Knitted Garden Bunny

Hi, everybody. Welcome to our live event. I hope you guys are doing well today. I wanna thank you guys for being patient with me while I recovered. I was s- sick for quite a while there, and had completely lost my voice, so even if I could get in here to the studio, I still wouldn't have been b- able to instruct very well.

It would've been a miming show. It would've been terrible. so thank you for your patience with me while, while I got better, and thank you guys so much for all your well wishes in the comments too. That's really awesome and makes me feel good. hope you guys are all doing well.

Today I'm gonna be working on this super cute little knitted garden bunny. Look at these little guys. Aren't they so cute? this project is I mean, I- I If you guys have watched my lives before, you guys know how much I love making toys. Toys are my absolute favorite thing to design, my absolute favorite thing to make, and I think it's just because you have that, like, emotional reaction after you finish making it.

It's just so huggable, and it just can, like, cheer you up, or your friend or a little kid you wanna give it to. It's just kind of amazing. It always feels like, a little bit like magic when you start out with something like this and some sticks, and then you end up with something that you have this, you know, emotional attachment to. so I'm very excited to show you guys how to make these. this is a really fun project.

It doesn't take hardly any materials. I mean, just, like, a couple small leftover balls of yarn that you have. It's very flexible also. I'm using a DK weight that's actually kind of like a l- like, might even be closer to sport weight. I mean, it's kinda like in between.

but, but you can use whatever size th- you know, whatever thickness yarn you want, and then just choose knitting needles that go with that in order to make a nice dense fabric that you're not gonna see the stuffing through. Like, you may not see the holes between your stitches, but just imagine you have to kinda put that stuffing in there, and that kinda tends to spread out your stitch a little, stitches a little, so, you know, just keep that in mind, and use needles that are small enough so that you don't see, that stuffing between your stitches. So whatever you have will work. I, I used about 30 yards of each color, so we've got two colors going on here. The main color is the bunny body color, and then the contrasting color is his little overalls color.

I used about 30 yards of each of those. That will vary a little bit if you use a different thickness of yarn, but just to give you an idea, you know, probably about this much of each color. and then, so y- so you need those two colors of yarn, and then of course you're gonna need your kni- knitting needles, and like I said, you'll just use whatever needles you have that'll get you a nice dense fabric. I am using the US size 3, which is a 3.25 millimeter needle. and you're gonna need a set of five double point needles.

And then, you'll need, some stuffing of course. I'm using this po- polyester fiberfill stuffing. Sometimes, I, I think Sometimes I recommend if you've got scraps of yarn, you can chop them up into little small pieces and stuff them into your project. But because we are going to be stitching through certain areas, it might be a little bit tricky to do that on this type of project. You could supplement, like if you just have a little tiny bit of stuffing, you could supplement with, like, some little yarn ends in there if you want.

But for the most part, I, I just feel like if you have access to this, if you're able to buy some, po- polyester fiberfill, that's gonna really be the easiest thing to work with on this project. or any kind of fiberfill stuffing that's made for toys, stuffing toys. and then you're gonna need one stitch marker, just to keep track of the beginnings of your rounds. So I, I And a locking stitch marker, or you can use a safety pin or a bobby pin if you don't have a safety pin or a stitch marker. That'll work just fine.

and then you're gonna need some sort of a yarn needle to weave in your ends with. And then last you'll need a length of some embroidery floss, just black embroidery floss. We're gonna be using that for embroidering the features on our bunny. So we've got little embroidered eyes and eyebrows, and then the little nose and the mouth, as well. And, yeah, and that's it.

Just, you probably have a lot of these materials already at your house, so. and then of course you're gonna need the pattern. This is the complete pattern. There's also picture tutorials of the things that are, like, a little bit less common or that I thought people might have extra questions about. I'm gonna be going through everything in this live event though, so you guys will know what to do.

but you're gonna need this for all the stitch counts and everything. I'm not gonna be able to go through every single row in this project. I mean, there's, you know, there's kind of a lot going on, and I wanna make sure that I have enough time at the end to show you the assembly and the embroidery and all that kind of stuff. so there will be sections that I go through a little bit quicker, but, you know, we'll go, we'll go through from start to finish all the things that you need to know in order to make this little bunny. So if you guys have any questions about what I'm doing or need a little clarification or if you have tips for other viewers or tips for me, then definitely put that in the chat.

I'd like to see, you know, what you guys are thinking about, if you guys have any questions or, you know, any tips that you guys would have, so. Oh, we've got a greetings from Oh, Lorraine is here. Greetings from Westchester. Aw, thank you so much for the compliment. I'm glad you're here, Lorraine.

All right. Let's see here. Okay. So we're gonna start out by making the ears. Now I know this looks weird, but this is what we're actually making.

It's two ears that are stuck together with this little section of I-cord. And in fact, the entire, this entire piece was made in I-cord style, and if you're like, "What are you talking about, Brenda?" That's okay. I'm gonna show you what I mean. I find that one of the trickiest things about making small toys is just sort of like hanging onto things and the fiddly nature of just doing little detailed things. So o- on this project, I was really thinking about that a lot and how to make things a little easier to hang onto, especially for those of you who are newer to making toys.

All right. So we're gonna start out-By just placing a slipknot on our needle, and you can cast on in any way that you like. It does not matter what kind of cast on you do. You're gonna cast on four stitches. So there's my four.

And then we're going to slide this to the other side of our double point needle, and we're gonna start knitting. So, when we are knitting an I-cord, we're only using two needles, and we are making a tube with those two needles. So, but you'll see it kinda come together as we work on it. So we're gonna start with this first one, and we're gonna go ahead and just knit that. So knit, and as we knit that and pull it off, I like to give the strand of yarn that's connected to the ball just a little tug, and that keeps us from getting ladders up the back.

