Knitted Yo-Yos

After my short and simple Tropical Scarf pattern, I'm back to normal with my new pattern which is sixteen pages long. They just seem to get longer and longer. To be fair, this one explains a new technique (well, new to me anyway) and then illustrates it with several sample projects. You can't do that in a couple of pages.

Knitted Yo-Yos

Fabric yo-yos (or Suffolk Puffs as they are traditionally known here in England) are gathered circles of fabric which are simple to make and can be joined to make lovely quilts. They are easy to sew by hand but you can also buy Yo-Yo Makers if you fancy a new gadget. 

Yo-yos make lovely scrap quilts but the circles can also be arranged into planned designs or appliqued to a background fabric. I particularly like this pattern from Kim Diehl's 'Simple Graces'. 

She also uses yo-yos to make a matching door hanger. I love her designs; she has a really good eye for colour.

These little circles turn up in toy patterns too. Jean Greenhowe calls these 'Rosette Dolls' in her classic toy book 'Favourite Dolls & Toys'. 

I bought my copy of this book years ago because I wanted to make her little doormouse tree trunk house for my daughter when she was little.

I wrote about this years ago; you can see pictures of the inside in this blog post.

There are various patterns out there for crochet yo-yos too which I have tried over the years. I bought Melody Griffiths' book 'Crocheted Throws & Wraps' purely because I spotted the Puffs Baby Blanket on the cover. There are some other interesting designs in this book too.

Isn't it nice?

I couldn't find links for any of these books so they are probably out of print but second hand copies would be easy to find, I'm sure.

Anyway, back to the knitting. All you need for a knitted yo-yo is a strip of knitted fabric with drawstrings at both ends. It took me quite a bit of experimentation to come up with a drawstring cast on that matched the one at the other end of the knitting. Instructions for this cast on which may or may not be new are in the pattern. I had a lot of trouble both trying to explain how to do it and taking the photos.

Once I'd sorted out the basic pattern I knitted lots of them, using some of my little balls of leftover yarn. Each one only takes about 2g of yarn and they're quick to knit.

After I'd worked out various ways of sewing the yo-yos together I knitted some different sizes ...

... and then several sets of flowers.

Can you spot the difference between the two pictures above? It turns out that you need the right number of petals if you're going to be able to sew flower yo-yos together to make a flat shape.

I also found that you can turn a yo-yo into a heart (with a bit of tricky sewing).

Next I had a play to see what I could make with my knitted yo-yos. First, inspired by Eric Carle's book, I made a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like the Jean Greenhowe toys, he's threaded on to elastic so that you can shape him a bit.

I thought a more traditional project was called for next so I set about knitting lots of four patch blocks of yo-yos, using two shades of one colour for each block.

These were pretty but I thought they needed something more so I knitted tiny black yo-yos and sewed them into the middle of each block which really set off the colours.

Eventually I stopped playing around with them and arranged them into four rows of three and sewed them together, adding more little black circles in the gaps between the blocks.

What I love about this layout is the way the black circles turn into on point squares once they're sewn in place. There's a hint of the hexagon about the inner coloured ones too. All this is because of how the yo-yos are sewn together; you can play with it to achieve different effects. 

I hadn't got a plan for this rectangle but it turned out to be exactly the right size to go on top of my cross stitch workbox so that was a bonus.

I hope knitters will find this a useful pattern. You can download it here and I look forward to seeing some exciting knitted yo-yo projects. I might make a yo-yo bag next ...

Sam's Blackbird

As a change from all the yarn based craft, I thought you might like to see a little quilt that I made recently as a birthday present for my daughter's partner.

It measures about ten inches square, the same size as the robin quilt I made for my daughter Rose earlier this year.

The robin was paper pieced but I couldn't find a paper piecing pattern for a blackbird that I liked. It didn't help that I wanted it to look something like this ...

Rose took this photo of a blackbird helping himself to some of their wild strawberries this summer so I wanted the blackbird on the quilt to be a strawberry thief too. I decided that I had to applique the blackbird but first came a lot of very bad sketches. Should he have one wing or two? One foot or two? Visible feet obviously, we're not talking disabled blackbirds here. Decisions, decisions.

Having decided on one wing and two feet, I set about sewing the black pieces to a square of hand dyed green fabric. I inherited my Mum's quilting fabric and I can nearly always find just I want amongst it.

Then I had to embroider the legs, beak and eye which took a lot of experimenting. I can't get at my stock of black seed beads at the moment (they're in one of the piles in the room I'm currently decorating) so his eye is actually a glass toy eye, threaded through a tiny piece of felt and mangled on the back of the fabric so it lies flat. The beak is layers upon layers of orange stitches; I kept adding more until it looked about right.

If you look closely you can see that the blackbird is holding a tiny strawberry in his mouth which I cut out of printed fabric. I added a few stitched leaves and then had to embroider a few more straight stitches in black to fill in the shadows in is mouth. 

That was the trickiest part of the project finished. Naturally, Mum had several pieces of strawberry patterned fabric so it was easy to find something for the borders. The quilting thread I chose was hers too; one of the range of variegated threads from YLI. It's sold as machine quilting thread but it works beautifully for hand quilting too which is what I do.

I drew rough leaf shapes meandering around the blackbird for my quilting design. I just use an ordinary pencil for this and make it up as I go along. I also quilted round the blackbird and gave that wing a bit of texture too.

Then I quilted the borders with straight lines and added a binding to finish the quilt.

As you can see, the quilt hangs from a wire hanger. In order to be able to take the hanger off if wanted, I only attached the fabric sleeve at the top of the quilt and then used snap fasteners to close it below the bar of the hanger. This was something I worked out when I made Rose's quilt. You can't really see the bottom of the sleeve in this photo but it's about where the little strawberry button is. The button serves no purpose but I thought it was nice.

I even managed to find a piece of fabric with little blackbirds on for the quilt label and then, as a finishing touch, I printed out Rose's photo on fabric and sewed that to the back too.

Sam was very pleased with his blackbird quilt so that was good. Now I need to turn my mind to the next mini quilt ...