Happy Easter, Happy Spring! :o)

wishing all of you joy at this wonderful time of year!

with love from
theknittycat and mr. theknittycat (anthor)

Easter Owlies Coming Soon!
(oops!  How did that Kitty Peep Ball sneak in there?)

Lucy's Fuzzy Hello Kitty

Yet another Hello Kitty

Lucy's Hello Kitty

My most recent and hopefully my last Hello Kitty. Not that I don't think that HK is adorable, I just don't like working with so much white. By the time I finish that big white head I'm pretty bored with white yarn! ;o)

This one was made for Lucy and Baby MaryJane on the occasion of Lucy's birthday in May. :o) She has a little music box button inside that plays Brahm's Lullaby when you squeeze her tummy. :o)

You can hear the little music button playing here in this little video I made.

(little meaning simple, not small unfortunately)

(yeah, I know - I'm no budding cinematographer. Heh heh)

Lucy's Hello Kitty was crocheted with Vanna's choice yarn, just a plain acrylic (but nice stuff), and then brushed with a wire brush to make her all fuzzy!  In the white areas I held two yarns together, adding Lion Brand Microspun for a little shine, but when she was brushed  you couldn't really see the Microspun.

Here she is before fuzzing up. I had just brushed one foot for a bit, at that point, to try out the technique.

It's really amazing how well that works. I purchased a small dog slicker brush, but an even better tool that I used a lot is something called a nap riser brush, which I purchased here from knitting-warehouse.com. It's like a mini slicker brush that you slide over a finger. It lets you get into small spaces and you have a lot of control.

It does take some work to get this effect but I find working with fuzzy yarn to be challenging with knitting, and crazy-making with crochet! So fuzzing up plain yarn after I've knitted or crocheted a peep is an interesting alternative.

What amazes me is that after all that brushing and fuzzing, very little fiber actually came off of the yarn. I've tugged on the fibers and they seem very secure still.

Did you know that Hello Kitty has a tail?!  She DOES!   I didn't know that till I did my picture research for this one.  And this is the fourth one I've made!  I just never noticed before.  Yes I know she's a kitty, but she's kind of a humanistic kitty.  And besides, I'm kind of notorious for leaving off tails!  heh heh    But Lucy's HK has a tail!!  Hurray!

More pics in my flickr photo stream.

http://flickr.com/knittycat

As some of you might remember, I injured my knitter mitts (hands) in my crazy Christmas marathon, and have been crocheting my peeps for awhile - okay that's been interesting and I've learned some tricks.   :o)   But being a knitaholic, I am really missing knitting them. Well, a couple of weeks ago ... Ummm this is embarrassing ... I overdid with the crocheting, and now I can't do ANY crafting!!!  Eeeek!! Making peeps keeps me sane.... Now what?  Heh heh. My hub has suggested learning to knit with my toes. Heh heh

Hmmm. I think he's scared. ;o)

Since I'm so behind in posting my peeps, I've got plenty of them waiting in the wings, and I may find time to put up a couple more of my adventures in crocheting them, while waiting for my hands to heal up enough to allow me to work on them some more.

I hope that everyone is enjoying the new weloveamigurumi community theme and their summer!

(xposted to weloveamigurumi and theknittycat's tips)

Animated Amigurumi Peeps - Stitch (but no Lilo)

                                                                                                                                         ^..^
FINALLY!!! A very belated gift for Tony's April birthday (yes, APRIL! I'm so behind!)
  Update: Pattern now available!  See the following post (link to the pdf is on the patterns page):
    http://theknittycat.blogspot.com/2010/10/pattern-notes-for-stitch-lilos-friend.html

- Stitch -
the little blue alien from Lilo and Stitch




Oh did this guy give me trouble!!! He's much larger than my usual, and with that huge head, it was like wrestling with a fat blue baby!! :o) Four arms, 16 claws, 8 toenails, 16 big TEETH!! Whew! He took me AGES! I started him in February, and just finished him last week!!! (okay, yes, I did make a lot of other peeps in between, but he was so exhausting for me to work on, I had to keep putting him aside!) But he's finally done and Tony really really loves him! So it was all worth it! Well ... now that it's done, it was worth it!! ;o)

I'll never do it again! I've sworn off making large peeps and I'm sticking to small and tiny ones! :o) Okay, my friends say they've heard that before... but this time I MEAN it! Really! Honest! heh heh

I knit Stitch from the bottom up. His body, arms and head are knitted in one piece with the medium blue yarn, and his legs, ears and nose (and color patches) are grafted on.

here he is with some of my photo references


Aren't those marvelous buttons for his eyes?!
I tried sooo many different things and was not happy at all, then my dear Hubbard came home one day with these beauties! :o)

and here with more photo references


and from the back showing his tattoos(?) Well, his dark blue markings.
I'm not sure what exactly they are.


