Baby Rattles- Turtle & Ladybug (crochet pattern)

The best thing about knowing how to crochet is when you come across an easy free pattern, have a myriad of scrap yarn lying about, and have someone expecting a baby that you can make a gift for.  Like they used to say on the "A" team, "I love it when a plan comes together"!  Up until now I had never thought to make a baby rattle out of crochet, but the adorable turtle in the picture that was designed by Kristie over at KristiesKids beckoned me to make one. Immediately.  Oh, and did I mention there was a baby ladybug pattern too?

The cutest homemade baby rattles you ever done seen!

You have to thank Kristie for the design and the free pattern, which can be found here.  The first adorable creature I decided to try  was the turtle.  All you need is a tiny bit of yarn in two colors, and a plastic cat toy with a bell inside of it (found in the pet section of most stores).  Remember you don't want ones with catnip, just plain plastic with bell. Sometimes the plastic ball is lumpy, try to find smooth ones ;)  Just look how cute he is!

Little soft turtle rattle - who jingles softly when you shake him

When you make this little guy, you have to finish off and change colors every row.  At first I was worried, because that is a lot of loose ends to tie off, but I realized it would all be inside the body that was being stuffed, nothing to tie off at all!  Matter of fact by the end I had this cup shape with tons of strings hanging out and it looked like just like a jelly fish.  Once I started to stuff the body, all the dangling strings went in and became apart of the stuffing.  Besides the adorable ruffle around the bottom.  I love the little tiny feet sticking out.

I flipped the turtle onto it's back so you could see its cute and tiny little knobby legs

And if that wasn't cute enough... I fell in LOVE with the tiny little wispy tail

Cute and tiny tail poking out from under the "shell"

Then when I scrolled down on Kristie's page, I noticed she had a ladybug rattle pattern as well, which was similar to the turtle (sans legs and ruffle) and she had added antennae.

Cute little lady bug with tiny little spots

The little dots are hand sewn on using an invisible stitch or a blind stitch (so you don't see any stitches)  I can show you that on a future blog if you want.  Also I noticed in Kristie's picture her lady bug had a line down it's back to show the to halves of the "shell", but she didn't say how to do it.  I just threaded a needle with the same yarn color as the head, secured it at the neck and did some small stitches down the back of the lady bug.

lady got back

This pattern was a great find because I happened to be making a lady bug blanket and I thought they would go together perfectly.

 
I just sent these off to the expectant mom and she received these in the mail yesterday so hooray, now I can post about it :).  If you have never done any amigurimi this would be a great beginner project to try.  Amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting little stuffed animals for cuteness purposes alone.  Also if this makes you want to LEARN crochet, everything I picked up was online by a lady named Teresa on youtube.  She has fabulous step by step videos on how to crochet, teaching every stitch.  Search for her courses under the title "crochet geek".  She has beginning courses and intermediate.  I highly recommend her.  So that's it, just a tiny bit of yarn, a cute little pattern by Kristie and you've got yourself some adorable handmade baby gifts.

Baby Bumble Bee - crochet

Last year, when my eldest was in Kindergarten, there were two classes, each with it's own theme name.  The other class's name was the "cool cats" and my daughter's class was called the "busy bees".  At the end of the school year I was searching for a teacher gift that I could make, and came across the free baby bee pattern on the inside of a red heart yarn label.  It was so cute and perfect, so I decided to make one for her teacher and the assistant teacher.

Aren't they so sweet?!  They are under their category of easy crochet on the red heart website, and can be made using small scraps of left over yarn. The downloadable pattern can be found here.  If you are new to crochet it can help teach you a number of skills, like changing colors, stuffing, working in the round, and attaching small pieces securely. This is like a beginning amigurumi pattern that can be the gate way to many cute stuffed animals in your future. So here is my girl on the last day of school, dressed in her class colors and off to deliver her adorable baby bees to her teachers.

By the way, the class party once we got there was really cute, you could easily do a fun birthday party with that theme. They had yellow plates and black cups, yellow and black balloons, plus two different bee themed cakes.

Check out the favors one mom made up for the whole class.  You could easily get a packet of yellow paper bags and decorate with either bee stickers, or a black ribbon stripe on them.  They were filled with a bug catcher craft, bee pencils and erasers, crazy straws, and bug stencils. Also the little name tag on the outside doubled as a book mark.

The kids had a blast at this party!  The whole place was buzzin'. ;)

So, back to the crochet... if you want to try and make a cute little stuffed toy, this buzzing bee is a great place to start.  I'm going to try and make a little butterfly modifying this pattern very soon.  It would make a cute baby gift for a new mom or a gift for a little girl's birthday.