Happy New Year everyone! I hope it’s better for you than 2015 in every possible way 🙂

It’s been a while since I posted here but I was very busy around Christmas. Mostly because I decided to crochet toys for three of my friends and didn’t really plan my time properly so I fell behind and was going a bit crazy right before Christmas, trying to finish the toys. Lesson learned!

I did manage though and I’m mostly happy with how the toys turned out.

I made three toys – a penguin, a dog and a bear. The patterns can be found here: Penguin, Dog, Bear.

I quite liked the penguin and was happy with how it turned out, I thought it was very close to the look on the pattern. It was a bit of a pain to sew together and the heel part of the sock was kinda confusing though.

I was very excited about the dog and the bear. When I found the patterns I thought they were gorgeous, especially the eyes. I contacted the author to ask where she got them and it turned out she painted them herself and she was kind enough to explain how. I got clear eyes from Etsy and some glass paint and gave it a go. It was a bit tricky but I think I did well for a first attempt 😀

The dog gave me some trouble while sewing the parts together but after a couple of hours of frustration I think it turned out okay and relatively close to how it looks on the pattern.

I was a bit disappointed with the bear though. I followed the pattern very carefully but it ended up looking nothing like the one on the pattern. The head just had a completely different shape. I had no idea what went wrong and I didn’t have time to remake it so i had to give it away as it was. Another thing that was probably a mistake, was my choice of yarn. I used a very soft 100% merino wool yarn that made the toy too….bendy so it was almost doing the splits when I put it into a sitting position. My friend liked it though so I guess it wasn’t too bad. 🙂

I’m taking a small break from crochet for now after the mad Christmas rush but I’m thinking of trying to crochet a cute little murloc (it’s a creature from the game World of Warcraft) soon. Problem is patterns are hard to find so I’ll probably have to come up with one myself. Oh my!