I'll explain that a little bit more in a little bit. So, all right. So we're gonna go ahead and just continue knitting across. We get our four stitches knit. And then instead of turning our work, we're just gonna slide that to the opposite point like that, okay?

So here is our yarn, our yarn end right here, that we're Working yarn is right here, and we're gonna bring that across the back, and then we're gonna start knitting here. And now at this point, we're gonna start doing some increasing. So we're gonna knit in the front and the back in this very first stitch to increase. So we're gonna go through our loop just as if to do a regular knit stitch, and then before we take it off the needle, we're gonna go into the back of that stitch, and we're gonna knit it again. So that gives us two stitches, and we're gonna pull that off the tip of the left needle there.

And now I'm gonna go ahead and knit two stitches. One, two. And then we're gonna do a knit front back in that very last stitch. Knit in the front and knit in the back. And then I'm gonna just kinda I like to just sorta pull on this a little bit as I go, 'cause it seems to straighten out my stitches a little better.

So I just kinda pull on the bottom. Now I'm gonna slide it all the way over to the opposite point, and then I'm going to knit all, knit all the way across. So when you knit this first stitch, I was talking about the ladders before. When you knit this first stitch, because it's coming from over here, you wanna, as you're pulling it off that needle, you wanna pull on this yarn just a little bit to tighten it, okay? And that's gonna keep us from getting There we go.

That's gonna keep us from getting, like, those l- l- s- longer stitches across the back, but a little bit of those longer stitches is not a problem, and I'll show you why. Because it basically becomes the inside of the ear. Here, let me pull these over. So you can see if I pick this apart a little, you can see those ladders in here. That's from, like, the beginnings of our round in the I-cord, but that doesn't bother me even though it makes sort of this little bit of a line on the ear.

It just looks like a bunny ear to me, so I f- I think of it as, like, a little feature instead of a problem, right? It's how, it's all how when you l- how you look at things. All right. So we're knitting. We're just knitting across this row, knitting each stitch.

And then we're gonna slide it across, and now we're gonna do another increase in the first stitch and in the last stitch of the row. So we're gonna knit in the front, and then we're gonna knit in the back. And then we're gonna knit across the next four stitches, so one, two, three, four. And then we're gonna knit in the front and knit in the back of that last stitch, just like that. Okay, so now we have a total of eight stitches, and then we're gonna knit in, continuing in this I-cord thing, you know, where you just slide it across, bring your yarn across the back.

You knit that first stitch, even though I know this is a little bit weird. Normally, we don't knit I-cord with quite so many stitches, but in this case, it really doesn't matter because the, like I said before, that little area that kinda ladders in the middle of the ear, it just looks like a feature of the ear. So you're gonna bring this across and knit that, just kinda pull on that a little as you pull it off the needle, and knit all the way across. Okay, so rounds five through 11, so that's seven rounds, of this ear, that's just knitting, knitting, knitting. We're not doing any i- increases or anything like that.

So, so once we do that, our piece will look like this. Okay, we've just knit a few rounds here. You can see there's a little bit of laddering going on, but it, it doesn't really Once we do the, the decreases in the ear, which we're about to do, it's just gonna bring that together, and it's not gonna be a problem. All right, so now we're gonna start our decreases to make our ear come in 'cause Here, let me show you where we're going here. So we start on the tip, do some increases, and then we do some decreases, work a little bit of this very skinny I-cord, and then we're gonna repeat, kind of in the opposite order, the shaping for the second ear, and then, and then we'll bind off, or we'll actually just finish off.

All right, so now we're gonna do some decreases. So we're just gonna knit the first two stitches together, still working in an I-cord. So there's the first two stitches knit together. Then we're gonna knit across until there's two stitches left. Now there's two stitches left, and then we're gonna knit those two together.

All right, so now we have six stitches. Slide it across.And then again, we're gonna do those decreases. So we're gonna knit two together at the beginning of the row and knit across until there's two left. There's two left here, then we knit those two together at the end of the row. We've got four stitches left, slide it across.

We're gonna knit two together here and then knit two together here, and all we have left now are two stitches. So we've done our little decreases to get our ear to come in, and now we're gonna go ahead and do four rows or rounds of I-cord. So there's one, slide it across. Two, slide it across. Three, slide it across, and here's our last one.

Four. All right, and now we're gonna start doing some increases to shape the second ear. So we're gonna do knit front, back and knit front, back. So we're gonna knit front, back here in the first stitch, and then we're gonna knit front, back in the second stitch. Now we've got four stitches on our needle and we're gonna knit front, back in the first stitch, knit two, and then knit front, back in the last stitch.

And we're gonna do one more set of increases. So again, knit front, back in the first stitch, then we're gonna knit four. One, two, three, four, and then we're gonna knit front, back in the last stitch. Just like that. All right.

And now we can just do another seven rounds of I-cord, and our piece will look like this, and then we can do our decreases to form the tip of the second ear. So we're gonna knit two together in the very first two stitches. So we're knitting those two together, and then we're gonna knit across the next four. One, two, three, four. And then we're gonna knit two together.

Like that. Slide it across. And now we're going to knit one row. So we're just knitting all six of those stitches there. Slide it across, knit two together, knit two.

One, two, and then knit two together. There we go. And then we're gonna knit all the way across, just one knit, knit in each stitch across here. One, two, three, four. And now we're gonna do one more or two rounds, or, sorry, one more round of knitting across.

So one, two Whoops. Three and four. There we go. So there is the second ear, and at this point, we can just go ahead and cut our yarn. Just leave a little bit of a yarn tail, and then we can use our yarn needle.

