Yana Knits

I made an adorable little crocheted bear for a charity called Mother Bear Project. This organization sends hand-made knitted and crocheted bears to children affected by HIV and AIDS in emerging nations. The way it works is like this: they sell patterns and kits to make bears, volunteers make the bears and either send them back or drop them off at participating local yarn stores. The bears are then batched and sent off to children.

I'd never heard of Mother Bear Project until I came across their booth at Stitches West. It was tucked away on the last isle of a huge conference hall (or maybe the first isle, depending on which end of the hall you started at, I happened to start at the opposite end) and by the time I got there all the knitting kits were already gone. There were a few crochet kits left, however, and I picked one up determined to make a child somewhere in the world a little happier.

The kit contains everything you need to complete a bear: different color yarns for different parts, crochet (or needles), and instructions. The instructions are very simple and easy to follow. You can stick to the exact measurements listed or you can improvise with color, shape, and size. If you purchase a pattern without a kit, you can use your own yarn in any color you want - leftovers and scraps are perfect for this project. The basic pattern is a bear wearing pants and a shirt, but you can make any other clothes and accessories for it: skirts, collars, scarfs, etc... I had a bit of yarn left after completing the basic bear, so I added a little scarf and a skirt.

It took me less than a weekend to crochet the bear. I was excited to get it done and get it sent off. I stitched the seams, stuffed the bear, tied the scarf around its neck, threaded the yarn into a tapestry needle... and that's where everything stalled. For 4 months. I've mentioned earlier that I'm not a sewer. I'm especially NOT an embroiderer. I was put off by the prospect of making the bear face. I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't just slap some buttons for the eyes and nose, like I've done for my other crocheted toys - Spider, Sheep, Moose, and Giraffe. Somehow the bear ended up stashed away in a yarn basket not to be seen again till last weekend.

I picked it up again on Sunday and it made me sad that I abandoned this project for so long. I didn't get any better at or more amenable to embroidering, but I buckled down and did it. It took several tries to make the face look somewhat face-like, but I succeeded in the end. I happen to live not too far from Green Planet Yarn, one of the participating Mother Bear Project stores, so I went there to drop the bear off. There were already a few bears, both crocheted and knitted, sitting in a basket near a window, and mine joined them. Hopefully soon it will be on its way to a child.

The 2 most significant developments are:

moving my blog to a different blogging platform
You may notice only a slight difference in the layout of the blog, but it took many hours of work to make it look exactly the same as the previous Wordpress version. I now have full control over the source code of my blog and will hopefully be able to do a bunch of cool things with it.

getting a knitting machine
I started thinking about getting one about 2 years ago but didn't make up my mind until January this year. I'm now a proud owner of a Silver Reed SK280 Punchcard Standard Gauge knitting machine. More on it in a separate post.

In March I attended Stitches West - this was my first knitting convention. I was after coned yarn for my knitting machine, but there were so many more things that I liked there that I ended up with a few individual patterns, a number of knitting magazines, and of course, many pounds of yarn (coned, hanked, and skeined).

I have been working on a variety of projects as well. Most haven't made it into the site yet but will soon. Just to give you an idea of what's coming, here are the things I've made in the last few months:

Crocheted Android - I love my Android phone and its little green robot-mascot. I had to make one.

I knitted 4 sweaters on my knitting machine. 2 of them were designed by me; the patterns for the other 2 I got from knitting magazines and converted to the instructions for a knitting machine.

I used one of the individual patterns that I got at Stitches West to make a tunic top.

In addition to catching up on posting all the projects that I've finished, I have a bunch of other ideas for the site - tutorials, yarn converters, pattern generators. I hope to get to it soon.

New project: knitting a realistic looking soccer ball!

When I came up with an idea of making a soccer ball, I thought it was going to be pretty simple and straight forward. However, I failed to consider the following fun facts about a traditional soccer ball:

• it consists of 32 panels (20 white hexagons and 12 black pentagons)
• there are 90 seams connecting these panels

Knowing this helps you realize that you may be signing yourself up for a bit more work than you expected. On a positive note, the panels you need to make are only a couple of inches wide (or if you want to be more technical – 4.5 cm to a side), the seams are short, and when you start sewing it turns from an ugly monster to a real beauty after a few dozen stitches.

It’s surprisingly hard to find all the necessary information about the dimensions of soccer balls online. For example, even the wikipedia article about “Football (ball)” failed to tell me how big the panels have to be. I could have tried to infer it from the given circumference of the ball, but it was so much easier to ask a colleague – avid soccer fan – to bring his soccer ball for examination.

All sides and angles measured, it was time to knit some sample panels, which took a few tries to get exactly right. Hexagons were a bit easier to make because once you figured out how to knit the bottom half, the reverse of it would give you the top half (hooray for the x-axis symmetry). Pentagons were a bit more of a challenge, angles being slightly more acute and symmetry running only along the y-axis. But even than it didn’t take more an an evening of fiddling with stitch increases and decreases.

I finished most of the panel knitting on a 10-hour flight to Europe and then another one back to the US. It turned out to be a very convenient project to bring on a plane: you can use very short needles because none of the panels are wider than 16 stitches, you don’t end up dragging something bulky half way around the world in your carry-on, and you can take a break every 15 minutes when a panel is finished and still feel like you accomplished something. The only drawback was using really tiny dull scissors, since you can’t bring a real pair on board.

Sewing the panels together was probably the most fun and the most tedious part at the same time. Tedious – because this is just a lot of sewing and I’m not a huge fan of it. Fun – because I took it upon myself to figure out how to stitch the panels together using the least number of seams (there are a total of 90 seams, but you can stitch a couple sides at a time with the same length of yarn). I was actually surprised that sometimes my plan to stitch 3 consecutive seams wouldn’t work, or that I would end up with a lonely unfinished seam among the stitched panels. It took a full 3 evenings to finish stitching the ball, stuff it, and weave in the yarn ends.

The ball turned out looking relatively realistic (except maybe slightly larger than life-size). The biggest difference between my ball and a real soccer ball is the weight – no matter how much fiberfil I stuffed in it, it just didn’t want to weigh 400 g.

Will other balls follow, you ask? Perhaps, but not in the forseeable future.