gifts

Another Handmade Christmas

- Caitlyn

This is it, folks! This is the final post documenting things I made last year. After this, I can move on…to catching up from the first quarter of 2019…

I admire anyone whose holiday traditions—whatever holiday it may be—involves making gifts for their loved ones or community members. My gift-making ambitions have always grossly exceeded my available time, resources, and common sense, but in 2018 I managed to make a few little things for some of my favorite people.

Up first, and by request, bowl cozies! From top to bottom, these went to my sister, my mom, and my sister-in-law Heather and her wife Elaina.

Two bowl cozies with a yellow and grey floral exterior fabric and a solid yellow interior fabric

Two bowl cozies with a taupe and cream abstract patterned exterior fabric and taupe and cream dotted interior fabric

Two bowl cozies with light and medium blue tie-dye patterned interior and exterior fabrics

My mom saw these at a craft fair but didn’t see any in a fabric she liked, so she sent me a text suggesting they might be an easy and well-received gift. I used instructions from Happy Hour Stitches, but you can find the details on any number of sites—in fact, Helen’s Closet just posted a tutorial a little over a week ago in a new series on scrap-busting.

My sister’s bowl cozies were made with leftover fabric (you may recognize it from her casserole carrier from the previous Christmas); the others were made with fat quarters from JoAnn. I already had 100% cotton batting on hand, but I needed to purchase 100% cotton thread to stitch everything up, as polyester could melt or scorch in the microwave.

Each recipient’s bowl pair of bowl cozies was served up with a bag of soup mix.

Three pairs of nested bowl cozies, each holding a bag of pre-packaged soup mix

The other gift was for a secret Santa exchange among the members of my D&D group. By sheer coincidence I paired with Jorren, the amazing illustrator from the art exchange. He had been working hard on multiple projects leading up to December, including prints for a holiday pop-up shop and several commissions. I wanted to show my appreciation for his work, so I picked a couple of art-themed gifts: a graphic novel called Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu and a set of Pentel Arts Aquash brushes.

I needed something to round the package out, and Jorren had just debuted his freelance graphic design business, Mind Fuzz, so I got it in my head that I needed to put his logo on something. Trouble was, he wasn’t using the logo as his profile image, and I couldn’t very well ask him for a copy of it without tipping him off to my plan.

In ninja-hacker fashion, I found a photo that he shared of a t-shirt screen-printed with his logo and proceeded to manipulate it in Photoshop and Illustrator until I had a black-and-white vector image that I could scale and print as a template. I transferred the template to a remnant of black poly cotton blend, embroidered the outlines of the letterforms, and then sewed up the embroidered fabric into a sturdy pouch with a brass zipper. Ta-da!

A black zippered pouch with outline of the words "Mind Fuzz" embroidered in white in a circle in the center of the pouch

I followed instructions provided by Jedi Craft Girl, but as with the bowl cozies, there are countless examples of this and similar pouches online. My pouch is lined with the same black fabric as the shell and interlined with 100% cotton batting to hold its shape. The embroidery is regular old DMC floss in white, stitched up using a hoop and a crewel needle.

A black zippered pouch with the zipper opened to reveal a cleanly finished interior lined in the same black fabric

I ignored the dimensions in the instructions; they were too small for my purposes. My pouch is slightly smaller than I intended at 9 inches tall by 11 inches wide (at the top), but is large enough to fit Jorren’s preferred style of travel notebook, along with a handful of pencils or pens.

Just for fun, I had Justin put together a GIF of the progress shots:

No last-minute sewing, I didn’t drive myself crazy, and everyone loved their gifts—success!

FO: A Hat of His Own

- Caitlyn

When Justin and I were dating, I bought him a pair of red mittens for Christmas. After we’d gotten married but before I’d started knitting, I crocheted him a hat to match. It was made from Caron Simply Soft, it was solid red, and it was subtly textured, alternating two rounds of single crochet with a round of double (or was it half-double?) crochet. He wore it for a winter or two before he lost it, and it was another winter or two before I plucked up the enthusiasm to make a replacement.

By that time I’d started knitting, but only just, and I wasn’t confident in my ability to knit in the round. I didn’t want lack of muscle memory to slow me down or uneven tension to spoil the result, so I stuck to the crochet I was familiar with. I also went back to the same yarn and pattern. But because I made the replacement during an interstate drive and didn’t have Justin’s head handy for reference, I ended up increasing a few too many times, and the finished hat was too big around and much too long, even for his larger-than-average 24″ head. He wears it anyway, but with a sizable cuff at the bottom to keep it in place and out of his eyes.

