In July 2023, when I gave a knitted doll and an accompanying wardrobe of seven outfits to my honorary niece Olivia, there was an eighth outfit I really wanted to include with the rest but couldn't because it wasn't quite finished. Now that it finally is, I'm going to include the outfit in Olivia's birthday present in May 2024, and give her the ballerina outfit I made for her doll in late 2023 sometime in 2025. That way, Olivia will get one new outfit for her doll per year, and I get to take 2024 off from making doll stuff.
When I was going through Sarah Gasson's library of doll outfit designs to pick out the ones I want to make in future, the Witch outfit was an automatic yes. I love witches, the outfit is cute, and Olivia would surely enjoy having a nice Halloween costume for her beloved Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals.
Then I decided that if Olivia was going to dress up her baby as a witch, Rainbow really ought to have a familiar. A cat seemed the obvious choice, as Olivia's family has three cats and she is cat-obsessed. I searched Ravelry for a suitable small cat toy design, and ended up deciding on the Wub Chub Cat Ornament, by Button Willow Knits.
As for the yarn for these two projects, I looked in my stash and found that I had 70 grams of a tan DK that would make a good broomstick, 50 grams of assorted odds and ends of cream DK that would do for the trim on the dress and the paws, chest, and muzzle of the cat, and 40 grams of black DK that could be used for the dress and cat, though of course I would need more than that. I went to Michaels and bought three skeins of Patons Astra in Black and, when the only orange DK in stock proved to be a Dayglo/pylon type orange, one skein of Patons Astra Hot Lilac for the accent colour on the witch outfit.
The completed witch outfit on Ms. Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals. It turned out satisfactorily. I think the one change I made to this ensemble was to use a wooden dowel rod instead of a straw for the broomstick. It should stand up better that way.
I really was very close to getting the witch ensemble done in time to give it to Olivia last July -- I just hadn't assembled the cat. But I didn't want to give Olivia the doll's witch outfit without the cat to go with it, so I held it back.
The cat. I can't believe how long it took me to make myself finish this thing. I had done all the knitting by the end of June 2023, and then all the pieces sat in a little plastic bag in my workbasket with me putting it on my to do list every day for months until I finally finished assembling it in March 2024. I don't really like making toys to begin with, and this one involved a lot of very fiddly details. I also made the most unwelcome discovery that my embroidery skills, which I've always thought of as basic, actually rank below that in a class I can only describe as "they suck".
I didn't want to go to the expense of buying plastic cat eyes, so I embroidered the eyes. I couldn't make the claw embroidery stitches look right despite five or six attempts, so I didn't do those at all.
The result, while not great, isn't so terribly bad for a toy for a eight-year-old, and at least Rainbow is going to be a properly equipped little witch with her very own black kitty cat.
When I was finished this project, I found I had used up 25 grams of the tan, 33 grams of the cream, and all of the new black yarn plus 26 grams of the stash black yarn I had. I was left with just 10 grams of the new lilac yarn. That's a net stash decrease of 74 grams, which isn't so bad for a little project like this.
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