Let's see, where did I put it? Here it is. Gonna use that yarn needle, and I'm going to just p- put that, put the tip of my needle through each of those four remaining stitches like that. Pull that needle out, and I can just pull on that to cinch it in. And I'm w- just weaving in my yarn tail here.

I'm trying to sorta snag through the thickness of some of the stitches here so I can feel that it's gonna stay in place. And then I can just go ahead and cut that off. And then you can do the same thing for the opposite end, and then you'll have your lovely little ears, ready to go. So we're gonna set those aside, and then we're gonna start on the head. oh, thanks, Sarah, for the compliment on my sweater.

And we've got a, "Hey," from Durant, Oklahoma, and, Farrah from San Diego. Hi, you guys. Thanks for saying hello. Oh, and Dawn is saying, "I'd like to purchase several sets of double-pointed needles. Does it matter what length of needle I purchase?" It doesn't really matter for this project.

You can-I find that for me, having a sharper tip actually helps with the tinier stitches, especially with when you're, you know, working tightly. That, but that's for me. That's just, like, my opinion about how I like to knit. but you really, it doesn't really matter how long they are. I have, here, I've got some little short ones here.

I don't remember what brand these were, but these are very short and compared to these, and I find these easy to work with, although I don't like the tips of these as much as I like some of the other ones that I have. So, for me, it doesn't really matter. if you are not-- The one thing about working with shorter needles, I feel like they're not getting in the way of your hands as much as these longer needles, and you can kinda see me doing that throughout this process. just, you know, maybe if you're just watching every once in a while thinking, "Oh, look, those needles are longer. It looks like they're a little bit more in her way," that is a problem.

But the thing with the longer needles is you can use them for all sorts of different other projects. You can do a larger circumference with them for other things, so they're-- I feel like they're more versatile. And also, if they're longer, you have less of a chance of your stitches sliding off as opposed to a shorter one. So, it's just kinda like, maybe if other people wanna weigh in on what they like, that might be helpful to hear what you guys think too. yeah.

Okay. Athena's asking, "Would this pattern work with a thicker yarn? Yes, I know it would make a larger bunny." Absolutely. You can totally use a worsted weight yarn with this. You could even use a chunky weight yarn as long as, you know, you're just adjusting your needle to fit whatever yarn you're using.

You just wanna have a nice dense fabric. Yep. Oh, thanks, Lilia. Yeah, I'm feeling, I'm feeling much better. I know my voice doesn't sound quite back to normal yet, but I'm, I'm feeling a lot better.

All right, so let's see here. Here's my gray yarn. I am going to start working on the head. so we're gonna be starting this bunny now. Now that we've got the ears done, we're gonna be working from the top down on this bunny, and we're gonna start with a pinhole cast on, also called a circular cast on.

so I like to do-- There's a couple different ways to do it, but this is how I do it. I just tie a little overhand knot here like this, and I just kinda let this I'm gonna pull this a little bit further so I have more to weave in later, but you just want maybe four to six inches hanging out there. and then I'm gonna pull this knot slightly closed, but not all the way. Then I'm going to place this yarn from the back to the front over my needle, and then I'm going to go in through this hole and go around from the front around to the back and grab a strand of yarn. So now I've got two stitches cast on.

So there's another one, third and fourth, fifth and sixth, seventh and eighth. So if you'd like to cast on your stitches in a different way, you absolutely can. You could just cast them all on, and then you can sew the little tiny hole in the top of the head closed later with your yarn tail, no problem. this is just an easy way to get all those stitches on and be able to tighten that up into nothingness, basically, if you'd pull on I was just pulling on my yarn tail here to kinda finish tying that knot. So all those stitches are coming from radiating out of that same little point there.

Okay, and now I'm going to just slide this over here, and I'm going to start knitting. I'm gonna be increasing in every stitch. So I've got eight stitches cast on here, and I'm going to end up with 16 at the end of this round. So I'm going to knit front and back and drop that off the needle and the next one front and back. Okay, so now we have four stitches, and I'm gonna let that just hang out there.

Front. Oops. Front and back. Front and back. All right, now I've got four more stitches on that needle, and I'm gonna bring in my next needle here.

Front and back. Front and back. And I'm gonna bring in my last needle. Front and back and front and back. Okay, so now we've got a total of 16 stitches, and if you've, if you've never worked with double point needles before, it really is worth just taking a minute to organize them a little bit.

The way that I like to, and, you know, this, you know, you'll find your own way to do it, but to start out with, if you don't really know how to hold on to them, try placing them so that you can see if, as you look at your needles, the right tip of the needle is sitting on top of the needle that it's crossing over here. This needle is sitting on top of this needle. This needle's on top of this. This is on top of this. So w-what I mean by that is instead of having, if I just pulled this this way, if I've got one underneath those two needles, then it's really hard to, I find it very difficult to knit across...This needle then, because this is in the way.

So I like to have the tip of the needle that I'm about to knit on, so for example, I'm gonna be start- start out by knitting across this, these stitches right here. I wanna have the tip of the needle, as, as you're laying it, looking at it, it'll be, on top here, but as I, as I'm kind of knitting it, it actually feels like it's underneath that, so that it can, it can tilt downward. I, I hope that that makes sense. But, if my words aren't making sense, hopefully you guys can see what I mean. this needle should be underneath this needle if you're holding it like this and looking at it.

So I'm gonna go ahead and just knit one round, and so I'm just knitting into each stitch. And try to knit these fairly tightly, because you don't want your needles to drop out of these stitches, and also you want your fabric to be nice and firm. So there, there should be four stitches on each needle. So I just knit across the first one. And here's the second one.