Did you know that Stitch had a little nub of a tail? I didn't till I started researching photos! :o) I forgot to take pics of the bottoms of his feet, but they have blue circular patches (you can see them a little bit in this pic above) - knitted in, not sewn on, since I could do them in the round while I made the circular bottoms of the feet.

And so you can see his relative size - here he is in my hand and from the side
(see the notch in the top area of his ear?)







    Just for reference... this is the size of
    peep that I like to make!  :o)

Cookie Monster Peep

  





Restraining his enthusiasm!

(and another notch, in the bottom area of this ear)

You can kind of see in this picture that he's nice and squishy.
Nice and cuddly, except for his giant button eyes! :o)

With two layers of knitting and curled around at the bottom, even as large as they are, the ears came out surprisingly poseable. :o)


RAAAAARRRRRGGGHH!

heh heh

Something about his big open mouth seems to fascinate people. :o)
Everyone wants to stick their hands in it! heh heh




including ME!


I told Tony that Stitch is like that wall sculpture in Rome (Boca Della Verita - the Mouth of Truth)...
If you tell a lie while you have your hand stuck in his mouth, he'll BITE it! ;o)

Almost a Pattern
I don’t have an actual pattern for Stitch (and won’t be writing one), but I did discover, just last night, that I made LOTS of notes as I was knitting him, which I had totally forgotten doing. I wrote out nearly everything I did, but not quite - there are missing bits. I did not complete the head decreasing instructions, and did not note how I made the patches for his tummy and back. (Frankly, I didn’t do such a great job on those patches anyway - you could do better, I'm sure.)

I may make my notes available in a pdf later, if folks want them.   
UPDATE:  Pattern now available. See this post for pattern information

Color Patches
As you can see, there are a lot of color patches on Stitch. I'm dreadful at knitting colorwork! I just hate doing it, and it never looks neat to me, so I usually avoid it very carefully! heh heh But since Stitch had all these different shades of blue, I had to work out something. As usually happens, I try various ways of knitting the color in, and wind up chucking that idea, and making separate patches of the colors and grafting them on. :o/

Weeks after knitting Stitch's color patches, I recently was working on Snorlax for Matt (see next post for Snorlax and Jigglypuff) and came up against my nemesis again... colorwork! I made a determined effort to find a good way to do intarsia in the round, since I always work in the round (intarsia worked flat is not such an issue). So I did a bunch of research, and tried a few things out, and was - again - very dissatisfied!! Well, in my opinion, it seems there isn't a "good" way, just work arounds. Gave that idea up and relegated myself to another set of less than satisfactory patches to stitch on. But then I came up with a better way to make the patches! I was very pleased with the outcome on Snorlax and wish I'd discovered the idea while I was making Stitch. But better late than never, I guess. And I'm less disgusted at the thought of making another peep with color patches again! But I'll still avoid it when I can!! ;o)


Update: you can see how I made his teeth and claws in the pattern, which is now available.  
See the next post (the link to the pdf is on the patterns page):
http://theknittycat.blogspot.com/2010/10/pattern-notes-for-stitch-lilos-friend.html

Teeth
In case you're wondering how I made Stitch's teeth (all 16 of them!!) ... since I reeeeaaaallllyyy did NOT want to make sixteen little pieces and sew each of them on (YUCK!) I tried a few different ideas and settled on knitting them from side to side (actually in the round so they'd be 3 dimensional) in a long strip, using short rows for the shaping (details in my notes). That worked fine! :o) They're two strips of teeth, which I later sewed into his mouth. After grafting the teeth in (using kitchener stitch) I still felt there should be some overlap of his blue lip onto his teeth so I went around his mouth, pulling the blue fabric over the teeth and stitching it down. Yes, it was tricky with that big blue head attached to the big blue body hanging off of what I was sewing!! heh heh My hands still hurt!!!

Claws
For his claws and toenails I knitted short I-cords and pulled them in between the stitches of his paws and feet. For the toenails I used one I-cord for each foot. For each foot, I pulled the completed cord through every couple of stitches, over and under, horizontally. For his claws I made one I-cord for every two claws (two for each paw, making four claws per paw). I pulled the finished cord into one stitch and out another, a couple of stitches over, and stitched them in place to ensure that they wouldn't pull out. That worked extremely well, and I used the same method for Snorlax's teeny claws (see next post).

