summer's over

wow, it has been a really busy time around here, what with the baby taking up all of my waking hours, and tons of trips - how many kids get to travel by car, bus, train, airplane, and canoe, all by the time they're six months old? but we're eager to get back into the swing of things, now that the kiddo is old enough to keep himself entertained crawling around at my feet while i knit and quilt!

i did finish the angora turtleneck that i mentioned in my last post, but unfortunately it was too warm and made the baby all perspirey, and also it sheds a LOT - he ended up with a big lint farm aka choking hazard under his chin! maybe i'll give it a wash and see if that helps with the shedding.

meanwhile, he has already outgrown his totoro hat:

kodama!

now that loudxmouse has received the package i sent for the miyazaki swap, i'm going to post my blurry pics here!

loudxmouse said that she was keen on kodama, among other things. kodama are little sprites that look like this:

so i decided, why not recreate that image as a handbag?

i made the handbag out of a few different-but-similar shades of dark green fabric. i appliqued a few leafy bits on, and to hold the kodama dolls, i made leaf-edged pockets, and top-stitched them so they'd stay nice and pointy:

then, i knitted and felted some little kodama dolls to tuck into the shrubbery:

here's a close up of my favourite little guy:

again, i chickened out of trying to felt them in the washing machine, and just did them in the bathroom sink - it only took fifteen minutes! - and then propped them in front a heating vent to dry quickly.

i've written up a pattern for knitting the wee kodama dolls, if anyone is interested. i made up the pattern using the two-needle tube double-knitting technique that erin explained to me a while ago. i also took a couple of snaps of the work-in-progress, which i'll put up tomorrow, since double-knitting is easy to do once you get it, but tricky to figure out the first time.

"f***ing awesome!"

that's what tg said when i showed him the awesome totoro hat and soot-sprite bootees that i got from loudxmouse for the craftster miyazaki swap! super cool and super cute!!



can't wait to have a real baby to put in them! in the meantime, they fit my old bear pretty well... mum made "poony" for me when i was an infant, and he's still going strong, waiting for the offspring to try to chew off his ears:



and here's a close-up so you can get a better look at the hat. he's awesome!



whee! i'm so happy! in other good mail news, two of the other things i was waiting for in the mail - both of wish i spent cold hard cash on, so i was getting antsy - also arrived in the mail. we're down to a missing-mail count of only one letter. a good thing too, since i bought some sari yarn on monday, and as i was paypal-ing the seller, i started to think: "am i crazy? my mail never arrives! what the hell am i doing!" but now i am at peace again.

now, off to post pics on craftster...

photos!!

finally, some photos of totoro! there was a laundry emergency yesterday morning, so i didn't get the photos off the camera until now. but here he is, in all his fuzzy glory:





i'm especially please with the whiskers - they stand out nicely, without being prickly.

download pattern here: knitted totoro pattern

knitted totoro pattern!

Well, no new photos due to the ongoing tragedy of the camera, but after much futzing, I have finally typed out the first ever filmcraft knitting pattern for the felty totoro toy! It's in pdf format. let me know if I've messed it up somehow, as I'm feeling a bit out of it, to tell the truth (apparently light-headedness and dizziness are common symptoms among preggos - who knew?). (edit) I just realised I left out the most important part - yarn! gauge!! I told you I was feeling out of it... I knitted this guy out of a double strand of White Buffalo unspun (which comes in a weird sort of bale of six-stranded raw wool - I split it so I was only using two of the six strands), about the same weight as a heavy worsted yarn, on 9 mm needles (U.S. size 13). I just want to fall asleep right now, will fix the pdf in the morning... (edit again) okay, I think I have it fixed... now I'm really going to bed!

here he is!!

my neighbour totoro:



as you can see i still have to tack his ears into place, add his whiskers, and embroider in his nose and pupils. but you can certainly tell what it's supposed to be!

coming soon: the pattern.

suspense!

in the tradition of film noir, filmcraft is more suspenseful than the average craft blog - will she or won't she?

that is, will she or won't she finish any of the projects she starts.