One, two, three, and four. And here's the third needle. One, two, three, four. And this, this is really the trickiest part I feel like, is when you're first starting out on the top of the head, and you've got all these needles and not very many stitches on. This is the hardest part.

So if these needles were shorter, to just to go back to that earlier question, it would be a little bit less awkward right now, because they wouldn't be sticking out quite so far. Here's my last needle full of stitches, so one, two, three, and four. All right. So now And you can see this, the center of my, my piece has kind of opened up. That's okay.

That'll happen as you stitch, but you can always pull that closed, later on. All right. So now we're gonna do increases all the way around. So we're, we're gonna knit front back into each stitch around. So we're gonna knit in the front and in the back.

So we'll end up with eight stitches on each needle, with a total of 32 stitches. So front and back, front and back. And here's our second needle. Front and back, front and back, front and back, front and back. All right.

Here's our third needle, still increasing every single stitch. Front and back, front and back, front and back, front and back. And here's our last needle. Knit front back, knit front back, knit front back, and knit front back. There we go.

All right. So you should have eight stitches on each needle. It's getting a little easier to hang onto. It'll just get even more easy as you keep going. And then at this point, this is where we're gonna add those ears back in.

Okay? So at the beginning of our round, we're gonna knit two stitches, so we'll, we'll just knit the first two stitches, one and two, and now here comes the unusual part. We're gonna grab this ear, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna place that skinny little I-cord spot in the middle of the ear. We're gonna put that between our two working needles. Okay?

So one ear's hanging on the front side, and one ear is hanging on the back. And then when we take our next knit stitch, we're just trapping that in place. We're just laying it there, and then we're gonna knit into the next, 12 stitches, so there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Move into the next needle. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Okay. And you should have two more stitches left on that needle.That we haven't knit yet. Now I'm going to bring the ear that's sitting on the backside. Okay, so we have an ear that's coming out of the front, we have another ear that's in the back. We're gonna bring that ear between our two working needles again right here to the front side.

Okay, so we're gonna b- lay that there, and then we're gonna go ahead and knit those last two stitches that were on that needle. And actually, those are gonna count as part of the 18 stitches we're knitting next. Okay, so one, two. See how that just traps that ear in place? Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.

Okay, so we're now at the end of our round, and you can see Here, I'm gonna just pull on that little beginning tail to close that hole, and you can see that there's an ear coming out here and an ear coming out here, and those are gonna be the very, on the very top of the head. Okay, that's what it looks like. They're just coming out in between those, those stitches that we did. We trapped them there already. So now at this point, you can go ahead and just start knitting in the round, I mean, continue knitting in the round, and you're gonna knit one stitch per stitch in the r- you're not doing any inc- increases or decreases yet.

You're gonna do that for maybe, like, five rounds. Let me check. Let's see. Rounds five through 11. Okay, then I guess that's seven rounds.

Five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. Yep, seven rounds. Just had to check there. so you're gonna be knitting rounds number five through rounds number 11. You're just knitting all the stitches, okay?

And then your piece should look like this. Okay, so we've worked our way around, and we're kinda getting the top of a bunny head here. And then after you do that, this is a good time to kinda pull on that beginning yarn tail and then to weave this in. because, you know, if you don't weave it in, it's just gonna continue to keep opening up, right? So you gotta pull on it, and I like to go through as many of those original stitches as I can at the beginning just to kinda reinforce and give it another layer of, of yarn running through each of those stitches.

You, it doesn't need to be perfect. If you miss some or, you know, splice through one or two, doesn't matter. Okay, we're just adding a little bit of reinforcement, and I wanna show you something. Right here, this little piece right here, see how I can stick my needle under here? This is that skinny little I-cord bit that's between the ears, and what I like to do is I like to stitch that I-cord to the inside of the bunny head.

So I just go through, you know, a stitch, a stitch or two. You know, I don't wanna have a, a stitch showing on the outside of the bunny head, but I just wanna grab, like, a strand of yarn and go into that I-cord. So I kinda go back and forth like this and stitch it in place, and the reason that I do this is because, you know, chances are it would not come out because the ear is a lot bigger, and I don't think it would fit between those stitches. But it really does help just kinda anchor it a little bit better. I'm gonna leave a little bit of a yarn tail 'cause why not?

But especially if you're planning on giving this to a kid, I would definitely not skip that step. I mean, you already have to weave in your yarn tail anyway. You might as well just sew that little bit of I-cord in place, and that way it's not gonna slip around. And also, another thing is, is, so I should mention this, when you're stitching that in, just make sure your ears are facing a way that you want them to be facing. Like, if you want, this, this is gonna be the front of the bunny head.

Okay, here's the beginning of our rounds. The front of the bunny head, if you look straight down onto this, the ears are set a little bit closer to the back of the bunny head, and there's a little bit more space in the front of the bunny head. So you just wanna make sure your ears are facing whatever direction you want them to be before you s- you tack that into place. All right, now, this is where we start doing our decreases to shape the little nose. And let me see here.

Just reconfigure my needles. Here we go. So when we're doing our decreases, we're going to knit 22, and then we're gonna slip, slip, knit, and then we're gonna knit two together, and then we're gonna knit to the end. So this is our first round of decreases. This is round number 12.

So we're gonna knit 22. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.Okay, and now we're going to slip, slip, knit. So we're gonna slip this stitch to our right needle, so as if to knit. So we're placing our needle on that side, we're slipping it, we're slipping it, and then we're going to knit those through the back loops. I'm gonna slide them back onto my left needle and knit them together through the back loops.

So that's our slip, slip, knit. And then our next stitch is a knit two together. So we're doing two increases, one right after the other. Okay? So knit two together, so we're gonna slide our needle in as if we're just knitting one stitch, but we're, we're actually knitting them both at the same time pushed together.

