Garn Boet - The Yarn Nest

Today’s project to be presented is the bear coat. For those not recollecting this knit, it’s a coat for a 25 (or perhaps 20) cm long teddy bear, knitted in Regia Silk on 2 mm dpns. The pattern is Eunny’s Anemoi mitten pattern, repeated 5 times in the coat. Last time showed was the front steek cut open. One reason why this knit is advancing so slowly is that I try to make it without showing it to the girls. A new edition of the Bear Catalogue is about to be published with brand new knits. And this time, in order to reduce the stress on my self, will most of the models be ready before the catalogue is issued. I love knitting miniatures, but having the girls hanging over my shoulder asking me when I think the garments they ordered from the Bear Catalogue will come is an effective way to take away the joy of knitting.
The system is that the girls put an order (pre delivered order forms) in a letter box in my office. Normal delivery time for an item is two weeks, but there can of course be force majeure of different kinds. In that case will a letter be sent to the girls, explaining why the order is delayed. And when the order is finished will the item be delivered with Rabbit post to our main mail box. I got the idea for this Bear Catalogue thing from Tasha Tudor, famous American children’s book author and illustrator, who made a very similar thing for her own children. They paid for the orders with buttons.

I have since last showing the coat sewn the arm steeks, cut them open, and knitted the first sleeve. The sleeves will be slightly bell shaped, ending as you can see with a blue-white-blue striping, the same way as the hem of the coat. The needle is there to keep the sleeve straight, I have not blocked it, and the interfacing is rolling like h*ll. I have picked up the stitches for sleeve number two, but not knitted anything (you see, Tuesdays are the days of my time hog lesson, and the only knitting time I have got today was while watching the children swim,
as I was down with a flu last week and doesn’t yet feel up to exercising).The front will be striped in the same way, but perhaps with slightly wider front bands. This bear has been at home when dinner has been served, and her belly is round. Rounder than what I had taken into consideration when counting stitches for the coat. But one good thing with bear knitting is that they don’t complain if a garment is too tight. And if the coat won’t fit over the belly, well, they don’t complain over cold clothes either. And they don’t get the flu, blessed small teddies.

I’ll be working on the bear clothing gallery today too. There are some pictures of clothes and knits made in the pre blogging era, but I have not yet uploaded the knitted items I made last year. And the layout of the pictures is not optimal either. Anyway, the link can be found in the sidebar.


As an update on Swallowtail I can report that the twelfth repeat of the budding pattern is done. I’ll try to finish the budding pattern today, and move forward to the lily of the valley pattern and the much talked about nupps tomorrow.