Two Sweaters Down and a Teddy Bear to Go

Christmas is getting ever closer and I am hurrying to get ready. I took my son in to the pediatrician's office on Thursday with a rash and we came home with the flu. Not so much fun, for either of us. We spent all day Friday curled up in my bed watching TV while I finished two of my three unfinished Christmas gifts. I didn't think I had time to be sick, but it turned out that it was pretty handy to have an excuse to sit and finish my projects.No doubt they would still be sitting in my knitting bag in pieces if I hadn't been sick.

My mom gave me a book of sweater patterns for kids a while back and I hadn't used any of the patterns yet. So I decided I'd get it out and make the kids some sweaters for Christmas this year. Jacob, my youngest by one minute, insisted on the color baby blue for his sweater. I tried to talk him into something a bit darker, but he would have none of it. It had to be baby blue. So I cast on and started knitting his baby blue sweater. He chose a beautiful cabled sweater pattern. I L-O-V-E cables. They take longer to knit than a flat or textured sweater, but they are worth it. I think it turned out rather well too. And although I think it would look a bit better in a darker shade of blue, Jacob will be getting exactly what he asked for for Christmas.



Next I moved on to Elizabeth's sweater. She insisted on a lavender yarn for her sweater and picked a pattern with a textured yolk. I had nothing against her choice of yarn, but I didn't really care for the pattern. In the book, it was shown in an off-white yarn and I couldn't understand why she would want that sweater. However, once again, I bent to her request with acceptable results. It turned out better than I had expected. I think she'll like it when she opens it on Christmas morning. Hopefully, she won't grow out of it before then. She's growing like a weed.

On to Joshua's Christmas present. He was adamant that he didn't want a sweater. I showed him lots of different patterns and told him he could pick whatever color he wanted, but he did not want a sweater. He wanted a fuzzy teddy bear. I happened to have one such pattern in my files that I had been wanting to try for years. So I said I'd make him a teddy bear instead of a sweater. His was the smallest project, but by far the most difficult. He chose a chocolate brown fun fur yarn. I had never used that kind of yarn before and it proved to be quite annoying. While the pieces for the bear were fairly quick to knit, it was very difficult to see any of the stitches. If I dropped a stitch, I had to carefully rip out the whole piece and start again because it was virtually impossible to find the dropped stitch again. And it was even more impossible to tell what row I was on if I happened to set it down and forget.

I have been sewing the pieces together, but hit a bit of a snag. The head pieces don't fit together properly. If I thought knitting the pieces was difficult, that was nothing compared to the pain of trying to pick out my seam stitches when I was trying to reposition the pieces. This bear may just end up with a bow stitched around it's neck to cover the spot where I'm going to have to kind of fudge it and pretend it all lined up correctly. We'll see. I'll let you all know how it turns out.