We're gonna grab that yarn and pull, pull pretty hard on this 'cause you don't want there to be a space or a ladder between those two decreases. So n- give that a nice tight tug after you make that and hold that tight as you knit the next stitch. Okay? And then you're gonna go ahead and knit to the end of the round. And then you're gonna do this three more times, three more rounds of doing these decreases.

So you'll knit all the way around to here, which is where we had our decreases. We're gonna do, first do that slip, slip, knit, then we're gonna do a knit two together, then we're gonna knit to the end of the round, and you're gonna do that a total of three more times. So that would be, we just did round 12, you'd do round 13, 14, and 15 just like that to do all your decreases, and your piece will look like this. Here's those short little needles here. Okay, so you can see all those decreases right here, kinda shaping the bottom of its nose.

And then on the next round, which is round number 16, we're going to knit two together all the way around. So knitting two together. See, this is why I like having sharper needle tips for, especially for decreases when I'm working tightly, so I can really I could slide that needle tip in there a little bit easier, but these needles that I'm using right now are not, they're not my favorite ones. They're a little tight, but we can do it. All right, so we knit them together all the way around, knit two together.

Actually, I'm gonna grab I'm gonna switch to these needles. So we're gonna knit two together here. And this section here has fewer stitches on it because we have been doing those decreases here. So you're gonna end up with fewer stitches on two of your needles. Knit two together, knit two together, we're just doing that all the way around.

Knit two together and knit two together. There we go. Okay, so now we're at the beginning of the round here. You can see all those little knit two togethers, that's creating the neck of the bunny. It's bringing it in all really tightly here.

And then we're going to And, and try to do this round kind of tightly, so that you don't see a lot of stuffing between your stitches, 'cause I know those decreases, you can kind of tend to see that. but we're going to just knit all the way around, just one round of knitting. Let's see. I'm stealing this needle. So this one, one round of knitting where we're not increasing or decreasing, that's gonna kinda reinforce those, those decreases that we just did when we did our knit two togethers all the way around for the neck of the bunny.

Making those nice and tight, as tight as you can. All right, that's the end of the round. And then on the next round we're going to knit front back all the way around. So we're starting our increasing now, knit front back, knit front back, each stitch around. Knitting We're gonna knit front back in every single stitch 'cause we're increasing for the body now at this point.

Oops, I just dropped my stitches. That's okay. All right, we are almost all the way around here. Here's our last needle. Knit front, back.

And knit front, back. All right. So now, after that, we will do one more round of just knitting in each stitch around, and then following that, we're going to do a round where we just increase somewhat. So you would knit front back, and then you would knit two stitches, and then you would repeat that all the way around, okay? So that's just adding a total of eight more stitches in the round, and once you've reached round number 20, then rounds number 21 through 31, you just continue knitting, knitting, knitting.

Okay, so we're just gonna knit in each stitch around for, you know, rounds number 21 to 31, and then you will have a piece that looks like this. As you can see, those little decreases that formed the nose of the bunny, and then you can see where it a- everything came in pretty tightly around that neck, and then came back out to form the, the bunny body. And then at this point, you can go ahead and just cut your yarn, because we're gonna add, another color. So I'm just gonna leave a little bit of a yarn tail, cut that off, and then we're gonna reposition our needles. I've actually already done that here.

But from where your yarn or from where your round begins, you're gonna count 11 needles and place that You know, you should have something close to that, but if you need to reposition some, that's fine. But just starting with that first needle, you're gonna have 11 stitches. Then the n- second needle, you're also gonna have 11 stitches, and then you're gonna use a third needle, so you might actually have two needles here, but you can combine them all into one, and you're gonna have a total of Let me get this out of here, 'cause that looks like a stitch, but it's not. you're gonna have a total of 10 stitches on that last needle, okay? So, and you can see here, I've been using a stitch marker placed in that first stitch, a locking stitch marker, just to keep track of the beginnings of my round so I don't get confused.

But if you take a look at this, the, these 10 stitches should be centered over where this, all these decreases were for the nose. So if you get look, a little discon- you know, discombobulated, a little confused, just know that those 10 stitches are centered over where those decreases were made for the nose, and that is the last needle. So we have 11, 11, and 10. All right? And then we're going to start by We're, I'm just gonna leave this hanging on the outside of my project so that I can, weave that in later.

And then we're gonna grab whatever color you need for the pants. I'm gonna be using this green. And then we're gonna just knit around with the green. So I like to hang onto that ending yarn tail. It helps me to keep the, the stitches from stretching out, and just go ahead and start knitting.

You could do that, you know, however you like, but we're gonna knit each stitch around in the new color. All right, here are the last 10 stitches. All right, so then the next two rounds, so rounds 33 and 34, we're gonna start by purling. Now, the reason we do this is because it kinda looks like the top waistband of the pants. It looks like, it'll make it look like the pants are sitting on top of the bunny.

So we're gonna purl 24. No, wait, 23. 23, so 1, 2. I know that got really stretched out there, but we're gonna, I'm gonna pull these yarn tails to the outside. Think I accidentally tucked them to the inside, but I really like my yarn tails on the outside, so I can weave them in nice and t- securely later.

All right, so I purled 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 6 Oops, I started knitting, you guys. So I think I started knitting on this needle. Did I start here? Yep. I just switched to knitting instead of purling.

