Following on from the idea of making some little 'pocket-money' items for sale at craft fairs, I started to look for key-ring decorations. This Babushka was made from a pattern/idea in an old edition of the Mollie Makes magazine. I made this first because my gorgeous grand-daughter is about to start secondary school this autumn, and since we live very near to that very school we thought it a good idea to give her a key to our house. The Babushka instructions in the magazine were so insouciant, that I wonder whether the designer actually made the thing at all. There was much airy mentioning of 'stitch the face to the head scarf' and so on, but no real specifics of whether embroidery thread, ordinary thread or somewhere between the two would be suitable. I suspect glue and/or Bondaweb played a big part in the original invention! Anyway, after a couple of trial and error failures, I produced this little Babushka to attach to our house-key. A grandmother for grandmother's key, right?
Anyway, it obviously is far too finicky a project for mass production, so I turned to our faithful friend the crochet hook, and made some little owls.
You can see the supplies required in the picture. A small amount of Acrylic DK yarn and a 3.5mm crochet hook is your starting point. Then hook as follows:
Owl Body
Rnd 1: Starting at bottom of body, with yarn and hook, make an adjustable ring, ch 1, and sc 6 into the ring. Pull closed.
Rnd 2: Work 2 sc into each st (12)
Rnd 3: Working in back loops of each stitch only (BLO), sc into each st (12)
Rnds 4-7: Sc into each st (12)
Rnd 8: *Sc, 2ch, sc into next st, sc into next 5 st * Repeat from * to * and fasten off leaving a long tail for sewing up the top edge.
This is working in the round, so in theory you put a stitch marker at the beginning of your round so you know when you've got to the end, but in actual fact, since we're only talking about 12 stitches over 8 rows you can just count your way through it.
Sew the eyes and beak on before you stuff and sew up the owl - it's up to you, but I found it easier to be able to stick my finger inside the empty owl body when stitching eyes and beak on. The eyes and beak are made from felt. (It can be the cheap acrylic fairly thin felt that you get on E-bay). I raided my stationery drawer for this bit, and used stick-on hole reinforcers as the eye template, and left them stuck to the white felt as a strengthener, and punched the eye pupil out of black felt with a hole punch. The beak is just a narrow triangle cut from orange felt. Sew them onto the owl body.
Stuff the owl.Thread the yarn needle with the yarn tail. Flatten the top edge so that you have one long seam of 7 st to sew through. Whipstitch the seam closed, knot the yarn tail and hide within the body of the owl, clipping the tail close to the surface. You can attach the key-ring at this point, using the yarn as you sew up the seam, or attach it later, whatever you prefer.
There you go - one cute little key-ring in less than half an hour.
I then started to experiment with the basic idea of making a little bucket or ball shape in crochet and attaching a face to it - hence the wee Babushkas, who are made using the same sort of idea, just increasing one more round (to 18 stitches), changing colour halfway, and then decreasing again when they are tall enough. For this you have to stuff the shape as you go, because otherwise you'll decrease beautifully but end up with an empty Babushka! The face is made from a circle of pink felt, with some hair-shaped brown felt stitched at the top, and eyes and mouth stitched on in ordinary sewing thread. (Embroidery thread is too thick for this small size of project) Stitch the face features before you attach the face to the crochet body. Sew the face onto the body. You then sew a key-ring to the top of your Babushka, and you're finished!
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