From peanut to a cute teddy bear!

Okay, all together now. . . .

Awwwwww !!

As you can see, I finished my bear. I'm pretty happy with how she turned out. I hope the cousin who's going to get her gets much comfort from receiving her (she's going in for some pretty major surgery).

I tried to match the bear from Jess Hutchinson's pattern book as much as possible with the colors for my first try. I did, however, add my own embellishment - a two stitch I-cord bow at the top. It turned out much cuter than I thought.

This time I followed the pattern and did Kfb's whenever she called for them. Like I mentioned before, it definitely is part of the charm of these toys.

M wants one of these SO MUCH! She's told me that she want's a pink bear with stripes and a bow. We'll see. I have the Knitting Olympics starting on Friday where I'm going to attempt to knit the alligator mittens using the intarsia method - I haven't quite wrapped my head around how I'm going to be able to do that as I also want to do it in the round.

In the mean time, I think I'm going to use the arm/leg patterns for finger puppets and make a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I still haven't worked out how I'm going to do it, but I think I'll incorporate the 2 stitch I-cord as seen in the bow above for the noodley appendages. I could knit a pipe cleaner into the center of the I-cord so the noodles can be adjustable. I could also shrink the sphere pattern from Spherey to make the meatballs. I still need googly eyes. I've found some on-line here, but they have a $10 minimum order, so I'll have to see if there's another resource. I also need the googly eyes for the alligator mittens.