Of Mice and Elephants

Well I promised y'all a "ta-da" post didn't I, so here it is!

A few weeks ago, I was at work (I think) when a little tweet came through on my phone: "can you crochet an elephant?" it said.  I thought about it for a minute or two and then tweeted back "I've never crocheted an elephant before but I sure can give it a try!"

My Twitter friend Lisa (@sewsofthandmade) wanted me to crochet a toy elephant for her two-and-a-half year old son Nathan, who is elephant mad at the moment, having just discovered Dumbo.  And as I had never attempted a toy before, let alone an elephant, I was more than happy to accept the challenge and see what I could come up with.

After work, I dashed home (well, it was sort of limited to a bus ride at 30mph but you get the picture) and did a bit of a search for toy elephant crochet patterns and eventually came across three or four which I thought might fit the bill (Lisa had specified "eight to ten inches tall, really soft and cuddly") and emailed the links to the patterns over to Lisa to see what she thought.

Not long later, the repsonse arrived:  this one.

So I set about finding a suitable yarn to use.  Easier said than done when there are so many different types of yarn and even more colours to choose from!  But after a trip to John Lewis in Cardiff (any excuse to visit that store!) and some help from a certain young Scotsman, I decided to use Rowan Cashsoft DK in shade 00534 for the body, and King Cole Merino DK in shades 788, 859 and 854 for the blanket and headdress.

Once work was under way, the elephant's body parts took shape pretty quickly, although sometimes not into quite the shapes I was expecting....

Can you guess which bit is which?!

Here's Ele's body parts laid out in the right places, before stuffing:

And then began the work of stuffing all the parts and sewing everything together.  And here's where I forgot to take any more photos so the next photos are of a finished Ele, just before I packed him up ready for his journey in the post to his new home.

Ta-da!

And by kind permission of Lisa, here is Nathan with his new toy:

Lisa says to tell you he's been feeling pretty under the weather lately and so these photos don't show Nathan at his happy, bubbly best, but I think he looks just the cutest little thing ever, with his shock of blonde curls, don't you agree?


Don't go away just yet - there's something else!

After I'd finished Ele, I got an urge - a sudden flash of I-must-do-this-now-or-I-won't-sleep-tonight kind of thing.  Does anyone else get that?  Anyway, I just *had* to crochet a mouse.  I think it was mostly because I had about half a ball of the grey yarn to use up and knew that a crocheted mouse would fit the bill perfectly.  So I got Google to do it's thing, and almost immediately came across this pattern.  Perfect.  I set to, and after a couple of "lost in translation" mishaps, Millie Mouse was made:

Resting her weary head on a pile of crocheted hearts

She's a bit of a madam, but has wasted no time in making friends with the other creatures that live on my desk:

Millie Mouse with Mollie Monster

Getting annoyed with me for procrastinating:

Trying to eat the beautiful pear pincushion that another Twitter friend Beth (@missmagpiemakes) made me:

Ain't she cute though?!

Sorry for such a photo-heavy post today, I was just excited to show you all what I've been up to these last few weeks and there's nothing like a load of photos to do that!  And besides, these "ta-da" posts don't happen very often, they're quite rare here at Lemon headquarters you know... In fact, this is only my second one EVER!  But you've requested "more crochet", so more crochet is what you'll get!

I'm off to pretend I'm a kid and peak through the curtains to watch the snow fall from the skies and imagine that I'm in Narnia....

Much love,

Emmalemonade x x