well yesterday i finally got around to felting my totoro doll! he's quite cute. i decided to try hand-felting him, since it's my first attempt at felting, and i was a bit afeared to just throw him in the laundry. so, i tossed him in the sink with a squirt of dishsoap and started agitating.

for ages, nothing seemed to be happening except that the water got all absorbed into the wool, and i had way too much soap (i hardly used any, i swear!). i kept adding more and more warm water, and let some of the bubbles down the drain. and it seemed to take forever.

but finally, i started to notice progress! about twenty minutes in (and boy, were my arms tired), things started happening. and once they started, they really got going. it was neat to feel the change in texture.

mr. t is currently drying out in the living room. i sort of liined him with a plastic bag, and then stuffed that bag with bags, so he'd keep his shape as he dried, and since they bags are all together, it'll be easy to pull them out.

while he's drying, i've been busy with whiskers. a commenter suggested stiff fishing line to give body to the whiskers. but how would i get it nicely covered with yarn? and, i was worried about the ends being nicely finished. these concerns were excuse enough for me to procrastinate for a while, but then while tidying up i found a spool of fishing line! (why was this in the house? i have no idea.) it was labelled "extra limp" as opposed to stiff, but hey, it presented itself, and so far i've relied on scraps and whatnot and haven't spent a cent on this toy, why not keep it that way?

i decided to try braiding the fishing line with embroidery floss, and i haven't attached the whiskers yet, but they look (and feel) pretty good. i'm quite pleased.

anyway, in keeping with tradition i don't have any photos uploaded (but i did take pictures last night! really!), but maybe i'll get them up later today!

here he is...

not felted yet, but here's the to-be-felted totoro all sewn up:



question is, do i have any black wool lying around in the filmcraft stash waiting to be used for his nose and pupils. but what to do about whiskers? part of me wants to twist some wire through yarn to make nice stiff whiskers, but i have a feeling the baby-safety people would freak out over that. and i have to worry about that kind of crap now. maybe starch would work? make whiskers stiff but not lethal? anyone have any ideas?

finally!

finally filmcraft has photos again! tg had the old crummy digital camera with him, so i've been able to take a few pics of totoro and upload them.

here's his body, which looks right now like osme kind of creepy ghost:



here's his ears - one lying flat, the other folded and ready to be sewn:



here's what the base and tail section looks like flat:





well i'd better get stitching... enough of this day has been thrown away already!

argh

so, totoro's body is done. his ears and tail are done. he's ready to sew up and felt and stuff and i want to get going but i want to take pictures first. augh! just killed some time looking around for old, crappy digital camera that we had before we got (and lost, grr) the nice one. can't find it; presumably tg has it with him. so - no news at all here, really, i'm just grumpy. i'm half inclined to just crawl back into bed and watch the last five episodes of honey and clover.

but a ray of hope for y'all: once i get him felted and stuffed, and he has proven to be a passable representation of the creature, i will post the pattern i made up, so you can knit one yourself.

if only i had a camera!

whee!

i finished totoro's body on sunday night! now i just have to work out the ears and arms and such.

in other news, last night we watched brick, which was awesome. i have always loved film noir dialogue, so it was great to hear it reworked in this setting. one of the friends we watched it with said they found the patter disconcerting at first since it is so unlike how "real teens" would speak - but how many screenwriters successfully use naturalistic dialogue? those who try (woody allen, david mamet) are mocked for their "idiosyncratic" style. in fact, real people do stammer and repeat themselves and say "like" too much and talk over one another. that's the problem with naturalistic dialogue - it can be difficult to listen to. i think most of us would rather shoot ourselves rather than listen to two hours of real teen talk. i get enough realism in real life; when i'm watching a film, i would much prefer to hear something clever and snappy.

feeling nesty

okay, so i'm feeling nesty and wanting to make things, but have too much hip pain to do much! fortunately, that won't stop me from knitting. so, i've gone back to a project i started months ago, before the Time of Much Sleep.



unfortunately our digital camera has gone awol, so no pics of thr project-in-progress at the moment. i am currently about halfway done the body, using white buffalo unspun. soon, the felting will begin.