Monday, January 24, 2011

Birthday Present for a One Year Old

My nephew turned one this past week and I was trying to think of something fun to make him and I found lots of patterns for finger puppets. I thought that might be good for a little kid and decided to try to do farm animals. Those seem to be good for learning sounds and so I thought they would be good for a one year old who is just learning to talk. I started with a pattern that I found and they were HUGE. Like so big that I stopped a couple of rows early and it was as long as my finger and really big around. My nephew is a tiny little kid and I decided that wasn't going to work. I still wanted to do it so I decided to just make up my own patterns and make them smaller. I used a pattern for the horse because I didn't  want to try to figure out the horse head. The rest I just made a body that I thought was a good size (big enough to fit my fingers snugly, small enough that they wouldn't be huge on a child's fingers) and then made the ears, beaks, etc. to make them look like each animal. 
 I decided 5 was a good number since that would be a whole hand worth. I made the sheep out of fuzzy yarn to make it more sheep-like. I wanted a little bag to put them in so I made a little drawstring bag that looked like a barn. It is shown above open with all of the animals out, and below closed with the animals inside. It was really quick and easy to make and my kids really liked it, I might have to make another for them to keep.
I have made a lot of other things for Christmas and Birthdays but I am really bad about taking pictures so since most of them have already been given away I probably won't be writing about all of them here.