Otto so far!

This has been a good few days for learning new techniques. I practised the Italian tubular cast-on yesterday in advance of casting on for my Endpaper Mitts.

Voila, sample:



I'm hoping it will look better on 2.0mm needles and sock yarn, as opposed to the aran yarn and 6.0mm needles I used here. I used a couple of Youtube vids to help me:

Video 1, Video 2.

It looks ok though so hopefully I will be alright.

And I bought and cast on for Otto yesterday! Made good progress throughout the afternoon and the football in the evening and Otto now looks like this:





I'm not entirely happy with him. I've just realised that his head is upside down for some reason. Don't know how I managed that. Probably because I followed some other people and did less decreases and repeats on the nose than called for, to avoid him looking too "snouty". Either way, he should still look ok. I only did 2 repeats of rows 43 and 44, making 6 rounds altogether for the nose decreases.

I'm stuffing him with pillow filling to make him baby-safe and washable - another tip from Ravelry. Thank you!

Learned lots of things so far on this bear.

Rather than doing the recommended cast-on as I couldn't get my head around it, I used Emily Ocker's cast-on, which uses a crochet hook and is very similar to the magic cast-ons I do in crochet when making hats or amigurumi.

I've also learned how to do m1r and m1l increases and how to graft, aka Kitchener Stitch. I had to Kitchener his nose and it was going well until I somehow lost one stitch in the middle and then had to bodge the rest of it. I should be able to make it look a bit better when I embroider his nose on. Hopefully.

About halfway through the body at the moment - the directions for the the legs and crotch gusset make zero sense to me right now. Hopefully if I just start "doing" them, it'll be fine.

Soooo annoyed with myself! But I'll carry on with him today and see how much I can get done. Hopefully he'll be a quick project and I can have him done by tomorrow night.