365 Days of Gratitude
2020 was such an awful year globally
that on January 1, 2021 I embarked on expressing gratitude for the
life I am privileged to live. I decided to do it on Instagram as
that would require only a picture and a short explanation. I soon
realized that this was not as easy as it seemed. It's not that I'm
not grateful for EVERYTHING but coming up with a specific thing and a
related picture EVERY day is harder than I expected; and yes, I get
the irony (boo hoo, first world problems). But that's what makes it
worthwhile -- a daily remembrance that life really is good to me and
I am blessed.
Now, I decided to
flush out some of my little Instagram glimpses. Number 2
The Winter of my Knit Content
Until this winter I had never knitted
anything much more than blankets. But I came into a banana box (you
know, the ones you get at Costco checkout) full of an assortment of,
mostly baby, yarn and felt obligated to use it. It's leftover yarn
from many, many projects so it's tricky. Really only good for small
projects but there was a really big ball of multicoloured self
striping yarn in baby pinks, yellow, green, blue and white which
looked like enough for a small blanket so I did that. The blanket
has a repeating star pattern. Free pattern at
Start Knitting
Once that was done there was still a good bit of the yarn so I made
mitts and a hat to match. Free pattern at
Knitting on the Net 
My First Sweater
In my search for star patterns Baby
Yoda sweaters and hats came up. After reviewing a bunch of different
versions I finally settled on Cari Luna's free pattern at
Ravelry.com
Knitting up the parts was straightforward. But putting it all
together took some mad skills. In the process of getting internet
help I read that this is the knitter's nightmare. Ugh. It wasn't a
nightmare but it took the better part of a saturday. Free yoda hat
pattern from Shinah Chang also at Ravelry.com
Stuffies
Next up, for Valentine's Day I knitted
little stuffed hearts in red and white for my granddaughter to play
tic tac toe with. I used a really cool pattern available for free at Ravelry.com
from Amanda
Berry aka fluff and fuzz
Well, the hearts were so easy and fun I
decided to make stuffed stars for the new baby's nursery. Once again
I looked to Amanda
Berry and found a free pattern at Ravelry
https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/starfish-24
I ended up making 6 stars all different sizes with different yarns
-- experimenting with needles sizes and number of stitches depending
on the yarn type. Super easy pattern. I marveled at how adding a
stitch at one end of the row and taking a stitch away at the other
end could change a rectangle into a diamond. Weird.
My last project for this winter was
dinosaurs because somewhere along the way the new baby's parents went
from a star themed nursery to everything dinosaurs. I used a free
pattern from Canadian Living magazine
to make a T-Rex. In a couple of places the pattern is incorrect but
it was quite obvious and easy to correct. Got help from Marinda Hekel
on how to “embroider” the eyes, nose and mouth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwu-ZoJtRkg
