Toto

The third and final part of the Dorothy costume I made for World Book Day (see here) was not something to wear, but rather an accessory to place in the pocket of the pinny I was wearing. It also happened to be the favourite part of my costume for the children at school. I made a knitted Toto. 

To make the dog, I used the book, 'Best In Show: Knit Your Own Dog', as I did when making the pug for my friend, and chose to make the West highland Terrier, and used some wool that I had stashed away from making a bear for my wife several years ago. 

The wool I used made it rather interesting to sew up the dog as it made seeing the individual stitches rather tricky. I took this as both a good and a bad thing though as it meant that although I couldn't be as accurate in the stitching as I might usually be, I figured that equally, nobody would be able to tell!

After I'd finished knitting and sewing up Toto, I made him a little name tag from a length of ribbon and a small circle of card which I simply hole punched and threaded onto the ribbon.

So, there you have it, the final piece of my Book Day costume, all of which cost me £6 in total, and was mostly made up of materials I already owned. It also took only about a week of my time, so all-in-all, took much less time than it's taken me to blog about them!

All sewn up

You may recall that back in May of last year, I laid out the Birthday Blanket (as blogged about here) and began the rather large job of sewing all 121 squares together. Yesterday I finally completed that task and gave the finished thing to my wife. She was rather surprised as she had no idea I'd recently been sewing together the last couple of rows, but loved the finished product. 

I know you're wanting to see the blanket now, so here's a photo of it on our double bed (to give you an idea of size):

After all that hard work (and time), laying the blanket out on the bed was very satisfying for me. It was also the first time I really knew the size of the blanket. Upon finding this out, I realised that although the blanket is wide enough for a double bed, it's not quite long enough. This may not be a problem at all, depending on whether we use this blanket as a bed blanket, or as a throw for use on the sofa. It's therefore possible that this blanket still isn't finished! I may yet add a couple of rows to make the blanket that little bit more bed-sized and it's still possible that I'll add a border of some kind, just to finish off the edges.

But, for now at least, this blanket is finished, a year and four months after I started making it!

Who Doesn't Love a Freebie?

Not a whole lot has been going on over here what with having less time to complete projects than I had in France. The Birthday Blanket is slowly getting sewn together and I also completed a mini cross-stitch project over a couple of evening last week. 

The cross-stitch kit came free with CrossStitcher magazine that my mother picked up with the shopping one evening, and made a sweet little bookmark that I have given to my wife (she generally reads more than I do).

Laying out the Birthday Blanket

I set myself a target to complete the Birthday Blanket during our time here in Grenoble, and in this post I had only thirty-nine days to finish the knitting of 46 more squares! I'd like to announce that I've managed this; all 121 squares for the blanket are finished, hooray!

This is them, all of them:

You'll notice in this picture that the cream coloured squares aren't yet blocked. 

So, I figured I'd best lay out this blanket just to check that it looked good in its final design still (although I don't really know what I'd have done if it didn't...)

This is the blanket in the configuration that I drew out on paper

But, as I'd already suspected, the top left quarter was looking a little dark with the brown and purple squares. I therefore swapped out the purple ring from that quarter for the red ring in the bottom right corner, and we had this ...

More balanced, don't you think?

Now I just need to sew all 121 squares together ... not sure that'll get done before we go back to England, but at least all the knitting is done! (...other than the border which will be done at some point, but shhh)