Playing

October 22, 2020September 16, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)17 Comments

Next week it’s the half term break here so Toby will be the centre of my attention, but this week I’ve been free to have fun playing with some of my knitted friends and making scenes to share. When I was small I loved little things and I still do – I seem to have acquired quite a collection of small props (mostly from Maileg) and it’s been lovely to get them out and take these pictures to show some of the newest patterns (the removable shoes, the sundress supplement/camisole top and the bags).

I hope you enjoy these pictures as much as I have enjoyed making them 🙂

Removable shoes, new patterns

October 13, 2020September 2, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)17 Comments

Regular sized to fit any of the 9 inch tall animals

(rabbits, bears, mice, foxes, monkeys, pigs, cats, elephants, sheep, deer and lions)

Small sized, to fit the 7 inch rabbits pattern

When my daughter was little she was quite good a loosing little bits of toys (sorry to tell tales on you Amy), and I spent lots of time hunting for lost things under sofas, down the back of seat cushions and poking through the contents of the vacuum cleaner cylinder. So when I designed the little cotton rabbits I chose to knit the shoes as part of the feet and so avoid having to spend time hunting down or re-knitting lost shoes. It’s become apparent though that some people who knit my animal patterns would like to have shoes that do come off and so can be changed to match an outfit, so over the last few months I’ve been working on these patterns for removable shoes.

There’s a pattern to fit the regular (9 inch sized animals) and one for the smaller 7 inch rabbits (please check you have the right one in your basket before you check out).

Both patterns contain 5 pairs of shoes: 3 pairs of Mary-Jane style with a functional buttoning strap; a pair of laced up trainers and a mules- style slipper. There are also options for knitting feet and legs with knitted on socks, either with a simple garter stitch cuff or a folded over ribbed cuff.

I’ve designed the shoes and trainers to be close fitting and to be shaped around the foot with some short-rows and decreases and the slippers, whilst easy to take on and off are held in place on the foot by a knitted on trim. Hopefully they’ll fit your animals foot well and you’ll not need to be knitting replacements for any lost shoes anytime soon 🙂

You can find the patterns in the usual places, either on Ravelry or on Etsy

If you give either pattern a go please come and share your projects over on Ravelry or on the facebook group, it gives me so much pleasure to see what you make from my patterns.

Happy knitting, J xx

crafts & knitting · knitting tips

A neat edge to a top down seam, a tutorial

October 12, 2020October 31, 2022 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)12 Comments

There are occasions when you want to create a really neat join between two seamed pieces, especially when this join is at the top of the piece and so very visible. Within my patterns this occurs at the top edges of both the removable shoes (soon to be released) and some of the designs in my ‘bags, backpacks and baskets’ pattern.

Above is a picture of the top seam that you’re aiming to achieve:

And here’s a little tutorial on how to work it…

Normally when you cast off you cut the work from the ball and thread this tail through the final stitch on the needle in order to secure the cast off row and prevent it from unravelling. But that creates a little nubbin at the end of the row and can interfere with a neat join when you start to sew an attaching seam.

So instead, when you have your last stitch at the end of your cast off row, cut the work from the ball and pull on the loop of this last stitch, like so:

Keep pulling that loop until the cut tail is pulled all the way through, effectively unravelling half of this final stitch:

Then thread a tapestry needle with this cast off tail end and sew through both arms of the edge-most stitch on the opposite side of the seam:

Then sew back across the gap and down through the stitch that the tail end is emerging from:

In doing this you have replicated a cast off edge stitch to span the top of the seam between the two pieces (see image at the top)

And then you can continue seaming the two pieces together using mattress stitch ( Mattress stitch seaming tutorial can be found here)

I hope this helps you to get neat and attractive edges to the seams at the top of your removable shoes and bags, happy seaming 🙂

J x