Teddy Bears

March 1st, 2009

A few months back I bought this cute little book of knitted teddy bears called The Knitted Teddy Bear. I love knitting things that are going to be useful, and I just can’t bring myself to knit all kinds of baby clothes that the little one will grow out of in a few months. However, a teddy bear can be of use for a very long time.

I had some Frog Tree Alpaca sport weight leftover from knitting Mom’s shawl, browsed through the book for the right teddy, and cast-on…again…and again… This is not a cleverly knit-in-one-piece-and-sew-closed teddy bear. Normally I avoid heavily seamed pieces whenever I can because, well frankly if you can then why not? I started losing track of what was what so I had to pin my finished pieces to a piece of paper and label them.

It looks like a mess right now, but just bear with me (pun not intended…I wish I was that clever). Once all the pieces are sewn up and the ends are all hidden away it’ll be a cute little brown bear of a thing. It’s going to be a bit on the small side, but I kind of like that. Toys don’t always need to be huge.

A bit on this particular pattern book. There are quite a few cute little bear patterns in it, and I imagine once you’ve done a few you get the hang of it. It has a nice variety to choose from, but the way the patterns are written can be wierd. It’s not wrong necessarily, but it took me a little bit to decipher some of the wording. For example…

Inc 1 st at each end of row.

When I first looked at that sentence, I thought it was telling me to increase at the end of each row. I began to wonder if this wasn’t written by a native English speaker, because that didn’t make sense based on previous rows. After a few more readings though, I realized that it meant to increase at the beginning and end of that particular row (or “at each end”). Not that this is a wrong way to describe what you’re doing, but in my experience it’s much more  common to see that written as something like “m1 at beg. and end of row” replacing m1 with whatever increase is being used of course.

So far this is a very thorough pattern. We’ll see when it comes to construction how the instructions are.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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