Sharon’s Knitted Duck

Photo copyright to Sharon of Making Stuff http://shazronnie.blogspot.com/

Happy Thursday! It’s been a little quiet around here lately, but today I’ve got an adorable knitted duck to share with you. Behold! Sharon of Making Stuff (Aka Avoidance of Housework) has knitted this super sweet duck from my free Knitted Duck Plush pattern. [also on Ravelry]  Didn’t it turn out lovely? I heart Sharon and all of those who share pictures of what they’ve made from my patterns. It gives me such a warm, fuzzy feeling inside!  Thanks, Sharon!

Speaking of Sharon’s blog, you just HAVE to check it out. All of her baking (wow, look at her blog banner… it looks good enough to lick the monitor screen!) looks so delicious. I love how beautiful her Battenburg turned out and I am definitely trying out her Fougasse recipe. Yum!  Plus… she has a PINK kitchen! It doesn’t get any better than that.

Thanks for making my day, Sharon! :)

Forget sock monkeys — YOU need an original Sock-thulhu!

Sock-thulhu © Lesley Karpiuk

Sock monkeys are sooooooo 1930s. What you need is one of my original designs: the Sock-thulhu, a Cthulhu plush design à la sock monkey. Made from soft, fuzzy chenille-style socks and stuffed with polyfil, Sock-thulhus will steal your heart with one look or a beat of their gently reinforced wings.  While socks and Cthulhus have gone together before, the Sock-thulhus’ pattern and construction is like no other and produces a one-of-a-kind plushy delight perfect for cuddling.

Sock-thulhus stand around 6 inches tall. You can buy one in my Etsy shop! Currently I only have three: one mint green, one purple, and one orange. I hope to get a blue and pink one up soon and more to come as well.

Hope you have a great week!

Sock-thulhus are a creature and pattern legally registered and © copyright to me, Lesley Karpiuk (pinktoque) of the Pink Toque Craft Blog http://craftblog.pinktoque.com

Just Ducky!

Photo copyright to Jill D'Aubery

I love, love LOVE when people send me emails, showing off things they’ve knitted from a pattern or made from a tutorial of mine. This week I got a lovely email from Jill D’Aubery who made her own version of my knitted duck plush, [on ravelry as well] making some fabulous adjustments to the wings and beak to suit. She even added a tie! The changes and resulting duck is simply FANTASTIC and Jill has given me permission to share her pattern changes with all of you so that you can follow her method on your own ducks. But first, the back story. Jill writes,

“My brother-in-law, who is in his 60s, is in love with rubber duckies.  For years now I have knitted something for his wife, but never for him…until I saw your pattern!  I had seen the Lion Brand pattern and felt exactly the same way you did about it.  So I tried your pattern and made a couple of changes and the result is in the attachment.  It’s adorable!!!  I gave the ducky a tie since it’s for a guy and I knitted the tie out of silk embroidery floss with a #1 needle…very difficult but very wonderful.”

“The changes I made were to the wings and beak.  I did the wings lengthwise and bound off tightly which give them a little scalloped effect. 

Photo copyright to Jill D'Aubery

Wings
Cast on 14 st. 
Knit every row for 10 rows or so…until the wing is the size you want.
Bind off tightly.
Attach to the body at the bound off end/side. 

The Beak
Cast on 7 st.
Knit in Stockingknit stitch (knit on right side, purl on wrong side) for 6 rows,
k 2tog on each side, purl one row, add 1 stitch on each side and continue for 5 more rows. 
Bind off.
Attach to body from the slightly narrow middle with the smooth side on the outside.
The beak curls nicely and opens just like a ducky beak!  Of course, you can make the beak larger or smaller as you wish.  Also, I attached the feet on the narrow end so that they sort of flare out like a duck foot does.”

Picture copyright to Jill D'Aubery

Now don’t you agree, the result is fantastic? Jill’s ducky rocks my socks off, and when I first read her email and saw the little knitted tie on her ducky, I squealed aloud. SO cute. Great job, Jill, and thank you so much for sharing your pattern with us!