I sh- I'm, I gotta, I gotta stick to the purling here. Let's see. I've got 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.21, 22, and here's our 23rd purl stitch, and then we're gonna switch to knitting just for eight stitches. We're gonna knit eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

That's where we're gonna pick up stitches later for the overalls, and we're gonna purl that last stitch on that needle. Okay? And then we're gonna repeat that exact same thing, so purling around, and then these eight stitches that are centered across underneath where the nose are, those are the knit stitches right there, those eight stitches. Okay, so I'm not gonna do that round just in the, you know, interest of time so I can make sure I can show you all the stuff, for the end of the bunny, for all the, like, details and stuff. So you would do that round that we just did one more time, and then after that, let's see, then we're gonna do rounds 35 and 36.

This is where we begin by purling six, knitting 10, purling six, knitting 10. Okay? So we're gonna purl six. One, two, three, four, five, six, and these six purls right here, this is gonna form the little lump of the pocket. If you take a look at this little guy here, there's purl stitches right here and right here that make him look like his hands are in his pockets.

It just sticks out a little bit more and also it's a visual cue as to where to do your stitching when we add those little lines in there for the arms, later. So that's what that is. So we're purling six, and then we're gonna knit 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Now we're gonna purl for the other pocket, so we're purling six.

One, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, so that would be where the other pocket is on the other side of the bunny, and then we just go ahead and knit 10. So we're knitting all the way across this last needle here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10. Okay, and then we would repeat that same sequence, that same row with the six purls over here, the six purls over here to be the pockets.

We're gonna do that one more time, so that would be round number 36, and then rounds number 37 through 46, we just knit all the stitches. We just keep knitting in that pants color, and then we're gonna switch to, for the, for the next two rounds, number 46 and 47, we would do two rounds of purls. I'm not gonna show you this part because, I we've already kind of shown you that in, when we did the waistband, but I wanna show you what it looks like. Okay, so, so here's where we had those extra purling, r- you know, purl six to b-become the pockets here, and here you can see how there's a lot more purling from here to here than just the waistband that's only two rounds of purling right here. Then we just knit a whole bunch of rounds, and then we do two purl rounds, and then we switch to, back to the main color.

We just can cut our yarn, grab a new strand of the main color, just like when we switched from the body to the pants. We just can go ahead and switch from the pants back to the body, and then we're gonna go ahead and knit. For rounds 49 to 54, we are using that main color, and we're just knitting around and around and around, and that brings us up to where we're at here on our sample. Okay? And then we're gonna, we're gonna do some decreases to shape the bottoms of the feet.

but at this point, or any time at this point or thereafter, you can begin stuffing your bunny. So I'm gonna go ahead and start getting that stuffing all the way down into the head. And you wanna make sure when you get in there that you kinda make sure you push out the nose a little bit. It's always such a relief to finally get the stuffing in there 'cause he looks so, just like a skin of a bunny. It's kind of sad.

But look at how cute he's getting now. All right. I like to stuff my toys fairly firmly because over time they'll get, you know, packed down a little bit. They kinda, the stuffing starts to stick together a little bit over time. But you don't wanna see any You don't wanna s- have it stretch your piece out too much.

You don't wanna see that, holes between your stitches. Okay, so now we're gonna do some of those decreases. We're gonna knit two together all the way around. And we're gonna grab this needle here. So we're just knitting two together all the way around here.I'm just transferring that stitch over to the next needle so that I can knit those together.

Knitting together. There we go. Tuck that back in there. Oh, Lady Lorrita says, "Hello from Taylor, Michigan. So glad you're feeling better." Thank you.

I appreciate the well wishes there. And Janice says, "I'm from South Carolina. I volunteer at a children's hospital. I'm going to see if they might accept these for donations made with organic cotton." Aw, that's very sweet. Yeah, that would make them a little bit more washable if they were o- organic cotton, or, I, I mean, a super wash could work as well, but maybe people are allergic to wool, so that might not be such a good idea, huh?

But one thing I do like about this project is that it is a little bit more safe for kids. I mean, you still probably wanna keep your eye on if they're chewing through or making any holes in these, but the pieces are anchored together really, really well. You know, they're all kind of It's almost made in one piece. Not quite. and, and I didn't use any safety eyes on purpose because of that 'cause I thought it would make it a little bit safer for l- the little ones.

Okay. So we made it all the way around, with our knitting two togethers, and now round number 56, we're just going to knit each stitch around. And then we'll do one more round of decreases after that, and then we can start, getting this guy stitched up. There isn't, there isn't a lot of sewing. There's just a little bit of shaping, a little bit of seaming to, to create those arms, and, and also the s- to separate the legs.

I know this looks really weird right now. but the thing I like about this method of constructing is you're not making all these separate little arms and legs and sewing them on. and also, you know how we did the ears, that I tried to do that a little bit so it's a little bit less fiddly, you know? You just have one piece to kind of tuck in as you're knitting. You don't have to do that sewing, to create the, the pieces, and it makes it a little bit more secure.

Oh, somehow I split my stitch. There we go. Okay. So now we're going to knit two together all the way around again, so this is round number 57. I'm just gonna slip this stitch onto the next needle there so I can knit them to- together.

And try to make these stitches as tight as you can because I feel like, where we do our decreases, that's where t- things tend to get a little bit extra stretched out. And it doesn't matter at this point. This is our last round here, so it doesn't matter if you're just trying to get more stitches onto your needle. like, I dropped, I dropped a needle there. I don't know if you guys noticed that 'cause I combined them together.

It doesn't matter anymore to You don't have to keep them straight on the, the needles that they were originally on anymore. All right. Almost done. One more. Okay.

So now I'm gonna cut this, leaving a little bit of a yarn tail, maybe, like, half a yard or so. That's probably more than we need, but like to be on the safe side. And then I'm going to thread that yarn tail onto my needle, and I'm going to run that through all of these. This is just like when we finished the tip of the ear, just running it through all of these live stitches here so we can get them off the needle. There we go.

