Barbara's Creative Projects
Mina is really too little to dress and undress with the itty bitty babies, but I like to make outfits anyway. One day she will enjoy them more. The original outfits Marjorie and I made are here: here and here.
I made the sundress on a visit to California last summer, and the purple pj’s this past winter. Right now the girl virtually lives in a bathing suit, so I made one for the babies, in aqua, similar to the girl’s. 
Mina with the babies at Christmas (2011):
I want to give my favourite little girl an Easter present and candy isn’t, in my opinion, a good option. So I crochet a gift. This year I made two little owls, ‘cuz the wee girl likes owls, one wide awake, and one a little sleepy, using “Grace” thread by Patons. I downloaded the pattern from KnitPicks.
Love you, Mina!
I also made one with scrap yarn for my great niece, Hayden.
Puppets are fun to make and take very little time or materials. I have created two recently.
The first one is a little penguin finger puppet – Mina used to love Pingu, though now George is a favourite. The pattern came from http://www.innerchildcrochet.com
The larger one is from a link Petrina sent to me: http://gosyo.co.jp/english/pattern/eHTML/ePDF/1101/3w/amikomo-7_Cleaning_Mitt.pdf — I modified it, of course.
Because Mina liked to “ride” her broom I decided to make a hobby horse for her. I found a pattern online on Lion Brand Yarns — free with registration on the site. I just used yarn from my stash. I will take it to California when I go there in August.
As the kids and I chose not to give each other Christmas gifts this year, but old habits die hard, I decided to make them something. I tried knitting again, and did make fingerless gloves for the wee girl, but it was looking like, at the rate I was going, it would take till Christmas 2011 to knit something for everyone, so I returned to crochet. But here is a picture of Trina wearing hers on Christmas morning. I made hers from “Stretchy Sock” yarn, 75% cotton 25% wool blend. Christine’s were in green Peruvian wool and Heidi’s in a blue and white Queensland Collection Merino Spray 100% extra fine merino wool. Christine and Trina also got headbands.
For the men I made hats. I used Diamond Lima Luxury Collection 100% Peruvian Highland Wool trimmed in Sirdar Clik Aran with wool (70% acrylic 30% wool). I used the pattern in the Fall 2009 Interveave Crochet magazine “Leaf Peeper hats” (p.62) for Simon and Masood. I made one like that for Gary, but Trina said it would need to fit under his bike helmet, so I did hte Tahoe hat (p. 54) in the Sidar Clik for him.
The little hat on the bottom of the photo is for my wee girl. Here she is modeling:
My mother saw me making these hats and requested one, too. So I also made her one with the Sidar Clik, mostly light with the darker trim.