Quarantine craft — An Elegant Sufficiency

With time on my hands, I never have to look very far for something to do. I have a studio filled with “supplies” and that includes quite a few plastic bags stuffed with part completed projects from…who knows? But hey, rather than finish one of those, it’s always more fun to start something new, isn’t it?

My WI colleague Marion and I are working with a group of would-be craft judges whose course has been postponed as a result of the current Covid19 situation. Marion issued us all a challenge in the form of a knitting pattern for a Trauma Teddy, the idea being that we’d each knit one and then use what we’d discovered as a learning tool. “A piece of cake” thought I…but this was not your usual Trauma Teddy, knitted in a straight line, all in garter stitch. Oh no…the Norfolk WI version required greater than your average knitting skills and at one point, I did look closely at the pattern to see if the word “beginner” was mentioned. It wasn’t.

I didn’t have any brown yarn, so my bear immediately acquired rarity status: the lesser known Gloucestershire Grey!

Three afternoons later, I was ready to sew him up, bearing in mind this is a “NFWI Craft Judge” project (!) I took extra trouble to make sure I didn’t muck it up.

But then I had to embroider his face. I couldn’t get over seeing him as a cat. Maybe it was his ears?

My first attempt wasn’t so good! Scary, even!

I took it out and had another go - better this time, but again, not as easy as you’d think. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing how everyone else’s teddy has turned out and hope they provoke plenty of conversation and material for their crib books! Would be craft judges might offer suggestions in the comments for the single, simplest thing I could do to improve the outcome next time I knit him…if there is a “next time” !

In looking for something else in one of my cupboards, I pulled out a plastic bag with an intriguing bit of stitching in it. This looked like another, self-contained project to work on during an “opera afternoon” now the Trauma Teddy was done.

All the wools were there, but no pattern.

Hmmm. A little voice in my head told me this was in a book somewhere; that I had bought the book because I liked the look of these two fine bears and wanted to stitch them.

Thankfully, I don’t have many needlepoint books on my shelf so it didn’t take long for me to track it down. Clearly, it wasn’t a Kaffe Fassett design….I looked in the Ehrmann books before spotting the little Glorafilia one and immediately knew I had the answer.