folded it over to make the neck of the guitar, leaving a slightly longer bit at the front so I could sew it onto the body to look authentically like the fingerboard.

I appliqued on pieces of felt in the shape of the sound hole and the bit where the strings attach. For the pegs I knitted small squares, rolled them up and sewed them in place when I was making the neck. I made the strings by laying the purple wool in place and stitching it down with thin embroidery thread. I stuffed the whole lot with toy stuffing and included a rattle inside so little Samuel could really make music with his mummy!

Here he is chilling out after what appears to have been a particularly heavy session of rocking out!

Thank goodness for tea cosies

There’s nothing I like to knit more than a tea cosy. It’s becoming something of a joke amongst my friends, but I don’t care. It’s so satisfying knowing that when you give the gift of a tea cosy, you’re not only giving a beautiful object, but a highly practical item that means the receiver of the gift need never suffer cold tea again! I liked the pattern I used for my Grandma’s tea cosy last Christmas so much that I’ve since made two more in that style to ensure the toastyness of tea in the South East region would no longer be at risk.

One blue and white one as a wedding gift for Catherine and Will…

… and one red and white one for Mandy to match her checked table cloth.

Now I just need to get round to making one for me.

 

Monkeys spreading like rabbits!

Knitted garden monkeys are continuing to crop up around the country and reports are coming in that they appear to be developing super powers. Click here to read all about the latest sighting in Northampton.

Where will the next knitted garden monkey be spotted? Members of the public are warned to remain vigilant at all times.

Baby’s got a brand new bag

I was all ready to tackle my first knitted baby blanket, preparing for the months of work ahead, when I discovered a clever little idea on Ravelry – the baby blanket bag, sometimes also called a kicking bag or sleep sack. It’s like a blanket, but knitted in the round with some ribbing at the top so you can pop the baby inside and they can kick and kick and the blanket doesn’t get thrown off. I’d never heard of them before, but over 400 members who’d made this project on Ravelry can’t be wrong, so I set to work to make one for my friend Mandy who was expecting in the spring.

I used two free patterns from Ravelry as inspiration – Annika’s Kicking Bag for Babies and Robyn Devine’s Snug as a Bug Sleep Sack, but adapted it because I wanted to use baby cotton DK yarn instead of the sock yarn Annika used and the Aran weight Robyn used. Then I used this pattern conversion site to work out the right number of stitches to cast on.

I chose the colours to match Mandy and Danny’s safari theme for their nursery and keep the blanket bag non-gender specific as they didn’t know if they were going to have a girl or a boy. It was a real pleasure to knit, the only thing that was a bit tricky was the ‘step’ issue you get with changing colours when working in the round, so I might knit it flat and sew up the seams if I make another one.

Here’s the gorgeous Ruben giving the bag a good testing! He’d already grown lots more than this by the time I got to meet him in June and reports from his parents are that he’s only managed to kick the bag off once, so a thumbs up from them.