Hooded Dog Sweater

Knitted Hexagonal Quilt WIP

A couple months ago I started making the blocks for a knitted quilt made of hexagons. I started off with a white yarn that has flecks of four different colors: blue, pink, yellow, and green. Then I got those colors, and started knitting up the hexagons making the white yarn the focus. I've finished all the blue hexagons, and have started working on the yellow. I'm about a quarter of the way finished with knitting all the blocks I'll need!

New Puppy - New Sweaters!

With the advent of a new puppy being brought home comes a desire to knit lots of new sweaters! Here are a few of the sweaters that worked the best for Ethel and I. Ethel doesn't photograph well, so bear with the goofy puppy shots.

This is not the first sweater I made for Ethel. It's the second. The first didn't turn out near big enough! This one fit much better, but we struggle to get her feet through the sleeves, and it turns out she doesn't enjoy getting her sweaters put on her. Being such a small dog though, she absolutely freezes in cold weather though, so they're pretty necessary.

I made this one next. It fits much better than the first wearable one, but it's a little short in the back. Ethel is a very long dog!

I made this one most recently, and while it's absolutely too big for her, she seems to be the most okay with wearing it. I will use this pattern for the next sweater I made for her. Her next sweater will use the k2, p2 ribbing instead of k1, p1. I'll make the turtle neck shorter again, and shorted the length of the body of the sweater. I do love how easy it is for her to get into and out of this sweater though, so I think I will keep the size of the body and sleeves the same.

Dog Sweaters Knitted in the Round

Here are the latest hand knitted sweaters I've made for Opal. The sleeves are much longer, and each was knitted in the round to eliminate awkward stiffness where the sleeves were joined to the body of the sweater. They both have a much more natural fit.

Bulbasaur Mini Quilt

A few weeks ago I was house sitting at my mom's for a few days. While she was gone she gave me permission to utilize her sewing room, so I picked out a few fabrics, and decided to make a mini quilt! It took me a few hours to collect the fabrics and cut up my squares one night, and then I spent a few hours the next day piecing everything together. I used a whole piece of white fabric for the backing, and then stitched int eh ditch between all the squares for the quilting.

It's really simple, and really small, but it was really fun, and perfect for a short stay at my mom's!

Pikachu

I finally finished the Pikachu quilt! After spending several weeks letting my machine learn it's lesson, because I was having tension issues, I came back with a positive mentality and set out to do as good a job as possible on this last quilt.

It took me a little less than 50 hours to complete this quilt with the most time being spent on quilting (about 13 hours.) The binding presented a new challenge for me. This quilt features a hole in the middle which meant I had to hand sew the binding. Luckily I remembered the importance of ironing before sewing, and didn't have too much trouble getting all those corners taken care of.

The back of the quilt was made of six columns of scrap "pixels" and two panels of muslin on either side.

The quilting was fun, but presented a new challenge as well. I quilted around the binding like previous quilts, and around major features of the Pokemon, but this time I decided to add much more quilting, so I pretty much quilted around every major fabric change. That still left lots of unquilted areas, so I decided to quilt around certain individual pixels.

Dog Sweaters

It's absolutely NOT sweater weather anymore, but I've just finished knitting another sweater for my Catahoula Leaopard Dog, Opal, and I'd like to share all the sweaters I've made for her in the past as well.

First I'd like to say that I believe clothes are for utility, and if your dog doesn't need clothes, I would recommend not putting clothing on your dog. A sweater is nice for cold weather, but it doesn't protect your dogs feet so you still have to be very careful their feet aren't getting too cold as well!

I also believe that some dogs might not enjoy wearing clothes so you've got to be careful not to make wearing clothes something the dog hates. The first time I tried putting a sweater on Opal I was very surprised to learn that she was so excited to wear her sweater. She enthusiastically put it on (with my help) and seemed to enjoy continuing to wear it.

I started looking for free dog sweater patterns online and came across this neat pattern where you could input your dogs measurements and it would output a pattern tailored to your dog's size. I wondered how effective it might be, but I put in Opal's measurements and quickly knitted up a little sweater using their pattern. This is what I got:

This sweater is pretty ugly. In fact I have no idea where it is right now, but from there I modified the pattern even more to get a better fit. That's when I made this sweater:

I really enjoyed learning how to knit the intarsia so I could use several colors to make a nice argyle pattern.

And once I had finished that sweater I felt like I was a pro at intarsia and decided I'd like to try a more complicated pattern using the same method. It didn't come out as well as I would have liked. The yarn pulls in weird places and is loose in others. If you don't look too closely it's still an okay sweater though! This one compliments her natural colors as well, and it's got a lovely wintery feel to it, which is exactly what I was going for.

I was quite disappointed in how that last one came out so it took me a while to feel like making another one, but I was finally inspired by texture as it compares to the 2D patterns I had been using with multiple colors. This time I wanted to make a sweater which had a lovely texture to it, and so I searched and searched for an interesting pattern. The color choice is a bit unfortunate - I feel this sweater makes her look a bit like a clown - but this is the best fitting sweater yet!