Lumpy cotton-linen bear

This little guy had been sitting in a drawer for months, missing an ear and a tail, so I finished him off last night. I'm pretty bad at sewing amigurumi pieces together, but hopefully the wonkiness adds to his charm. In my opinion, eyebrows maketh the bear. I don't know why more people don't give them eyebrows.

One thing I did succeed at sewing on was his tail. Unlike anything else I've ever made, this dude can sit upright without leaning on anything. Even the weight of his giant, misplaced head won't topple him over!

Oh yes, and the main point of this post was the yarn. I wanted to try something with a bit more texture than my usual double knit acrylic, to make the teddy more teddylike, but a lot of the hairy stuff looks quite hard to work with, especially for small, tight stiches. I found this Stylecraft cotton & linen Sircco DK in a local yarn shop and was mostly drawn to the pretty dusky colours. I'm not sure the lady in the shop had much faith in my making it work for a bear.

It was tricky to work with at first because of the thin and thickness of the yarn. I couldn't really see the stiches I was trying to work into, but with the strong fibre running through it, I could feel them easily. I'm pretty pleased with the result. I like his knobbly texture How could you not want to hug him!?

New blog! and crochet cushion beginnings

Hey look, I have a blog now! :) After a long summer of doing things outside, I need indoor things to fill my time. A new crochet project, taking photos of said crochet project, and blogging them should do the trick! I'm making a cushion cover, using Lucy of Attic24's Summer Garden Granny Square pattern, and her join-as-you-go method, which I've not tried before, but am expecting to be considerably less soul-destroying than joining everything together at the end.

I was driving myself crazy trying to pick a colour scheme so I just narrowed it down to 9 definite colours and 3 maybes, plus a rough idea of balancing out colours and... lightnesses (there must be a better word than that) in each square, and am just going to go crazy within that and see how it turns out.

These are the colours. I think I'm going to use the yellow with the others, but I'm either not going to use the white or cream, or use 1 of them for the outer round of each square.

Terrific progress so far! Given the strength of the cold I have at the moment, I think that's a good evening's work. I'm mustering up the courage to go to a craft group on Monday, so this'll be something I can take along with me.