As you know, we have a "new" little one in our family and she'll be turning 1! soon. I've already made her a little star tree so she can learn her colours and sizes but I stlil wanted to give her something else - something fun and "just for her". When I was really young, my grandma used to make me what I now called scrap donkeys. They were peanut shaped and she made me all sorts of sizes from various scraps of material she had. At one point, I had a family of donkeys. This memory inspired me to want to do something similar for Yi Ying. I had happened upon the Bunny Square pattern and thought:. This is brilliant! Here's the same thing I could do except in bunny form!
As it so happened, Hurricane Douglas was barreling towards us and it was a perfect time to do something non-electrical. Thank goodness knitting doesn't require electricity! 😉👍 So, I took down my scrap yarn box, picked out a skein of leftover Red Heart yarn, looked at it and decided to double up the yarn (I wanted a bulky yarn), then casted on (using the long tail method) what I thought would be 100 sts. As I got near the end of my yarn, I was 10 sts short! 😒🤦 So, off the needles the yarn went and I recasted on again .
Once I got my cast on stitches right, I proceeded to use my favorite stitch pattern: seed stitch. I merrily knitted away for about 2 or 3 inches until I began to notice that I was quickly running out of yarn. 😒😭🤔 This posed a problem, especially since I was not remotely at the halfway point! So, I decided to rip everything out (again) and casted on (again), this time using just a single strand of yarn and merrily caught up to where I was at. It worked out a bit better this time. At least I was able to get 21cm (8 5/16 in) of material before I had to transition to another set of yarns to finish off the body (this bunny was a very good stash buster! 🙌). I knitted 160 rows to make the square. Here's what it looks like:
Now that this one is made, I thought that maybe I should make her another one for Christmas so that this (not so) little bunny has a companion ... 🤔🤗 And so, I dug through my stash and decided that a solid cream bunny would be the perfect Christmas bunny - a snow bunny!🎄🎅☃️ Then I dug through all of my stichtionaries and thought a moss circle pattern would be interesting on it; it would give the bunny some texture without being too boring. It also "matched" (but wasn't too matchy matchy) the first bunny a little bit (seed stitch is in the same "family" as moss stitch). This, I casted on 49 stitches (Hubby recommended that I try something "smaller") and proceeded to follow the pattern (the moss circle is a 16 row repeat) nearly 5 times to create my square. Here's what her Christmas bunny looks like:
I had to wait to stuff it; it was virtually impossible, really dangerous and ridiculously expensive to find poly fill! 🤦😒 The most inexpensive way to obtain poly fill was to purchase a 10 lb box but, it was virtually impossible to find, much less purchase it.🤦 So, the next best thing was to purchase 2 5 lb boxes. I was finally able to obtain it for a somewhat reasonable price through Amazon.🎉🍀 Here's how they're shaping up:
And how they look, completely done:
Front/Face
Left
Right
"Sleeping"
Front/Face
Right
Left
And, in case you wanted to know, here's how I made the Rainbow pom pom; I used my Clover 85mm pom pom maker and wrapped it like this:
I used my 65mm Clover pom pom maker for the other bunny.
And for size, this is how big the big bunny is:
I'm hoping that as she grows older, for every milestone (or whenever she asks for one whichever comes first (or both😉)), she'll have another bunny to add to her brood (or at least until she tells me she wants a different animal or would rather have me knit her something else). ♥️🙌
I hope she likes it! 🤞
Birthday Bunny Update:
At first, Yi YIng was not exactly thrilled with her bunny but, it seems as if she finally found something very fascinating with it:
Me and My Birthday Bunny
But, really, this is my favorite part of the Bunny 😉😍
