If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Bingo...

Here it is Tuesday again - another afternoon of B-I-N-G-O.. It's the one activity for which I know that Mom is always agreeable to getting out of the house, even if it is snowing. I'm really not much of a bingo fan, but if Mom enjoys it, then I'll do my best to enjoy too. The last two weeks, I've been taking along the baby afghans I'm crocheting for our K4 group and working on them while keeping an eye on the cards - it does help the time pass more pleasantly. A couple of the other ladies wanted to see the afghan and I told them about the K4 group meeting on Thursday afternoons. Perhaps one or two may come join us, which would be nice.

I have to admit that I'm still working on the baby afghan I started last Thursday and it's probably the only one I'm going to get done this week. I've been knitting away on the Clapotis and should be able to finish it this evening.

I've had several nice emails about the crocheted puppets in Saturday's post. For those asking for patterns, I'm sorry but I didn't write down the instructions while I was making them. I just played around until they looked the way I wanted which means that I did a lot of ripping on some of them. They're all done in knitting worsted with a size H hook and single crochet.

The least successful one was the little girl in the pinafore - I still wish I'd reworked her head so it didn't look like a potholder with the start in the center and no nose, but she was the first "person" I tried.

The little boy was the second. I worked his head in two pieces from the neck up, making sort of a bobble for his nose on the front piece and doing the back and one row around the top of his face in his hair color. The ones that are designed to have the arms work have bodies that start at the neck and are worked front & back for a few rows to make arm openings and then worked in the round. The arms are also worked in the round starting at the shoulders and ending at the hands. To get the striped robe on the genie (who is missing his vest in this photo), I crocheted the body up and down and then worked the head last, so it's a case of "winging it" to get the effects you want.

The guy in the green sweater was one that Miki requested with a movable mouth - he has a nose that is crocheted separately, stuffed with fiber fill & sewn on. His arms are just stuffed tubes. All of the puppets have some fiber fill stuffing in their heads to round them out - it's just packed in loosely so that it can be removed if the puppet needs to take a "bath"..

Most of the animals start with the nose and have slight differences in the shape of the head. The kitten has a short nose, the dog a longer one, the mole is very pointy, while the hippo's nose started with a rectangle that I then worked around on all 4 sides. The giraffe and the snake started with an upper nose and a lower jaw that were then hooked together while crocheting the rest of the head. The inside of their mouths were worked around from the resulting edges and decreased to a center seam. The snake has a opening at elbow length and then the rest is stuffed with fiber fill.

Most of the eyes are embroidered on using progressively larger "lazy-daisy" stitches to get the bigger ones like on the hippo - that seemed to work better on top of the crocheting than doing them in satin stitch. I know that these are lousy "instructions", but I hope they might be a bit helpful for anyone who wants to try their hand at puppets.