Forest Animal Blanket

 This was definitely a labour of love 

and a lot more work than I thought it would be.

I made it for my sweet Elijah.

Designers

Patterns: -beaver @knot.your.nanas.crochet
-raccoon adapted from @nellascottage
-bear, wolf, fox, owl, squirrel by passionatecrafter
-moose The yarn conspiracy on Etsy
-bunny Fancy infancy crochet on Etsy

Crocheting using a knitting pattern

 I borrowed Susan Anderson's cute book

Itty-Bitty Nursery from the library

and fell in love with her cute

pacifier clips.

I knew that there was no way that I could knit

them but I wondered if I could crochet them

using the pattern as a guide.
I chose the elephant because it's cute but
also because it is made up of simple shapes.
This is how it turned out.

I started by substituting a single crochet 
for the knit stitches.
This worked well and even the gauge
came out the same.
Then I tried a couple of ways to handle the
increases/decreases, none worked.
Each resulted in incorrect stitch counts.

So what I did instead was

I looked at the stitch count at the end of each row.

and made the number of increases/decreases

necessary to get the right number of stitches.

I then spread out the increases and decreases 

as evenly as possible in each row. 


Obviously if you are comfortable with 
knitting a small toy on DPNs then that's
the way to go.
But I'm not so I'm glad that,
at least as far as this pattern is concerned,
I was able to produce a decent crocheted clone!

Getting back into crochet

I haven't crocheted since March for a few reasons.....

vacation, family get togethers, hot, humid weather, gardening, 

and I've gotten back into reading every day.

(I just finished The Girl who played with Fire).

Great book! 

I'm looking forward to reading the 3rd one which, 

unfortunately, is also the last.

So I decided to start small by making these booties.

 I changed them up a bit by slanting

the strap to the side.

I'm fairly happy with them although 

the pattern has a mistake in it

and it took quite a while to get the correction.

I hope Sebastian likes them.

Peter Rabbit embroidery

I was cleaning out the crawl space in

my laundry room today and found this.

In 1977 ( pre-children, pre-husband),
when I had loads of time,
I decided to try embroidery for the first time.
Being young, I decided to tackle a fairly large project
so I bought a this crib sized Peter Rabbit cover.

My stitches aren't too bad for a beginner
but I only managed to embroider this one panel
but I did finish all the words in the other panels
Then I quit.

Here is an overall picture of what
it could look like.

I still have all the embroidery thread
and the instructions so I'm going to
set this aside for a winter project.

I have no idea how far I'll get but
hope springs eternal.

Comparing crocheted and knitted baby booties

I've never made the same project before
in both a knitted and crocheted version.
But these booties came in both
so it was interesting to compare them.

This isn't a totally fair comparison
because the knitted did get an unfair advantage by
getting the better yarn and the smaller size.
I''ll take that into consideration.

Crocheted version

Knitted version


Looks:
I think if they were both made with identical yarn
and identical sizes
then they would be EQUAL in cuteness.
The knitted version was made with
some lovely soft wool in a smaller size
while the crocheted one was a test run made
with acrylic in a larger size.

Seams:
The crocheted version gets big points for no seam
up the back. It looks better and is much faster to make.
I think this is the biggest difference between these two patterns.

Price:
The big advantage for the knitted version
is that
the knitted version was free while
the crochet version cost $5.95 (US)

Fit:
The knitted one stretched more because
of the stocking st.
This could be seen as a plus or minus depending
how closely the fit matches the baby's feet.
This was an advantage for me because it turns out that
the baby had bigger than average feet.
Not sure if there is a downside to this stretchiness.
So the winner?
Both have advantages and disadvantages so
it really comes down to personal choice.
For me, it's the crochet version because
I can't knit that well and I'm willing to pay
for the advantage of seamless.