Now, with more than a few successful knit hats in my collection, I felt the time had come to make Justin the better-fitting—and warmer!—hat he needed and deserved. Needed, because the red hat obviously no longer passes muster in this more experienced maker’s opinion, and the 3″ difference in our head sizes means we can’t share hats even if wanted to. Deserved, because he’s a reservoir of patience and support when it comes to my hobbies and a gracious recipient of anything I make—including less-than-stellar dinners and off-beat jokes—and therefore knitworthy (the lost hat notwithstanding).

So, hot on the heels of Jonah the D&D dice bag, here’s a wonderfully woolly, cabled hat for Justin. He picked out the (free) pattern, Brigid Hat and Mitts from Willow Yarns, and the yarn, madelinetosh Tosh DK in Chicory from Warm ‘n Fuzzy.

The hat is designed to fit a 21″ head circumference, which is pretty typical for adult hats and thus too small for Justin. To compensate, I added a repeat of the cable pattern but went down a needle size from the recommendation, finding the sweet spot that yielded a hat exactly 24″ around. For more technical details, check out my project page on Ravelry.

Like all hats, I found this one satisfying to knit because it practically flew off my needles—even after casting on, knitting through the first few rounds of the body, and then frogging and re-starting to get the right size, it only took me two weeks from start to finish. The cables were a little different than ones I’d knit before, because there are places where one crosses under another and then vanishes instead of continuing to travel away, but this kept things interesting for me. And because every cross was two-over-two, they were easy to accomplish without a cable needle and easy to fix if I made a mistake.

Justin’s been wearing the hat practically every day since it was finished, and he gets compliments on it any time we go out. He loves to tell people that I made it, and I love him for that. Knitworthy, indeed.

FO: Jonah

- Caitlyn

If there’s a list of the top 10 most contentious topics in crafting, surely selfish/unselfish creating is on it. For myself, I’m in the staunchly selfish camp. I tried my hand at a bit of unselfish sewing about half a decade ago, and it did not go well. In hindsight, the attempt was ill-advised, and had all the hallmarks of a project doomed to failure: keeping the project a surprise instead of consulting the intended recipient, using techniques and materials that were new to me, and sewing on a deadline all conspired to make it a less-than-stellar experience for me or the victim beneficiary of my well-meaning intentions. Since then, I’ve shied away from hand-making gifts, as I don’t trust myself to focus on what’s actually important—the desires of the receiver, rather than my desires as a maker-giver—and I’ve become rather jealous of my creative time anyway.

I broke my streak when Justin joined a Dungeons & Dragons group and asked me to knit him a dice bag. It’s his first grown-up D&D campaign, and thus his first opportunity to purchase a fancy set of dice. We had both seen knit, crochet, and hand-worked bags—in fact, one of the members of group has a handmade bag—but he wanted something special to commemorate what he hopes will be a long and prosperous (and non-fatal) adventure. His character, Odo Fridtjofsen, is a trident-wielding fisherman, and Justin felt that it would be appropriate to have a suitably themed bag to wrangle and transport his all-important dice. I couldn’t agree more.

Justin picked the pattern, the Fish Purse by Doreen Blask (available for purchase on Ravelry). He also picked the yarn,
Blue Moon Fiber Arts Super Sparkle in Sapphire, because of all the yarns at our LYS Warm ‘n Fuzzy, it reminded him of scales the most.

I made several alterations to the pattern. I knit it in a fingering yarn held double instead of a DK yarn held single; I used a US 3 to get a firm gauge without the possibility of holes. I omitted the scales but added a bottom fin that mirrors the top fin. Instead of creating I-cord drawstrings, I created two three-strand braids using six equal lengths of yarn for each braid. Before knotting each braid I added a sterling silver charm that Justin picked out. One is an anchor, the other a ship’s helm. I threaded both drawstrings through the eyelets so that the ends hang downward, like the barbels of a catfish. I omitted the shoulder strap as well.

Justin’s favorite part, and the thing I was most worried about, was replacing the knit eyes called for in the pattern with googly eyes. I wasn’t sure if we would be able to find sew-on ones, and when we did I wasn’t sure if they would be the right size (they’re 20 mm). Once I sewed them on, though, they proved to be exactly the thing to bring the whole project together.

Jonah is currently safeguarding 14 dice, but he could easily hold twice as many. He’s weathered several intense sessions already, and could easily outlast Odo if the party keeps up the shenanigans. Justin is more than pleased, and I’m happy to have made something he’ll treasure as much as his memories of the game.

Does this herald the beginning of more unselfish crafting? As a matter of fact, it does. 🙂 Stay tuned!