First asked for in November, finally done, here she is! She went through many trials.
Misshapen head…
Enormous highwaters…
Badly designed top…
But at long last, she made it.
Note little undies. Also, actual belly button. Pictured to the right is the amount of yarn left over from a skein of Dale Baby Ull.
To the left, my daughter’s idea of what she should look like. Eh, pretty close! To the right, the doll stands against my homemade blocking board. The squares are one inch high. I put her up against this so you could get an idea of height, but it looks to me like she’s in that one sinister shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Or like she’s in the slammer. Turn to the right!
Sorry the one at left is so blurry. It’s to show how I did her hair. It’s looped through the stitches in a semicircle around the back of her head, which pulls back nicely into a full ponytail, even though she’s bald in the back behind that curtain of yarn. The hair is Crystal Palace cotton chenille.
This is how I wound up constructing the shirt. I made my own pattern up based on the picture, which is what I should have done in the first place. I did get a letter back from the book publisher, who has passed my comments along to the author. Hopefully there’ll be an errata or clarification issued. For the record, even though there’s no gauge anywhere in the book, my gauge was 7 sts=1″. I can probably write out this pattern if someone wants, but it’d be fairly rough. As lovely as the pictures are, based strictly on this experience, I can’t recommend this book.
Up side: all this knitting and re-knitting gave me a chance to really practice my seaming. The doll was done first, so hers is rough, but by the time I did the shirt AGAIN it was looking pretty good! This’ll be good practice for doing my father’s Charlie Brown sweater. (See? I can bright-side anything.)
My daughter said she’d pick a name for it when we got home, which told me she was having trouble coming up with one. She kept asking me if I knew any girl names, but I decided I wasn’t going to name it for her. She just couldn’t come up with anything, though. I pulled up a baby name website and asked her if she wanted to look through some to pick a name. She said yes, and decided to look at the “most popular” list. We looked over the options, and she said, “go back up!” I scrolled up, and she said, “Elizabeth!” So Elizabeth it is.
I’m pleased that she named it herself, and that we came up with a way to let her do that. She brought the doll with her to her speech therapist to show off. As for me, I’ll be bringing it to the knitting guild tomorrow for show and tell. 🙂
Will be posting to
Hats up for: New Zealand, Texas, and DC!
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