I ran the knitting through the washing machine on a 40 degree C wash with a bathmat for company to give it a good thumping, and it felted beautifully. I also threw in a small square of hand-knit 1x1 ribbing to use for the feet and ears like the Burra Bears. I spent some time online looking for a pattern which had joined on arms and legs to make it easier to match up the knitted patterning - I didn't want to deal with the challenge of jointed arms and legs. I eventually landed on this pattern from Canadian Living magazine from 2011 for Beau Bear which I enlarged from the PDF file to be a bit bigger, keeping in mind I only had a limited amount of felted fabric.
So today I spent several hours making this little guy, who stands 8 inches high. It was harder than you might think to try to match the patterning around his body and head, and he's not perfect. In particular his muzzle is a bit lop-sided which, together with his chunky head and smallish eyes, makes him look a bit more like a hamster to me than a teddy bear. He's mostly sewn on the machine with a 1/4inch seam allowance using a normal straight stitch, the felted fabric doesn't fray. I pressed seams flat as I went, using a damp press cloth and the wool setting on my iron. I didn't have any safety eyes the right size so his eyes are little black flower buttons. I positioned the pattern piece on the fabric to produce an effect of socks and shoes, or boots, which was fun.
So not nearly as cute as a Burra Bear, but I like him and he is all made out of existing stash. I'll enter him in the club competition and see how he does.
I've done a few more blocks for the Let's Bake quilt but things have slowed down while I tackle some of the embroidered blocks. This is the cooking stove and a flour scales, both with embroidered dials. And I'm working on a cross-stitched recipe written out on gingham, which is taking a while.
Another finish this week is my Japanese applique snap purse, made from some of the fabrics I bought in Japan and using an applique design for a handbag in one of the Japanese quilting books I bought there. I love how detailed the Japanese aesthetic is. My quilting stitches aren't very small because of the bulk of fabric I was stitching through but they still give a nice effect. The picture on the table with the vase is more true to the actual colours. For something that's not very big, this was a huge amount of work but fun to do and I'm pleased with how it's turned out.
And I called time on a big knitting project which has been cluttering up the living room for the last three months. This is a knitted jacket from a pattern in the May 2015 issue of Knit Today magazine designed by Rico. I chose it from my pattern stash because I was trying to use up some Colinette Zanziba chunky yarn that I bought several bargain skeins of from a Yorkshire mill on one of the knitting weekends I attended. It had sat in my stash for years because I didn't have enough for a full sweater and because it is so chunky and boucle even though I really like the colours. Here's the jacket, although it looks a lot better on a person with arms to fill out the sleeves than it does on this dressmaking dummy.
I had enough yarn to knit the fronts, backs (two joined together) and ribs, but ran out before I could knit the sleeves. I do have some of the same yarn in the blue colourway, and started knitting a sleeve in that, but it just looked silly with the pink body. I was gloomily wondering if I could still get more of this long-discontinued yarn when I tried the jacket on and realised that it actually looked quite nice as it is. The sideways knit means that the drop shoulders hang someway down the arms, like a short-sleeved effect. So I've decided to stop as it is, and wear it as a sort of over-cardigan, sloppy shrug sort of thing. I'm pleased it's turned out as well as it has, since I had to re-write the pattern to match my own gauge and found it difficult to understand the very strange construction as there is no assembly diagram. The fronts and backs are knit sideways in a twisted rib, then the two back pieces are joined along the cast-on edge up the centre back and the fronts are joined to the back at the shoulders. You pick stitches up from the inside of the resultant U-shape to knit the collar, then sew the side seams. Finally you pick up along the bottom edges (which were the sides of the knit pieces) to knit the bottom rib.
I've stepped away from textiles to dabble in furniture repair this week. We have a Victorian oak extending dining table (we live in an old house so old brown furniture looks good in it) which I thought was solid as a rock. That was until DS tried to cross his legs on his dining chair, kicking the trim in the process, and knocked off a five-inch chunk of trim like it was polystyrene. It turns out to be a patch of historic woodworm (not active) which we hadn't even noticed but which runs along the piece of trim under the table for about three feet. I don't think it affects the main structure so the table is not in danger of collapsing. The bit he kicked off was riddled with holes and incredibly fragile, instantly devaluing the table by several hundred pounds I should think although I didn't tell him that during my lecture on inappropriate table sitting positions.
We still had some wood hardener from treating the rot on the outside windows a few months ago, so I treated the bit of trim, and the cavity it had broken off from, with the hardener. Then I glued the trim back on with wood glue, using dollshouse clamps to hold it in place until the glue dried. Some careful filling with wood filler and some sanding with the fine papers I use for dollshousing, followed by a touch up with some dollshouse oak stain, and the repair is pretty unobtrusive. I finished it off with some buffing wax. DS has to sit on the opposite side of the table now away from the woodworm danger zone.
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