Around here it’s almost time for a long weekend, so hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll be back to update you on our Father’s Day sock progress soon!

Tags: duck, ducky, featured artists, plush

Crafty Crochet Weekend

It was a busy weekend, and yet somehow I managed to sneak in three whole crochet projects. Crazy, I know. It’s the official start of spring break for me, and my mom and grandma are coming to visit later in the week. Between getting organized, cleaning and getting some things around the house done we’ve been meaning to complete, I am amazed that I was able to get so many extracurricular crafting done this weekend, too. Woohoo!

First on the list is a crochet sackboy from Little Big Planet. I stumbled upon this pattern and felt up to the challenge. I have a friend who loves the game and so I decided to whip one up to send his way. It’s off to the Netherlands tomorrow! He turned out okay — I added the little yellow ribbon for flair — but I felt the zipper part was a bit messy. It was my first go at jointing limbs on a crochet stuffie, too. All in all I think he turned out pretty cute and I’m sure he’ll be well received when he arrives.

Second this weekend was another gift for a friend; this time a colleague of mine at work. I crocheted a 12 ft tall purple bird. Well, not exactly 12 whole feet tall (try 17 inches), but there’s a bit of an inside joke with this bird. Each morning on the bus run for our school, this other teacher friend of mine puts on kids music for the kiddos. The kids really love this one tape (yes, tape) of songs and refuse to listen to anything else. Let’s just say that after three months, the tape is starting to get a bit annoying. But the songs are cute and it makes the students happy, so who cares, right? My teacher friend shared with me that she really hates this one song on the tape, and it’s a song about a “12ft tall purple bird.” I of course told the students that she looooooooves the song and that it’s her favorite, and so now whenever the song comes on the kids will say, “Oh, isn’t this your favorite song?” to her, and she has to just agree with them. It’s good for a laugh, even though I get the evil eye, haha. So I imagined what the “12ft tall purple bird” from the song would look like, and voila.  I cannot wait to gift this to her after spring break.

The last thing I made this weekend was a little tiny Cthulhu! Oh my gosh, isn’t he cute?! I could just eat him up. I made him for Lucas, who found the pattern online awhile back. I of course then found it in the Ravelry database and queued it up. Today I was browsing my queue to find something to make and was reminded of this little guy. He was a quick crochet, and I just loved the way he turned out. I opted for no arms because I’m weird like that, but he does have wings and those oh-so-cute tentacles. If he had a nose, I’d want to rub noses with him. He now sits on top of a stack of blank CDs and DVDs on Lucas’ desk. I think I need to make a pink one for my own desk. TOO cute! It makes me want to make more… and more… and more…

My side-by-side cowl neck sweater is still sitting where it was 2 posts ago. It’s such a time consuming project that I’ve found I really have to be in the mood to do something incredibly repetitious for long periods of time to get anywhere with it. I’ll have plenty of time for that whenever we make the move back home to the states. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here on my craft blog yet, but Lucas and I made an announcement over on our personal blog that we’ve decided to move back to Indiana to be near family. Mostly because we’re ready to start a family of our own, and we don’t want to be so far away from them when we do. You can read all about it over on our blog. We go in tomorrow morning to start paperwork, and are crossing our fingers we can be ready to move by the end of the summer. That means 4 days in a UHAUL with my boys and lots of crochet projects to keep me busy ;) Here’s hoping! Take care and have a wonderful week :)

crochet

Tags: Cthulhu, Little Big Planet, sackboy

Easter & Another Feature!

Yes I know St. Patrick’s Day comes first, but today I was in the mood to create a bunny, and so I drew up the image I had in my head and made a quickie pattern. It was kinda nice dragging the sewing machine out of the basement and rooting through a large box of my fabric to find just the right stuff. This bunny is made from fuzzy felt and regular craft felt. I used the machine to assemble the body and ears, and then hand sewed the facial features on. Nothing majorly special, but I did love how the face turned out :)

So that’s my crafty donation for the weekend. And what a busy weekend it was! I spent most of my weekend in a two 8-hour day first aid course for work. I am thankful that my instructors had a great sense of humor because it actually helped make the day not seem to drag on. But I did feel like my weekend flew by way too fast, with very little extra time to craft. This next week will be the same… a short four day week at work for kids, but five days of home visits to families of my students for me. The best part is that after I get through next week, it’ll officially be spring break and I’ll be done with home visits. Plus my mom and grandma will be here to visit, yay! So I’m hangin’ in there and am looking forward to more relaxing times ahead soon.

