Happy Halloween - First Stuffed Toys

Questions of the Post: Have you tried your hand at knitting or crocheting stuffed toys? What's been the hardest challenge you've ever undertaken? What was your first project you ever tackled without a pattern to guide you?

Materials:

• US 5 Double Point Aluminum Needles

• Yarn Bee Soft Secret Black for the bodies of both toys

• Yarn Bee Mini Maker Grey for the Scythe blade

• Yarn Bee Mini Maker Brown for the Scythe staff

• Yarn Bee Mini Maker Purple for Jiji's ears

This year I had an itch to try my hand at stuffed toys for the first time. My inspiration was the second book in my Knit & Nibble Mysteries book series that is written by Peggy Ehrhart. The very beginning of the book starts out talking about the knitting club having made stuffed aardvarks for the annual town festival to help raise money for the high school sports program. I think the thing that inspired me the most, was that one of the characters in the book is very new to knitting, so it made me feel that maybe I could actually make this happen. Now I do realize that this is a book character, but it still gave me enough confidence to give it a try!

So I started down the road of trying to decide what to make for my kids, Jera and Avery. Jera LOVES cats (picture below - she did her own make up <3), so I started by google searching free cat knitting patterns and stumbled on this wonderful post from Treasurie. There are several cute patterns, and I'll honestly try my hand at some of the others in the future. However when I spotted the pattern for Jiji the talking cat from Kiki's Delivery Services, I knew this was the one I had to do! (Thank you, Sincerely Louise, for providing this free pattern!!!)

Then my focus had to shift to my Son, Avery. We are big on Halloween in this house so my mind went to The Grim Reaper. He was The Grim Reaper for Halloween last year (picture below) and there is a cute short on Disney+ that is titled "The Race" that he loves. (You can find it by looking up Short Circuit and then going to S1: E7). My searches for Grim Reaper knitting patterns were not providing me what I was envisioning until I stumbled on THIS cute pattern from an Etsy shop. I was going to buy the pattern until my undetailed eye caught the large letters that say "Knitting Machine Pattern". Bummer! So I decided to use it as inspiration and just work on it piece by piece. Needless to say, Avery's pattern had a LOT of trial and error involved in it.

I decided to start with Jera's Jiji since I figured that I had a pattern and might learn some things from it that I could then apply to Avery's freestyle project. Overall the project went very smoothly. This was the first time I had ever knit with two different colors for Jiji's ears. It was strange and I was afraid I was messing it up, but just kept pushing forward with it and they turned out great! There was one part of the ear pattern that wasn't typed out correctly on the website, but I figured it out pretty quickly and was able to make two adorable ears. The one thing I didn't like as much was part of the purple was more of a flap and thinking about my kids and how they play, I went ahead and stitched that part down so it wouldn't easily get caught/snagged on anything. Below is a picture of Jiji before I stitched it all together. The eyes and nose I cut out of felt and glued down with fabric glue hoping that it would hold well on the yarn and be flexible for movement that will occur.

Then it was time to focus on Avery's Grim Reaper. I started with the body and used different techniques that I've learned through my Knitted Knockers pattern and the Jiji pattern to build it out. It ended up being so narrow on the top and I kept thinking about the head and arms so I put a little sock of rice in the bottom to help weigh it down.

I used THIS knit ball pattern for the head and found THIS kids hat for the hood. I used the tail technique from Jiji for the scythe handle and made up my own pattern for the blade portion". The arms I modeled a bit after the body. Let's just say there were several starts and stops and unravels and restarts on several pieces of The Grim Reaper. But we finally got to a good place. The picture below shows it prior to being sewn together.

The sewing was the trickiest on the Grim Reapers Head. Part of me wishes I would have knitted the body and head together like Jiji, but then it wouldn't have had the hood effect that I was hoping for. Overall, I still have a LOT to learn when it comes to knitting stuffed toys and am actually going to start challenging myself to try crochet since there are so many awesome patterns out there to crochet toys. Until then, I'll just be really happy that both kids loved their new stuffed toys and I'll be praying they don't fall apart any time soon.

Thank you for reading!

God Bless and Take Care!