He drew the shapes on proportional graph paper and I swore and shouted my way through stints of shoddy darning, knitting on too-big needles and Swiss darning in the wrong sort of stitch.

Dan seems quite pleased with them though, as evidenced by his willingness to wear the jumper in public.

Here’s the teddy bear I knitted for baby Natalie. Admittedly I made the arms upside down by mistake, but even so, this is easily my favourite of all the bears I’ve knitted. Besides, the error with the arms makes it look like she’s constantly saying “Yippee!” – which I don’t think is a bad look for a teddy bear.

I’ve got better at embroidering eyes since I started on these bears, although I still struggle with noses. There’s something just right about this bear’s eyes – she’s got more character than the others. Within seconds of finishing this one it was obvious she was called Henrietta and liked moshing to The Fratellis. I wonder whether The Fratellis will still be around when Natalie is old enough to project personalities on to her toys herself.

Incidentally, I reckon this is going to be my last teddy-related blog post, for fear of ending up typecast by those nasty automated link farm websites:

Here, belatedly, is the second knitting project I finished the other week – the stripey blanket I started months ago. It’s… well, someone was kind enough to describe it as a ‘travel’ blanket. It doesn’t quite stretch across the end of our bed, but it adequately covers four knees in front of the TV.

At one point, three particular stripes reminded me of a Zoom ice lolly, and that made me think it would be fun to try knitting bits of familiar pictures (starting with confectionery wrappers) and Photoshopping the knitted bits into place.

It turns out Felix had already had a similar idea, inspired by a splendid cairn. Look at the pictures!

Don’t you just wish you would stumble across a giant knitted cairn on a country walk? Just once?

Two long-standing knitting projects got themselves finished this week. The first was this teddy bear for baby Nathan.

He’s nice and cuddly but I’m not sure this bear’s got quite as much character as the two I made in the summer. I’d been thinking of giving him a bowler hat, monocle and moustache, but Dan talked me out of it, which was almost certainly for the best.

Pattern from the slushily-named Simple Knits for Cherished Babies by Erika Knight.