Knitting!

I've been knitting on and off for years, but I've decided to make a blog, in the hope that it'll inspire me to knit more, and share my creations. At the minute, I've been making these teddies of my own design:

This is my first one that I made; I've made several since this. I make these by making two identical sides of the teddy, by doing a simple garter stitch pattern, and casting on and binding off stitches to make the arms.

This is one I created for my Mum for Mother's Day one year:

I made the back half of the body with longer arms and legs, so that when I sewed it all together, the arms and legs bent around, so it would look like it was sitting. It kinda worked; it usually just flops over - something I need to work on.

I went on a photo-taking spree, and took pictures of all my knitting stuff, to show the start of my collection, which I'll hopefully build up as I carry on knitting. These are my boxes of knitting stuff:

The one on the left is FULL of wool, and the one on the right is all my knitting/cross-stitch books (I lovee cross-stitch, just have hardly any materials for it) and also all my mini things that I've made; I've made little swatches of patterns, and kept them all - really they were just testers to practice my knitting, a few years ago. But anyway. My favourite thing that I've made is the little grey cardigan that you can see in the bottom of the box. It's a properly proportioned cardigan, and it's uber cute. Only problem is, it doesn't fit any of my teddies:

^ Here you can see Eddy (the teddy) sporting the cardigan with the too-long sleeves. It'd be perfect for a little doll, or perfect proportions to template making a larger cardigan for actual people, but alas, it is useless for my teddies. Oh well, it's cute.

For the past few days, I've been knitting a teddy for my boyfriend, as he's seen my pink one and wanted one himself. I used the same pattern that I used for my one, only this time I used a stockinette stitch, and it looks a lot better when it's stitched and stuffed. I uh, got impatient when wanting to finish this - I didn't have any stuffing, so I ripped open an old cushion out of my room (nobody was using it, anyway - put it to better use!) to be able to stuff this little thing. It took me two days to finish, as I was babysitting in between making it, and this is the final product:

He looks all funny. I love his cute lil' face. I think his body is a bit too long (looked fine when I used the same pattern before, with my pink teddy, so it must be the gauge) but my boyfriend says it looks fine, and he loves it. He's named it KaL. I'm gonna make it a little jumper like my one, too.

So yeah. I've got a few ideas of things I want to make, and I want to find sources of inspiration in new projects. It's my birthday on Monday, and on Tuesday my boyfriend's taking me to London (so I can go to build-a-bear!) and I'm gonna get some more knitting stuff; needles, buttons, etc. I need ideas of things to make, so I can keep busy through the summer. I'm also quite interested in learning how to crochet, and how to do quilting as I'd love to make a big blanket.

But that's enough for now - and this post has taken FOREVER to write as the pictures have taken aaages to load as I'm using a dongle - and I'm off to find ideas of things to make next.