Freebie!

Oh, and it’s definitely worth mentioning that I was recently featured in the March 2009 edition of the My Memories Suite email newsletter! A layout I designed with the software (using elements I designed myself as well) was chosen as the March winner of a $20 gift certificate for products in the My Memories Suite store. The text from the newsletter reads, “This month’s gallery winner is Lesley Karpuik.  Lesley is an amazing scrapbooker and a dedicated blogger!  You can visit her blog at http://craftblog.pinktoque.com. Lesley wins a $20 certificate to the Design Shop.  To enter, post your layouts under “Fan Photos” on our Facebook page.”

How awesome is that? And wow did such nice comments make me blush. And which design did I use? My “Autumn Romance” quick page that I created and gave away for free here on my site back in November. Did you miss this freebie? Well go and grab it HERE so you’re not missing out! :) Don’t forget if you’re on Facebook to join the My Memories Suite fan group and enter to win!

Hope everyone had a great weekend <3

Tags: Easter

Celebrate Valentine’s Day With Crafts!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine’s Day! Lucas and I went out to breakfast at the Pfanntastic Pannekoek Haus, a dutch pancake house here in town that we love, despite the nasty cold I have. We spent the day lounging and I even completed a last minute craft for him. (See below.) … this evening I baked him my “famous” lasagna and we watched the hockey game. Go Flames, go!

So… now that I’ve given my Valentine’s Day present to Lucas, I can reveal all of my crafty goodness here to you!  First on the list is the big one… a completely handpainted, custom Mahjong game/tile set!

A little backstory: a few months back, some friends of ours, Caley and Kali, (the Ckalieys) had us over for dinner and game night. They had recently been taught how to play Mahjong, and they were eager to share it with us. It was somewhat of a learning process for all of us because they were a bit rusty and hadn’t had much practice, and it was fun! They had bought a Mahjong set and taught us to play that night. We enjoyed Mahjong a lot and look forward to playing more with them. Lucas has even been playing Mahjong online lately. That’s when the idea for this present hit me.

It took a lot of searching … I was unable to find blank actual Mahjong-type tiles or anything quite the same. However, I did find that there were people out there selling blank domino tiles with holes drilled into them lengthwise to be used as “beads” for designing jewellery and such. So I bought a large lot set of 350 of these blank wooden domino beads from a seller on eBay.

Once they arrived, I sorted through and picked out 145 tiles. The version of Mahjong we play is a 144 tile set with 1 extra tile to be used as the Prevailing Wind Marker. Then I set to work handpainting all 145 tiles myself, with Wikipedia’s page on Mahjong with little images of the tiles as my guide. I know my characters aren’t perfect, but I am really proud of the turnout. Once the faces of the dominoes were dry, I turned each tile over and then painted the backside of each orange… Lucas’s favourite colour. If this was to be Lucas’ custom handmade Mahjong set, I wanted it to be tailored to his likes.

Anyway, once I was done with the painting part, then I had to spend a few days using spray sealant/clear coat to give each tile a bit of extra durability and shine. The fronts and the backs, of course. Then we found this great paper-mache box at Michaels craft store (Lucas didn’t know what it was for) and I painted it black on the outside and brown on the inside to be used as the storage container for all 145 completed tiles.

I still need to print off the custom instructions I put together based on Wikipedia’s info, but the gift was very well liked, and I can’t wait to use it the next time we play Mahjong.

There are a TON of photos — I took lots along the way as I worked on this. To see them all, check out the photobucket album here… there you’ll be able to see close up photos of the different suit sets and all of the tiles, as well as “in-progress” photos. I posted this one to Craftster and my deviantART account as well.

