Mark's "M" Pillow

This is one of my favorite projects yet: an "M" pillow for a soon-to-be-born little dude who will be named Mark.  When his mother asked if I might be able to crochet an "M" pillow similar to Audrey's "A" pillow, I responded with a YES!  The free alphabet crochet patterns by Kimberly Lewis are so nicely written, easy to follow, and done in a lovely font.

Mark's mom requested that the pillow be orange and blue, but that left me with a question.  When I added a gusset in between both sides of the M, where should I change color?  We decided on making half of the gusset blue and the other half orange.  I think it turned out pretty cool!

I ordered yarn from the internet for the first time ever....  For this pillow, I wanted to use a really nice cotton/acrylic blend that I had used before for baby blankets (Cotton Ease by Lion Brand Yarns), but it doesn't come in the colors we wanted.  So, I searched around for other cotton blend yarns, and I found the right colors ("carrot" and "planetarium") in Knit Picks Comfy Worsted.  Other than being really impatient while waiting for the yarn to arrive in the mail, I was happy with the ordering process, price, and yarn itself.

Here's the reason for the orange and blue yarn.... We were trying to match Baby Mark's ADORABLE sea creature bedding!

The blues match pretty darn well, too!

Mark's older brother, Ike, is the one who chose this super-fabulous bedding.  Ike is going to be such a good older brother!

I think it's hilarious that it looks like the shark on Ikey's shirt is trying to take a bite out of the M pillow.  Ha!!  Please don't eat that pillow, Mr. Shark.  I worked very hard on it.

Audrey's "A" Pillow

Another member of the "second generation" of kids from our playgroup, Audrey, just turned one year old....  This sweet little girl is such a joy to play with!  She's busy honing her walking skills, growing hair (she's a hair-challenged beauty just like Sonia was at age 1!), chatting up a storm, and idolizing her older sister, Ella.  When I was trying to figure out what to crochet her for her birthday, her mom mentioned that Audrey seems to like Mickey & Minnie Mouse (she dances to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song).  Great!!!, I thought.  I'm sure there have to be a million awesome Minnie Mouse crochet patterns out there.

Shockingly, I found very little.  I'm not sure if it's because Disney keeps a tight rein on their most important characters (although if the crochet pattern is free, I think there's not a copyright issue), or if Mouse lovers just don't happen to be crocheters.....  Nothing was inspiring me at all.  Even the one or two Minnie Mouse amigurumis I found were really weird-looking.  Not all characters translate well into amigurumi, especially ones whose eyes are their most defining feature (after the ears, Minnie & Mickey's eyes are definitely their best assets).  I was afraid to try to come up with my own pattern and have the resulting amigurumi give poor little Audrey nightmares.  When I was perusing Pinterest, I suddenly hit upon a fun idea: a pillow in the shape of an A!  And I could even appliqué a Minnie Mouse symbol on it!  Here is the result:

I used a free pattern I found on the internet (more than half of the alphabet's letters are available on this site), an F hook, and a mix of Caron One Pound (worsted weight acrylic) and Red Heart With Love (also supposedly worsted weight acrylic) yarns.  Once again, as with Daniel Tiger, I ran into trouble by mixing my yarns.  The pink Red Heart With Love yarn worked up a MUCH smaller A than the lavendar Caron One Pound yarn.  Whoops.  Stupid stupid stupid!!!  So, I had to add several rows of a border around the pink half so they would match when I sewed them together.  Oh well.

I free-handed the Minnie Mouse appliqué (easy when the iconic symbol is just three circles joined together!!) and sewed it on.

To give an idea of the scale of the pillow, Sonia posed next to it (while wearing her favorite American flag dress):

Happy birthday, Audrey!