Soft Pink Teddy Bear

It is teddy bear time!
As I was browsing trough my patterns I found this very cute teddy bear, and since I got a lot of fur fabric in different colors from my husband for my birthday I finally found what I was going to do with it (beacuse I wanted to make something really nice). For this bear I chose a pale pink fur fabric and since the fabric was about 1,5 m long I only used about 30 cm width! That means that I have almost 1,5 meter width left ready to be used for something else.

The whole body is one piece, the only separate pieces are the nose and the ears which I have sewn by hand. The instructions were not easy to follow when it came to the nose area since the pictures were very dark and authors used dark brown fabric. In the end I just got a bit frustrated and I made some own decisions and it came out good. I usually is quite impatient with patterns and if I don't understand right away I just do my own thing and hope for the best. However, this time I really pushed myself to understand for a long time but it didn't work out. I think the result is good and I will stick to my own routines if I do more bears of this model. The pattern I found for this bear is coming from the same book I used for the Soft Toy Elephant.

Happy sewing everyone!

  

Soft Toy Elephant

As you probably already know by now I like making toys and last month when I found a book about making soft toys I knew I had to start planning for some serious toy making! The book is from the 70's but these models doesn't get out of fashion which is great.

The pattern pieces for these toys were drawn in miniature size on squared paper in the book and I had to do my own squared paper were each square was 2,5 cm *2,5 cm to get the natural size. Then I tried to copy the drawings of all pattern pieces the best I could on my own natural sized squared paper.
It was a new way for me to get the pattern ready, I have only used Burda patterns before and there you don't have to re-size anything or draw by hand, so this was exciting and fun!

I chose the elephant pattern because I thought it was so very cute. I calculated how big the final toy would be and thought it might get too big so I chose to make my squares 1,5 cm instead of 2,5 cm. That resulted in the little elephant you see in the pictures. It was a little tricky to sew and then turn the fabric inside out, especially around the trunk area, so I decided to make one more elephant in the original size which resulted in the big elephant in the pictures. I think they both turned out good and I am pleased with them both. The filling is a white fluffy 100% polyester fuzz, but according to the book small pieces of cloths is good to use too.

Knitted Soft Toy Moose

Knitted animals and soft toys - who doesn't love them!? I have thought of making soft animals many times before but I have never really giving it a fair try. This time I decided to really make an effort because these kind of handicrafts are very lovable and you can really use your imagination to create cute things. I love to create from scratch and build things with my own imagination and design and I think this could be a new fun hobby!

Today I will show you my first soft animal friend :) He is a Swedish moose and his name is Sven. Sven is one of a kind because he has red pants (and I can tell you it is not very likely to find a moose with pants in the Swedish woods these days). Ever since the day he got the pants he loved them and whatever others may say or think about it, he will never throw them away!
As you can see he is quite a lively moose making silly moves every time I tried to take a picture of him...!

I wrote the pattern myself as I went along and the total time from making the first calculations until he was finished was about 10 days.
It was Easter holiday this past weekend and I had a lot of time knitting while my husband played videogames and I watched sitting beside him. At the moment he is playing Bloodborne, which is a new game related to the Demon's Souls and Dark Souls games. I really like to follow the stories these games are hiding - it is almost like a movie sometimes. So there I sit in our sofa having one eye on my knitting project and one eye on the tv-screen :) 

The horns were apparently excellent support when standing on the head...

Perhaps standing a bit too close to the camera...