Vox.com
One last note:
Today is Vox.com's last day ... so goodbye to vox ...
and HELLO! to blogspot.com! :o) So far I'm quite happy with how well things work here! Yay!

Why Knitting Peeps is Fun... and info about Hello Kitty and Muppet Peeps

 

Please check out www.flickr.com/knittycat for larger photos and all of the peeps.

Why knitting Peeps is fun...

Sissy in her new pink lace dress

• You don't have to worry about gauge.

• You rarely have to weave in ends (they just get buried into the peep).

• You can use any yarn that pleases you, including scraps.

• They are generally very short term projects (instant gratification - something we knitters don't often get).

• Pretty much one-size-fits-all.

• They give you the opportunity to try out new techniques on a small project.

• They're cute and knitting them makes you a very cheerful knitter!

• They make the recipients happy!

Okay, they won't keep you warm like socks, a scarf or a sweater, but they will give you the warm fuzzies inside.  :o)

 

Info about Hello Kitty Peep and Muppet Peeps...
I've been getting requests for patterns for a number of my peeps, and I want to thank you all so much for your kind interest in them!  :o)  I'm so pleased that you like them so much!  As you probably know by now, I don't actually HAVE patterns for them.  You may have already guessed that I'm not much of a pattern writer, since I like to make things up as I'm knitting them.  This makes it a little difficult to reproduce them.  :o)  But I am making an effort to share the things I've learned, and I'm writing up instructions as best as I can for the little guys.  I'll be putting up a "nearly" pattern for the Thing here soon, which has been taking up a LOT of my time, and frying my brain (at the moment, it's fairly complete except for the arms and hands), and then I'll be able to concentrate a little more on instructions for some of the other peeps.  I do have some notes on a couple of the others that just need finishing, and I'll put them up as soon as I'm able.

Hello Kitty for Nicole in my hand

The Hello Kitty that some of you are interested in was actually a very simple variation on the classic peeps, which are made using the double knitting technique.  My recommendation is that you start out by trying out the free pattern for the double-knit bear that is linked to on the intro page (Peeps! and how to make them... Introduction).  It teaches the inside-out double knitting technique really well (that's where I learned it, though I had tried the right-side out technique previously), and it is the starting point for the classic peeps.


Then if you want to make Hello Kitty after that - her legs are a bit shorter and instead of increasing in the center of the front of the face, you increase at the sides, to make her head wide and rather flat, and quite large in proportion to the rest of her body. 

(TIP:  I find it unwieldy to do much increasing and decreasing while the peep is inside out, so I turn them right side out after the arms are made, and place the stitches on two circular needles to do the increasing for the head, or you could use dpns.  Also, I've found that turning goes a lot easier if you turn the arms first.  I also stuff the legs, arms and body at this point, using the back end of a size K crochet hook to push the stuffing into the limbs.)


I used a slip stitch technique to shape her ears so I wouldn't have to knit them separately and sew them on (which I heartily dislike doing), but it would work just as well to make them separately, or pick up stitches at each side of the head for them.  I will eventually provide the slip stitch technique, but I'm not sure when I'll get to it, since there are so many things to do!  So I'd suggest making the ears one of the other ways, and not waiting for me!  :o)   When I do make the bits and pieces separately, I knit them in the round with 2 circular needles so I don't have to make a front and back and sew them together.  The ears on the classic peeps are double knitted while making the heads, and require a break in the yarn for the second ear, but no other sewing.  (Have you gotten the idea yet that I don't like sewing?). 

Cookie shows his stuff! Cookie, Elmo and Kermit

As to the muppets... I don't have any patterns started yet, but since I am making an Elmo, and possibly a Cookie for Christmas gifts, I will try to make some notes as I go.  Except for Kermie, They are based on the classic peeps, but are larger, and have much larger heads.  Then their eyes, Elmo's nose, and Cookie's cookies were knitted separately in the round, then stuffed and and sewn on.  Kermie was approached totally differently, knitting his body and head in the round in one piece, then each limb knitted in the round, then stuffed and sewn on.



I hope this has been helpful to you.  If you check back here occasionally, I hope to eventually get some patterns done and posted.  But as I keep making new peeps, and I'm as slow as a snail at writing patterns (if a snail wrote patterns) ... I think it is going to be a looong process!  :o)