A little cashmere panda

This little guy is a present for my cousin's new baby boy. We both loved pandas as we were growing up, we had matching toy ones who were regularly married to each other. (Actually, we both still have them, mine is called Peter which provided much amusement on my Hen night seeing as my husband is Peder).

I made the little panda from thrifted cashmere sweaters which have been washed in the machine to fuzz them up a little bit. I used the bear pattern from the Aranzi Aronzo book Baby Stuff, which I picked up in the library on a whim, and adapted it to add the panda eyes. I tried using the sewing machine but that didn't work too well because the cashmere was so stretchy, so I sewed him by hand. He's turned out a completely different shape to the bear in the book but nevermind, he may be lumpy but he's very soft.

The End!

A cashmere hat for Magnus...

I've managed to find a few cashmere sweaters in the thrift shop recently and they are soooo soft. They don't felt up like wool does but they do go a bit thicker and fluffier if you run them through a hot cycle in the machine. I thought I'd try and make a hat for Magnus based loosely on a fleece one that I saw in the Crafty Mama book I borrowed from the library recently. It's two pointy pieces stitched together and then knotted in the pointy bit. I like the idea that as his head gets bigger the hat can be made bigger just by moving the knot. We had problems last year with a Santa hat that kept falling down over his eyes in the car because his head disappeared up inside it! I didn't have the pattern so I just eyeballed it and cut one piece out from each of the sleeves. I stitched them together and added an extra bit of ribbing from a different cashmere sweater round the end so that it could have a turn-up without exposing the seams. We've just been out to the park and he only pulled it off once so that's a good measure of success for me.