What Christmas present to get for a pregnant emergency services worker?
“A home-made costume to dress her newborn as the fire service mascot” may have been too obvious a choice for most people, but it was what I decided to go with…

Koala Ear Hat

I had always been a knitter.  Several years ago I went to the effort of completely inventing/adapting a pattern for a friend’s David Tenant Dr Who – despite having seen several great looking crochet patterns around – because I was sure learning to crochet would be so much harder.   But in searching for a koala-ish hat, all of the patterns that came up were crochet.  It seemed it was time to trade needles for hook and take a deep breath…

The fabulously simple and easy Little Bear Baby Hat Pattern was designed by Inkie Goijer, who has been kind enough to share it under a Creative Commons License. (The actual Non-Commercial Creative Commons License is in Dutch because it was issued in the Netherlands, but trusty Google will help you find similar versions in English if you want to check what you’re allowed to do with it.)

Best of all, I found this step-by-step video which not only shows exactly what you need to do, it introduced me to the wonderful concept of the magic ring.  In fact – being pretty much brand new to crocheting – it taught me crocheting basics: the terminology, the basic stitches, and how things were supposed to look.  I am a huge fan of Google and Youtube as teachers  (I believe that you can teach yourself almost anything* with enough Googling), but anyone with a computer and working internet can upload to Youtube: instruction videos are not created equal, as I very quickly found out.  This one, though, is an excellent video… Even if I did have to keep pausing to keep up at my newbie speed.

*apparently you shouldn’t try to teach yourself brain surgery or munitions disposal through Google – even its almighty reach has limits.

I’ve since made this hat several times more, and the one change I make is that I prefer to do things as a spiral instead of in rows – I don’t add the “joining slip stitch” at the end and the “chain 1” at the beginning of each row, I just keep going.  It makes it smoother (because there’s no seam), but it is less neat if you want to add the coloured line along the bottom.  You do need a stitch marker to keep track of where the new row starts, but a something as simple as a paperclip hooked into the first stitch works perfectly well. (A good explanation of the differences/advantages/disadvantages of spiralling vs. joining can be found here.)

 Firefighter Jacket

 

I can’t find the exact pattern I used for the basic yellow jacket (without lettering). I can tell you it was really simple and I found it on Ravelry, or adapted it from something I found there. If you haven’t come across Ravelry before, it is a magical world of patterns and shared projects, and they will not in any way spam you once you’ve signed up. Seriously, head over and create an account now. I’ll wait.

The red lettering and logo weren’t actually as difficult as they might look because the body of the jacket was essentially a square.  I made a grid (I did it in excel, but you could do it on paper), with the same number of rows as my pattern and the same number of columns as I had stitches.   I coloured in cells  (with a lot of trial and error) until it looked right.  I then knew which stitches needed to be red and which were yellow.  The pattern stretched a bit in the actual knitting because my stitches are slightly taller than they are  wide, but it seemed t work out OK.

The real difficulty was in getting it to look nice on the back while carrying the colours across.  I trialled a number of things as I went (with trusty Google  providing me with other knitter’s suggestions), and wasn’t entirely happy with the end result… But I  settled on carrying the colour across the back and picking it up occasionally when there was a big gap to prevent loops behind my work.

 

Mum and bub were exceptionally happy with the final result, even if her colleagues thought I was a bit mad… 🙂