Today while trying to get some rest and get over this cold, I worked on a little crochet Valentine’s project… a penguin stuffie. I chose to make him as Tux the (Valentine’s) Linux Penguin in honour of Lucas and I both completely making the switch to Ubuntu (Linux) on all of our machines… even mine! Here is a picture of my Tux sitting with my Ubuntu netbook.  It’s hard to tell due to the flash, but Tux is holding a little light pink heart in his left wing there. This gift was well received, and he was a quick and cute project. :)

So that’s it for now! Check back with me later in the week, as I have some Huugs to finish up and share :) It’s Family Day on Monday, so that means a long weekend for us — yay! It’s a good thing, too, as I think I’ll need the extra day to get over what’s ailing me. :( Hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine’s Day! Thanks for stopping by.

crochet

Tags: crochet, custom, General Crafts, handpainted, Linux, Mahjong, Tux, Ubuntu

Just Married! And a Few Changes Around Here

Hi!

We’re back from our fabulous wedding weekend in Las Vegas, and it’s time to update my blogs and show off all of the crafty things that were part of the celebrations. I am most proud of the wedding gift I made for Lucas — a scrapbook. And if you’ve read any of my more recent posts, you know I mean a digital scrapbook made with My Memories Suite software. I showed off a Christmas album I made and an album I made of our two dogs… but for the wedding gift album I took it one step further and had Polaroid, the company that makes My Memories Suite, do the professional printing and binding of the digital scrapbook pages and ship it to me as a physical scrapbook. The result was amazing! I was worried that the print quality or the book quality wouldn’t be as good as I was hoping for, but it was just as good if not better than I was expecting, and I will definitely be turning future digital scrapbooks into real life book creations this way. Kudos to Polaroid! I did my best to take some photos of the actual book once it arrived (see right), but you just gotta see it in person to do the quality justice. You can see the full digital version in my scrapbook.com wedding gift album. If that link doesn’t get you there, head over to my scrapbook.com profile and navigate to my gallery and then to the Wedding Gift Album.

Our favours were a lot of fun. We didn’t do anything too terribly crafty, but we did order photo coaster sets and personalized shot glasses. The photo coasters came in sets of two, and we put a 2″x2″ photo of us (seen here) in one of the coasters, and printed text with our names and the wedding date for the second coaster. They turned out really well. We put them in little pink paper bags and stamped the little bride and groom design that we used for our invites on the front of the bags. We used some cute brown and pink polka dotted ribbon to close up the bags, and I made little personalized tags to string up with the ribbon. The tags sported little pink poker chips with our name and the date on them plus the words “thank you” scrolled around the outside of the chip. While it wasn’t much, seeing all of the finished favours together made us proud of our efforts.

There was one other little thing I made for Lucas to go along with his album: a little stuffed ball and chain! As a joke I sewed a little stuffed ball and added a keychain chain to it to finish it off. He really liked the gesture and we got a good laugh out of it. Now my crafty efforts are focused on building an actual wedding scrapbook album now, showcasing photos from our wonderful wedding weekend and all of the fun we had with friends and family. I’m also trying to figure out what I want to do for a summer job since I’m done teaching this school year, so stay tuned for that wedding scrapbook as I have time to devote to working on it. If you want to see all of our wedding photos, we’ve got them posted HERE. I can’t wait to creatively collect those into a digital album! All of the photos really turned out well.

You may have noticed that my posting name has changed slightly, the actual name of the blog is a bit different, and that my profile isn’t quite the same — due to my name change I needed to change my email address that was linked to my blogger account. I managed to shift this blog over to my new gmail account, so the profile is still me, just on my new email. It’s all mostly the same, though! I also decided to give the blog a bit of a face lift since I was starting “fresh” with my new profile, and now more than ever, this blog’s subject matter spand across many various types of craftd instead of just knitting or sewing… especially with my latest obsession with digital scrapbooking. Hope you like the changes, and thanks for reading!

Happy Easter!

