January 15, 2014

Crocheted Rattles


A few weeks ago, I pinned a picture of  beautiful crocheted balls on my Pinterest. The link took me to an Etsy store (ATERGcrochet) where I not only found the pattern (for sale) for the balls, but I also saw these beautiful flower rattles. I had to have the patterns, so I ended up purchasing both.

Once I had the patterns, I started to go through my yarn stash, and I realized soon that all the cotton yarn that I had was going to be too thick for these delicate rattles. So, the searching started. The yarn that was used for both patterns was Schachenmayr Catania Cotton. It is 100% cotton and fingering weight which means it is very thin and delicate. The colors are beautiful, and there are lots of options. It is also, of course, made in Germany which then means that it is pretty expensive to buy here in the U.S., and one can mainly find it in specialty yarn shops if they happen to carry it. Well, since I had bought the patterns, and I had decided that I was going to make the flowers and balls, I started to obsess a bit about the yarn. I went online looking for a local yarn shop that might carry it. I looked for Finnish stores to see if they sold it there. I looked online yarn shops. I did Google searches. I went on Etsy. I looked on Amazon. I spent some hours doing this, and I was not going to let it go until I found this yarn at reasonable price.

Interestingly, I found the yarn on Etsy, and the seller had a nice range of colors available. It turned out that the price per skein was great, but shipping was ridiculously expensive since she was selling them from Germany. Well, of course, she was. Not only was I not going to pay $7.95 for shipping, but I also refuse to buy things such as these from Etsy since, in my opinion, one should be only selling handmade items on this site...don't get me started on that. So, after doing some serious price comparisons, I ended up finding and buying the yarn from Angelika's Yarn Store. They were wonderful! The price was good and shipping was a great deal. I was able to convince my friend that she also needed some of this yarn, so we ordered together and split the shipping. Yay for crocheting friends!!

The yarn is beautiful. And, it is so much fun to crochet. I highly recommend it.

Here is my very first flower rattle. It is an exact copy from the pattern. It was so much fun to make, and I am a bit obsessed now with these rattles. Good thing we will be having another baby girl. She will  have lots of flower rattles to play with. :)







I also made another one (on the right), and this time I made up my own color combination. I am pleased with that one as well.


And, here is the ball that started all of this craziness. I chose my own color combination for the ball, and that is what is so nice about the pattern...you can just make up the colors as you go. They are super easy to make and took no time. The only annoying part is all the ends of the yarns since you switch colors after every row.




For each of the flowers and balls, I have stuffed with fiberfill and added a little bell so that it makes a sound. I have been working on baby gifts for friends, and some of these will be send for them. I hope that the babies, who by now are almost 1, will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them. If nothing else, at least, they will add some color to the toy basket. :)




1 comment:

  1. Tosi hienoja!! Pallo varsinkii :) onko se kuin iso?

    ReplyDelete