Just like that. And then we can go ahead and just pull that nice and tight to close it. All right. And then Just getting those out of the way there. And then we're going to go ahead and use the same yarn tail.

I'm gonna go through I'm gonna just run this through those stitches one more time just to make it a little bit sturdier. And then we're going to basically take a look at where those decreases were for the nose, follow that down. This is b- going to be the center of the body, and we're going to separate this into two feet. So I'm gonna go in through the bottom and come out right here, and where you're coming out, that should line up with those decreases in the nose. So I'm gonna come out right here.And then take a couple little stitches just in place to kinda anchor my yarn, because when I pull on this, I don't want it to cinch this together.

I want it to seem like this yarn is coming from this point right here. See, when I pull on it, it pulls here. It doesn't pull from down there anymore. Okay, so we're gonna use that, and I'm gonna come right in here through so that you've got half of the stitches on this side and half on this side. I'm gonna come straight through with our needle like this.

And that should lay right on top, and we're gonna cinch that together to make feet. Look, magic. Okay, we're gonna do that a couple of times, make that nice and sturdy. Okay, so that's gonna create the little feet, and we can go ahead and weave that in. I'm just weaving this in and out, back and forth, because I do not want this to start to unravel.

Okay, I'm just, I'm just finding, you know, little places to weave it back and forth so it's, I know it's gonna stay. Then I can go ahead and cut that. Now, if you had a long enough tail here where you fastened off your pants, you can use this to stitch the little line i- but, to separate the legs. If you didn't have a v- well, hopefully this will be long enough. It might not be.

but if it isn't long enough, that's okay. You can just add a new strand of yarn here. I'm gonna come on over here and make a couple little stitches in place, just so it feels like it's anchored from this point. And then I'm going to stitch through to create those legs right about here. it's maybe just a little lower than the halfway point.

Maybe like a th- a, if this is a third, this is a third, this is a third, okay, if we divide that visually into three sections, I'm just going a third of the way up. You can always go further if you, if you want, but start, start with a shorter line there and s- you know, take a look and see if that's good enough. So I'm gonna come in through the back, and we're basically just making stitches through to create the division between the legs there. All right. We're starting to get very short on time.

I have another live event coming up, so I'm gonna go ahead and just not weave that in. You should probably, you should definitely weave that in. Oh, looks like I caught that yarn. and y- at this point, you can weave in any of these yarn tails here. this one I am going to use for creating the arm stitching.

Actually, I'm gonna show you real quick first how to pick up the stitches for the bib in the overalls. So I like to just slide my needle through all of, if you take a look, there's a purl stitch right there. It's going to be these eight stitches that don't have any purls. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay.

And then you can just grab y- some matching yarn, and then you can start knitting your, the bib section. So let's, let's take a look at that. And then we'll go back, we can go back and stitch the arms in just a little bit. Okay. So row one, we're just gonna knit all the stitches all the way across, just to kinda get our, our yarn anchored here.

And this can be done without, like, before you stuff the bunny. You may be wondering that. I find it easier to pick up the stitches and to deal with this after the bunny is stuffed. but, y- you know, everybody's gonna have their own way that they feel more comfortable with stuff. I like to do it at this point, but y- you may find that it's just as easy or easier for you, the way that you like to knit, to pick up and knit these stitches before you stuff the bunny and before you finish all of this stuff here.

But then you gotta put stuff on, on holders or something like that later, I mean, before you, add the bib. Okay, so we've knit our way across, and we're gonna turn it this way. And then we're gonna slip our first stitch with the yarn held to the front, so held to the, the wrong side of the bib, if that makes sense. So we're gonna slip that stitch, and then we're gonna go ahead and purl seven. So purling across, one, two, three, four, five, six, oops, and seven.

There we go. And then you'll turn your work, and then you're gonna hold the yarn to the back, slip the first stitch purl-wise with the yarn held to the back, and then you're gonna go ahead and knit across. And then you're gonna repeat these rows a few times, according to your pattern. And then you will end up-Let's see. On a wrong side row, you're going to bind off all your stitches.

This would, this would be row Let's see. Oh, it looks like I have an extra S here for some reason. That S does not belong here on row number 11. You can get rid of that. but yeah, you're gonna go ahead and just bind off all your stitches knit-wise on the very last row.

So, you can see this is creating this little flap that's gonna become the bib. All right? And you'll just repeat those back and forth, slipping the first stitch, and purling across when you're on a wrong side row, and slipping the first stitch, and knitting across when you're on a right side row. And then you're gonna bind off all your stitches knit-wise at the end. And then, I'm just gonna pull that out 'cause I need that needle.

You'll have this little flap that looks like this. Okay? And then you can create the two little shoulder straps, and these are just made with I-cord. So you just This is exactly like how we The same method of construction as when we made the ears except for, like, a million times easier. You're only going to be knitting I-cord with those two stitches to make a very thin little cord.

These are gonna be the two straps, and you just need to make sure that your straps are long enough to go from this point on your overalls across the shoulder into the back and be stitched there. So, okay, so you're gonna, you're gonna make two of those. and I always wait to s- to fasten those on and to sew them until after I have stitched the little arm sections in, which I'm gonna do here. So we just have to imagine this has a bib. I'm just gonna take this off 'cause I feel like it's gonna be easier for you guys to see.

And I wanna show you, this is, The reason that we did those little purl stitches on the sides Looks like my stitches got a little stretched out. is to help us when we're stitching the arms so that we know where these little pockets or where these arms are going to end. So here's the th- the thickest part of that purl section, okay? So if you I'm just gonna put my yarn needle through here and weave it in back and forth in a couple of places just to kinda anchor it, so it's not gonna slip when I start making my stitches. That seems pretty good.