Just in time for Easter, I whipped up a new little design: meet my tiny knitted “gribbly bunny!” This little guy is made from satin-y acrylic yarn, which makes it really smooth and easy to work with. The pattern is one I developed myself, and I have plans to make various creatures based on the same design in the future. The series will be called “gribblies”

from urbandictionary.com:
Gribbly/Gribblies:
“In gaming, an enemy/monster that is small and/or insignificant, and usually serves no purpose other than to irritate the gamer/opponent.”

and

“In tabletop gaming, a small annoying monster that does little more than irritate.”

So these are just tiny little insignificant creatures hiding in nooks and crannies that will do little more than just irritate you if they cross your path. They like to pester and annoy whomever they come in contact with, and I like to believe that gribblies are to blame for all of those little irritating setbacks in your typical day. Having a bad day? Blame it on the gribblies! Stay tuned for more in the series down the road when I get time to create all of the ideas in my head for other little gribblies :) There just aren’t enough hours in the day!

Huug the Hug Monster©

On my way to work the other morning I got an idea in my head for a new knitted plushie pattern I wanted to create. I wanted to name him Huug, and he would be the Hug Monster… so Huug the Hug Monster©! I made a few sketches and started guesstimating stitch counts and then went home and began testing. My final result turned out pretty much how I wanted it; the face is something I want to work more on. The original idea was that Huug has two small beady little eyes and two fairly big buck front teeth sticking out. I’m not so good with embroidery on knitting, so I hope that my future versions of Huug’s face turn out a little better with some tweaking. Anyway, he was originally released here as a fairly popular free pattern, however due to a retail venture I’ve decided to remove it. Sorry :( Huug the character and his knit/crochet pattern was officially and legally copyrighted recently for said venture. I will share more Huugs I make in the future and more backstory about this wonderful creature in the future instead.

Huug the Hug Monster© can / will come in many different colours — I just used orange because this Huug is for my fiance, Lucas. I envision Huugs of every colour of the rainbow and even made from fuzzy and furry yarns to make hairier cousins.

Quacking Up Over Knitting

I finally put the finishing touches on the knitted plush duck I attempted a few days ago. It’s based on the pattern by Lion Brand with a few Toque-ish adjustments. The basic idea is that you knit a square — I believe the pattern calls for garter stitch — and then you fold it in half to form a triangle and sew up one side. You then have a cone that you need to stuff with polyfill, sew closed, and add your ducky details. The beak, feet, and eyes are all cut from felt just like in the pattern, (I wish I were savvy enough to have been able to knit them all together as part of the pattern instead), and sewn on. I was really unhappy when I was finished at first; I enlarged the pattern to begin with, didn’t use fun fur like the pattern called for, decided to use a stockinette stitch instead, and somehow it just didn’t look as “cute” and “duck shaped” as the Lion Brand pattern when I was done. Lucas suggested adding a few stitches to form more of a line/definition between the head and neck, and I did. I also decided to embellish on that by adding a ribbon. See what you think! I’ve decided to keep this one as a tester and perhaps use some more “fuzzy” yellow yarn that I found in my assorted box in the basement next time. I’d love to make one for Somer for Christmas. Oliver thought it was pretty fantastic, but he’s a little biased. I think he thought that the duck was for him, lol.

Yesterday I posted my back-and-forth thoughts on whether or not to use circular needles to knit the blanket I was wanting to make for Lucas’ mom for Christmas. I decided to take the plunge, risky I know, but it’s going really well! I will admit I probably should’ve chosen a smaller project to serve as my intro into using circular needles, but it was only awkward for the first row. I’m only on the 6th row, but already by the 2nd row I was feeling more comfortable with the setup. I’m really looking forward to this blanket now! I can already see how much better the finished product will be. I’m not doing anything fancy; I nabbed a pair of size 10, 36 inch Takumi bamboo needles for the project and some jumbo skeins of yarn that fades between various shades of blues, which is Lucas’ mom’s favourite colour. On the needles I casted on 130 stitches and plan to go back and forth between knitting a row and purling a row, or stockinette stitch, because I like the way it looks when it’s done. And that’s it. I’m really excited about the final product already, and I’ve got loads of work yet to go. I’ll keep you updated ;)