Haute Knits

Showing up in fashion, knitters know how easy these would be to create...if you wanted to.

via Outsapop Trashion

Beer Squirrels

I've been wanting to make these for awhile, but I hadn't gotten around to trying to make a pattern. Fortunately, Jessica Correa did the work for me. Using her free pattern on Ravelry, I got started with these little fellows. They need to be washable, so I used Red Heart "Soft" in Toast and Red Heart "Fur Sure" in Camel. (I don't expect them to go through the washing machine, though.)

D&J Hobby in Campbell used to be my go-to store for googly eyes, but while I found 8mm sew on eyes, they are really phasing out the craft side of the store and moving towards radio controlled models. Affordable Treasures in Los Gatos is a good source, or I may just have to buy online.

About the squirrels, I made four so that you can have a few friends over for drinks, and everyone gets a cozy. There is plenty of the body yarn left over, there's almost 200 yards in a ball. I used small amounts of Cascade 220 Superwash for teeth and tongues.

There were lots of fiddly bits to knit. I knit the ears, teeth, and tongues directly on the body, but knitted the arms and tails separately, then sewed on. The pattern calls for a few different needle sizes, but I used just two: US 7 for everything except the tails, and US 13 for the tails (the long pile of the "Fur Sure" made it very difficult to use anything smaller).

Squirrel Beer Cozies

More Photos of the Hammock Quilt

Well, although the weather is cooperative, the hammock is put away for another year. But the hammock quilt is ready! Final dimensions: 54" x 56" [approximately].

It seems like there was a majority of the middle aqua tones. This is mostly random; I did "cheat" and try to mix up the colors and prints in each long strip. But I just stitched the long strips together willy-nilly. Here's a close up of the mix of patterns and colors, which shows off the wrinkles in high relief.

And here's a shot of the back. Yes, the strips are crooked. They are just applied to the surface of the darker fabric. I am super-lazy! Anything worth doing is worth doing fast just to get it done. I really rushed on cutting and sewing the backing. It was the home stretch and I could see the finish line.

I'm debating quilting along the long strips. And then would I use the light aqua thread or coral thread? Or a mixture? See, it gets all difficult.

Beer Squirrels

They're coming along nicely! Currently they all have bodies and ears. Now for tongues and teeth, then tails and eyes.

Four Squirrels, one still without ears, one modeling on the bottle

Aha!

It was 2009 when I bought the jelly roll. Quilting takes a lot of time and space. I can see the attraction of mini quilts. You get to play with color and pattern, but it doesn't take as much space. Perhaps I will try that.

Thoughts on the Hammock Quilt

I don't even want to think about when I picked out the jelly roll for this quilt. I'm going to say it was 2009, but it might have been 2008. I chose a pattern for it and started cutting the strips to size. Then a year passed...

via Amy Butler

I put the strips in order of color value, light to dark, so that each band of the quilt would at least have the same number of light and darker pieces. I didn't want to end up with a bunch of one value or pattern left at the end.
Putting the pieces together into long bands didn't take too long once I got started. Then I needed to press the seams, and that took some time to get around to. More months passed...
The seams were pressed, and then I needed to figure out how to arrange the long bands. I tried laying them out, but I didn't have enough room anywhere to really tell how it would look. My next strategy was to bravely sew the bands together randomly. That also went quickly, but then more pressing was required.

detail of my hammock quilt top

Originally, I had thought about using a small duvet from IKEA for the batting and an IKEA sheet for the backing. The small duvet worked, but none of the colors for the sheets worked with the fabrics. By now, the whole jelly roll fabric line was discontinued. So I took some extra strips to the fabric store to find something for the backing. I found two watery prints that worked, so I could piece them together along with some of the leftover bits of the jelly roll to tie the front and back together.

The pattern calls for making a kind of "sandwich" of the front, back, and batting. I wasn't sure about this...I thought that it might look better with binding. But I didn't want to make my own binding and none of the colors of pre-made binding worked with the jelly roll fabrics, so I went ahead with the "sandwich." Now I'm stuck at the point of top-stitching around the edges and closing the hole I used to turn the quilt.

And I need to figure out if I want to quilt it or not, and if I quilt it, what pattern? Decisions! Choices!