Knit And Crochet Design Week: Day Four, Progress Pics!!

Unfortunately, These aren't the best quality photos. My camera's batteries died on me, and I was barely able to upload these few pictures! Well here they are anyway. I haven't progressed farther than the head...hehe

                                                I decided Panda is definitely a boy.....
I used green plastic safety eyes and light blue felt. The first pic is before the felt was secured.

I needle felted his nose and mouth, and secured the circles around his eyes by needle felting them down.

                  Then I added his eyebrows. So worried! So cute <3 I can't wait till he's done!!

                            Check out other day four posts, and Stacey's post, by clicking here!!

Knit And Crochet Design Week: Day Three, Yarn!!

Picking the yarn you want for a particular project , is , in my opinion, one of the hardest parts of the design process. Finding the yarn that will perfectly suit your project is a bit difficult, because it's hard to tell if it will turn out the way you picture it! However I think I have narrowed down my choices to two. I know that I want panda to be either purple or blue. I bought new yarn just a few days ago and I love the texture, I'm just not sure which color to go with!! It's Gala yarn, A mixture of Acrylic, Polyester, and Nylon, and it's sooo soft.

I am definitely using this white yarn for the body and head. It's fingering weight yarn, and I wanted to make panda kind of dainty. The problem is I'm not sure I will like the way the Gala yarn looks beside this white yarn. I may have to make a swatch to see how they look together.

Another difficulty is finding yarn that matches the felt colors I have chosen. Here is a picture of the blue yarn. As you can see It doesn't exactly match up with any of my felt selections. The purple matched a little better, but I'm leaning towards a boy panda.

Don't be surprised if panda isn't made out of this yarn, I'm a bit fickle when it comes to yarn selection. This yarn may get tossed in exchange for something brighter (metaphorically speaking, I'm not actually going to toss my precious yarn!!). And for panda's shoes, if it's a boy I may go with yellow or red,  a galosh/rain-boot kinda look. If it's a girl, maybe some cute little mary-jane's, in black or pink? Oh there's so many choices, what's a girl to do!?

Be sure to take a look at Stacey's daythree post, and find links to all the other participant's posts HERE!!!

Knit And Crochet Design Week: Day One Sketches!!

I was on twitter, when I stumbled upon a tweet about "knit and crochet design week" , That caught my attention, I clicked the link. Stacey Trock(the awesome designer behind Fresh Stitches) is hosting a week long blog extravaganza (sorry couldn't think of a better word) all about the process of designing a knit or crochet object( I think that was a run on sentence...)! It sounded super fun, so now I'm in! Check out the rules and technical stuff here.Also be sure to browse the comments to see what all the other designers are making!! There's some pretty cute stuff in there! :)

Day one is all about starting out, sketching! I <3 sketching, especially when I have an idea I just can't visualize. When you have it right in front of you on paper, it's so much easier to create!A panda popped into my head when I pulled out one of my many sketchbooks, so that's what I started drawing.

The first couple looked more like mice then pandas! But I kept working at it and finally came up with something I liked. :)

Since I have a scanner now, my pictures and sketches look 100% nicer!

I liked the style of this one:short body, long limbs. Long limbed plushies strike me as "trendy" for some reason, and I like that ;)

But this isn't really a finished product...I needed to elaborate. I jotted down another sketch and scanned it into photoshop. This baby needs some color (cracks knuckles).

When I was drawing, I thought this would be a classic black-and-white panda bear. But that's just boring right? How bout' blue for a change? I dropped the eyebrows in the first sketch. They make panda look a little bit like an old fashioned thread crochet bear. Not saying that's a bad thing...without the eyebrows he looks a little blank...eyebrows or no eyebrows...what do you think?

And what's trendier than a pair of cute shoes? I wonder if it's possible to give panda heels?...That's an idea.....

 

 One thing I love about Photoshop is the ability to easily modify colors. This first sketch is the original, a rough pencil, and colored pencil over it. These next two are simply altered by adjusting the colors on photoshop. Simple, right? I'm still not entirely sure what color I want, (Oh the agony of difficult decisions!!!) I'm also not sure whether it should be a boy or a girl.......

I added the eyebrows to these.

      If I make panda a girl, I can give her a cute dress, and maybe use the high-heels idea! :D
I like the way this one looks, maybe I could use varying shades of pink and purple. In fact, I think I know just the yarn for this job!

                                           Hopefully I'll post more tomorrow! See ya soon!!

                                                             hugs n' kisses -Brea