August 30, 2012

Sleepy Owl

I got a letter in the mail inviting me to a baby shower for one of my relatives in Houston. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it that weekend. Hopefully my little crochet owl will make up for it.

She is having a girl and has chosen colors of cream, lilac and sage for the nursery. They also have had one wall painted with a countryside mural. With that in mind, I set about looking through my patterns for something cute. I was also looking for something quick since I need to have it arrive on time and so I decided against most of the patterns in my Evernote folder. Of course, the very last one in the folder... perfect.

This pattern is not really a pattern per se, but rather a set of "here is what I did, kind of". It requires basic crochet skills, knowing how to achieve a circle in crochet, as well as decision making skills. Just the kind of off-the-cuff pattern I was looking for! These Owlets are meant to be pretty small, but I wanted to make it bigger, so just following the patterns same loose guidelines, I made one that came out at around 7 inches wide by 7 inches tall by 6 inches deep or so.

Finished Owlet.
After knowing what colors they had picked for the babies room, it was much easier to pick out yarn. I chose a variegated purple, pink, blue, cream and yellow yarn to do the body in. I had hoped it might look like random blotches of color when done, but I picked the perfect number of stitches in a row to make the colors line up from row to row. So the body has kind of a tye dye effect going on. I then found a lilac yarn in a huge bag of yarn I was given. And after that I found the perfect sage green color in another bag for a project I have abandoned. I also took a dark purple for embroidering details. So with the right color pallet lined up, I set to work.

Backside, you can see the head point start and the tail.
Since this pattern is so simple, it took about 3 hours to make. Longest parts were the details, of course. The body is a simple bowl shape; a circle base with the same number of stitches up to the top. You have to kind of eyeball where to stop. I did do a little decreasing unlike the pattern to make the butt a little fatter than the head. Then you just stuff and stitch up the top and add a few more stitches at the corners to make them stand like ears. Starting a little behind the head seam, you crochet into the body and then decrease every row to get the pointed shape. I thought about using buttons for eyes, but I always want to make these friendly for small kids to actually use, so I just crocheted some circles in white, added a border of the sage, and then embroidered sleepy eyes and eyelashes.

I tacked down a good amount of the nose point so it wouldn't come up. You can see the feet, too.
Since this one was larger than the ones from the pattern, I decided it could have a little more detail. So I kind of made up a pattern for some clawed feet and a tail for the backside. I stopped there, fearing that too much more detail (like wings and little sleepy Zzzz's) might be too much. Overall pretty cute I think. :)