Little Green Monster

This is an old softie I made a while back. I ended up giving it to a friend of mine who had a baby boy and she really loved it. Initially I had wanted to make little pants to put on the monster, but i loved the way the fabric sort of gathered and wrinkled where his legs meet his torso, so I didn't wan to cover that up. I sort of have a pattern that I drew up and printed to make this that I am sharing here. It includes the pants. The pattern is bigger than a standard 8.5"x11" paper. I tried to make it so the body and legs are about 11" all together. If you have a big printer you may be able to print at that size pretty easily. I use a program called Posterazor that allows you to take an image and split it up into 8.5"x11" chunks that you can print on any standard home printer and office paper. Then I tape them together and cut them out and get to work.

Also, I changed the face to use two different fabrics to create the face. It's pretty obvious how to do that, i think so I won't go into any detail unless I get deluged with requests (ha, ha).

Matt's Scarf

Matt is getting a lot of attention these days. Recently, in addition to a monster for his nephew, he requested I knit a scarf for him. He said he wanted a soft scarf that wasn't too long because he doesn't like to wrap scarves around his neck, so I used the Windy City Scarf pattern from Stitch n' Bitch as my jumping off point. It's a keyhole scarf so it will stay on without being wrapped around his neck.

I used the mock cable pattern from the Warm Fuzzies scarf pattern from the same book to give it a little visual interest. When I got a couple of rows in I felt like the cables were too tight and just looked jumbled up, so I changed the pattern a little. I added a 3rd row of k2, p1 and a 4th row just like the 2nd row. That spread out the mock cables a little bit. All in all I think it looks cute.

Hope Matt likes it.

My monster has two mommies

My friend Matt wanted me to make a handmade gift for his cousin's new(ish) baby's first birthday. I had been kicking around some designs in my head for a softie. These are some sketches I made:
Eventually, I decided I wanted my monster to be short and stocky with his knuckles dragging on the ground behind him.

I just sort of made the pattern up in my head. For the body I cut two squares of fabric, about 12"x12", pinned them right-sides together and sewed along the top and the two sides. I made 2" long cuts between along the bottom to separate the hands from the body/legs and sewed around them, but left the legs completely open.

To give the shoulders more depth I pinched seams of each of the shoulders together and sewed a 2" line of stitches perpendicular to the seams. There is probably a technical term for this. I do not know it. Next time I'll take more pictures as I go to better explain it, I promise.

Then I turned it right side out and top-stitched between the legs and above the space between the arms and the body. I cut out ovals and sewed them into the openings at the bottom of the legs. I also folded the ends of the arms backwards and put in a few stitches to make it look like he was dragging his knuckles on the ground.

The head was basically a miniature version of the body.

My favorite part is the tattoo of a heart that reads "MOMS" (because the monster is a lesbian love child).

Here is my best attempt at instructions: