3 hours

within only three hours the sky changed from dark to beautiful peace this morning, I couldn't resist but take pictures all along the way. On days like these I love my job! I hope you enjoy the view like I did...

it had a brain

designing sometimes takes forever and this time it does too, sorry for the little progress on my designing series.

But I have something else today .. a little How-To. I helped repairing a cute little toy bunny that got felted in the washing machine. In case you follow me on instagram, you might have seen this picture before:

Mr Bunny wanted to take a bath real badly and jumped into the washer, unfortunately the washer was going for a hot circle and Mr Bunny didn't read the take care sign before jumping in .. well coming out again, he was all crumpled and hard. His insides got felted terribly. And so Mr Bunny found its way to my house and asked for a fluffy belly, which I was able to give ..

here you can see Mr Bunny BEFORE he got repaired, he looks happy but he didn't feel happy, tough little fella

then I carefully opened the seam at the back of his head and opened it slowly, you can see how much his inside wool got felted, it's one solid block

Next I tried to remove the felted insides from the head/fabric. This was a little tricky .. a) the wool didn't only felt in itself it also felted to the lining of the fabric too, and b) the eyes were sewn into the head through the wool, which I would do as well, which I actually do when I sew on eyes/nose/bellys to my amigurumi, but I use stuffing that can't be felted, so that's one less problem

when I finally had removed all the felted material from his head and belly I could get, I just stuffed "some" new polyfil inside

and sewed Mr Bunnys head closed

doesn't he look all happy again?

bunny hugs,
Diana

just like I NEED another

hobby ...

my mom always was the one who loved cross-stitching I never really found it tempting until just before New Years when I spent a whole day browsing the webs for patterns and pictures and accessories .. and now here I am with probably another yarny doom

^__^
Diana

How I design - series - part one

A friend asked me to make an amigurumi specifically for his new born son and I thought since I'm starting from scratch I'd share my design process. A little step by step if you wanted to call it so ..

He wants a "finding Nemo" doll with the short fin. His son was born with one hand a little shorter than normal. But overall his son is all healthy and a super cutie!

Well what do I do when I make a new doll? first I research:

I always start with a google picture search .. I search for the original animal, in this case a clown fish ..

Since I wanted a Nemo, which is a specific clownfish, that already shows the typical signs of "cuteness" .. big eyes, I added Nemo to my clownfish search ..

Then I search for amigurumi that might already exist, I wouldn't want to make something that's already there ..

and I always take a look at dolls/toys of clownfishes ..

here I found a very good picture ..

the marked toy gives a very good picture of the overall shape of Nemo, especially the back fin was interesting to see, since it was continuous.

I sometimes (well quite often) make sketches of what I want, which I will share next time

so long, have a super start into the new week,
Diana

acorns

in the last days I've been knitting a lot more than I was crocheting. And I made quite nice progress on my Eichenlaub blanket:

Meanwhile I'm at row 129 of 300 and wonder if I should skip the second pattern repeat. That would make the blanket a LOT bigger, probably almost double the size, and three things stop me a) it's getting boring, even though I like see all the leaves and acorns grow .. b) I might run out of yarn .. c) I ask myself if I want a biiiig blanket or one that would be just big enough to cover my legs on chilly evenings.

knitting and wondering,
Diana

blooming

my afghan grows .. even if you take it literally ^__^

and since I needed to order all the yarn for this new project and waiting for it to arrive felt like ages I even continued working on a blanket that's been sleeping on my couch for nearly two years: the Eichenlaub which made me feel like a chipmunk

for the flower squares I used the Crocodile sticth blocks by Joyce Lewis, but I made some alternations to them and also created a smaller version with only 5 petals to make the smaller flower squares, which I'm thinking to add as a pattern to the database but would ask the designer of the original square first

cheerio, Diana

she did it...

I made a granny square ... my very first square ever and I like it, and even "worse" I think I will love it!

I plan a blanket, not sure yet how to organize the single squares, not even sure if every square will be a sunflower one, well I guess I will see..

I hope you landed well in 2013, so far it looks like a good year to me ^__^
Diana