And then you're going to just make a little, tiny stitch just at the top of the pocket through here. And then that's gonna help you visualize where the rest of the arm goes. Okay, so it should be about six stitches incorporated into the arm. Okay, and then you can go ahead, fasten that off, and do it on the other side. also, if your, if your yarn isn't too different between the two colors or you feel like you can kinda dig it in there enough, you can really stitch that in the gray if you'd prefer, not to change colors, in the middle of this little seam here.

But we're gonna be I'm gonna anchor my yarn once again. I'm just kinda making my yarn go back and forth into a couple different directions here just so that it's nice and anchored. And then I'm going to stitch through probably about, again, maybe about a third of the distance up in that color. Sorry. If this is a third, a third, and a third, we're gonna stitch on through here to the back.

And we can make some smaller stitches to hold that in place. See how that's forming the little arm there? And there should be, like I said before, there should be about six stitches around which, I mean, you can eyeball that, but if that helps you to count your stitches, that's fine, too. Looks like I need to go up just a little bit more. Okay, so you would do this on both sides, pinch out that second little arm over here, and you'll have your little bib on there.

And then you can go ahead and just use your yarn needle to stitch, to anchor the ends of your I-cord into, the shape of your overalls. Okay, so you want them to cross over in the back like this. And then last thing to do is the face. So we're gonna do this. I'm trying to catch up on my questions here, you guys.

Let's see. Oh, somebody's asking about magic loop. Can you maybe explain how to arrange the stitches when getting to the pants part? let's see. I don't think I guess I would include You know, it's really up to you, but I would i- start and stop so that those six stitches, those six purl stitches, and then the knit stitches between are Like, you, you'd have one section of knit stitches and one section of those six purl stitches.

When you're doing the purl six, knit 10, those should be on one section of your, your magic loop. And then the six and 10 should be on the other section if that makes sense. you know, behind, on the other side of the loop, if that makes sense. but I think as long as you, yeah, are just paying attention to how many to knit and how many to purl, you should be fine. Okay, so I'm gonna anchor my, my yarn here.

Actually, I think I have you guys do the eyes first. Let me see.Try and do it in the same order. Okay, it doesn't actually matter what order, whether you do the eyes or the nose first. I just don't want, things to look different than the pictures that I, that I gave you guys. All right.

Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and just anchor my embroidery floss back here. And I'm gonna come out so that i- and you can look at the pictures. I did it like a little There's like a little side view picture in your pattern. You want there to be more distance from the eye to the back of the head than from the eye to the very front of the nose. Like m- again, maybe like in thirds, if you think about it that way.

you can also place like a little quilter's pin on each side to see if that's where you want the eyes to be. I think this I'm gonna move my eye down just a tiny bit. And then you're just gonna make some little vertical lines, vertical stitches here just to create that eye on each side. So I think I went around maybe like three times or so. I'll do a fourth one here.

Just little, little vertical lines right on top of each other, and then we're gonna come over to the other side and try to make them as even as you can. But also keep in mind that when you're doing this, if it's a little bit uneven, it's okay. It'll give him a little quirky personality. Like, my bunny faces are not all perfectly symmetrical, and it m-makes their smi- You know, when their smiles are a little crooked or their eyes are a little different, it doesn't It really just It, it isn't really a problem, you know? You just do the best you can, and then you'll end up with ever so slightly askew features, which makes it look adorable.

Okay. And then once you get those in there, I like to do a little stitching between the two eyes to pull those eyes in just a little bit, to kind of make indentations in the face. Just a little. And if you find that you're losing Like, this eye got a little bit lost here because I pulled it in a little far. You can always add some more little vertical stitches in there.

And this one as well. And then you can do some cute little eyebrows kind of set up and slightly behind the eye. So when they slope downward like that, they look really cute. Here, I'll show you. See that little eye?

It makes it look like a little, like, "Hmm, what's happening here? Aren't I so adorable?" And there's another little eye. And then now we're gonna do the nose, so we're gonna come out. Just decide wherever you want the nose to be, the top. let's see.

I usually do this to just kind of test it out. Oops. Sorry about that. All right, so I am gonna grab this other side. So I'm making a loose stitch, and I'm gonna come out just slightly lower than those two to kind of anchor the bottom of this V.

Okay? So it's just a little shallow V for this little nose, but you could have a sharper V if you'd like. And then you're gonna take a little vertical stitch that goes straight down below, right there, and I'm gonna come out slightly to the side. There we go. And then, again, I'm gonna do another V.

I'm gonna bump this up just a little tiny bit. There we go. And now I'm gonna do another loose stitch right here, and then I want to catch the bottom of the V. And this is gonna make, like, a cute little smile line. You can also make the V go upside down.

It makes a really grumpy looking face, which looks totally cute. And then I'm gonna go ahead, and I make that line below the nose just a little longer so that it connects to the mouth a little bit better. So we'll go back in here. So basically, you're making a loose stitch here and a loose stitch here, and they're and you're anchoring them pointing down just a little bit there. I'm gonna make this one, this line, I want this line just to be a little tiny bit darker.

There we go. And then I, I usually just kind of go out the back of the head. And there's his cute little nose. He looks so cute. And then you, you want to make sure that you weave this back and forth, you know, in a couple of directions, actually going through your stitches so that it gets nice and caught and it's not gonna slip out.

Okay? So I'm sorry I didn't have, you know, every single step being able to show you guys, but, you know, we did talk about every single technique. You guys know all the orders to do them in. yeah, and you make your cute little bunnies. I hope you guys have fun with this project.

Thank you guys so much for joining me. I appreciate you guys. I appreciate you guys being so patient with me, to feel better enough to do these live events. All right. Thanks, you guys, for being here.

Bye, everybody.