Crochet Fidget Toys

 Confession time: 

...Dramatic pause... 

 I'm a fiddler...

I have always fidgeted to the consternation of my parents and teachers. I had my wrists slapped more than once as a child. I thought it was a bad thing, I thought doodling was a bad thing. But it's OK, it's all encouraged now! Not only can you buy books that encourage creative doodling, but you can buy fidget toys. To the educational psychologists who led the charge, who ever you are, I say Thank You! Someone has finally figured out that fidgeting serves a purpose.

So what is that purpose? 

After a quick trawl of the internet I came away with mixed messages, so I chose to only hear the positive messages. 

Most of us live a very sedentary life stuck at desks, in offices and class rooms. People who fidget tend to be thinner and fitter than those who don't. 

You may fidget because you are anxious, in this case the repetitive movements are calming. 

You may have trouble concentrating, but fidgeting, despite what my parents thought, aids concentration!

 

You don't have to have ADHD to fidget! I simply cannot sit in front of the TV without crochet in my hands. So, it occurs to me that perhaps crocheters are by their nature fidgeters. What's more I am not the first crocheter to have thought about making fidget toys.

 

A fidget toy is anything which encourages repetitive, almost subconscious movement. Most importantly, I think, it should be silent. It should be tactile, so think squeezable, bounce-able, roll-able, stretchable, foldable. It could be a small thing you can pop in your pocket or even a thing that you wear. It could fold, bend, button or knot.

 

My first idea for you is one of Dedri Uys' Amish Puzzle Balls. I chose it because it works on many levels. Although this one is far too large to go in a pocket you can make them as small as you have the patience.

 Here's a pair disguised as Cactus, I made them with a No10 crochet thread.

While it is a puzzle it is not exactly a Rubix cube.

Made up it is simply a soft tactile ball that can be rolled and squeezed.

Take it to pieces and the individual elements can be bent and manipulated without thought.

 

Sticking with the idea of shapes which can be manipulated, the Endless Hexi is a design by IraRott. It reminds me of a 3 dimensional Kaleidoscope pattern. It is made of 6 triangular pyramids.

By folding the coloured blocks either inward or outward you cycle through each of the 4 colours. As you rotate a different colour becomes visible on the face of the Hexi.

Even having made it, I am fascinated by the process which makes it happen! I made mine with the same Double Knitting yarn as the Amish puzzle. The original design uses a very cuddly polyester yarn. This is another design which can be made as large or as small as the yarn you choose.

 

There is another similar pattern made by Lyudmila Dzeman which uses a larger triangle made in rows. I had to try making this one as well so that we could compared the result. 

The size is considerably larger and takes much longer to make. In principle the pyramids are joined in the same way and it turns through the colours exactly the same.

For some reason I get a greater feeling of satisfaction as it turns so delightfully.

 

Remember when I made all those Hyperbolic forms but had no idea what to do with them after? Suddenly I realise that a simple Mobius strip would work. But add a tactile frilled edge and it's perfect. I have looked at numerous instructions which all vary, so I would suggest there is no wrong way to do this! I would suggest you use a yarn which will not felt or bobble. You can go with any weight of yarn and hook size, depending on the dexterity of the end user. You can use any height of stitch.

In principle begin by making a number of chain, any where between perhaps 10-15. Do not join.

Work into the back bump and make a Double crochet (Sc-US) in each back bump. Your strip now has two sides. 

Twist the strip and join by beginning the next round working into the first chain.

Work a Dc, in the first stitch and 2 Dc in the next stitch. Work around (Dc, 2Dc in next stitch) until you reach the join. Work across the join in the same manner

From now on work continuously in the stitch pattern. 

You may choose to work a different number of increases. The more increases the frillier it will get.

 

Turn it into a bracelet and it's always with you wherever you are fidgeting! 

To do this you make Dc (Sc-US) around an elastic hair tie, when you reach the start, do not join. Instead, you twist and begin to work one Dc between each dc on the under side. When you reach the beginning work in continuous rounds starting with the very first stitch, as above.

The number of stitches increases very quickly. In all honestly I got rather bored after 3 rows and so I switched up to Htr (Hdc-US) for the last two rounds. This meant it grew wider much more quickly.

  

I have noticed a lot of simple fidgets which include a marble encapsulated with in the crochet. So of course I wondered if it was possible to make a marble Mobius strip!

You could make your strip either as a tube or a flat strip which is seamed later. As I hate seams I went with the tube option. I began with enough chains to enclose a marble, and then worked in continuous rounds until I felt it was long enough.

At this point I put the marble inside and joined my tube ensuring that it had a three twists. I joined the seam by working 2 whip stitches through each pair of Dc at the ends, pulling the seam together. The whip stitches almost imitate the crochet stitches. While it is easy to see where the seam is, it blends quite well. Choose a marble that fits easily but not too loosely. The idea is that the marble can be squeezed endlessly around the loop.

 

Keeping with the simplicity of the Mobius and for those of you have find pleasure in popping the bubbles in bubble wrap, I made a Pop-it! To be honest the crochet version doesn't give the same level of fidget satisfaction. This pattern is by Kim Ethridge. The Pop-it panels can be worked as Hexagon or squares and tiled to your hearts content.

At this size it slips easily into a pocket, although to be honest it didn't score highly on my fidget scale. I wanted to find a way to add a marble to a single pop-it by making the panel double sided, but I am afraid I couldn't get it to work with any level of satisfaction.

 

Snakes turn up endlessly when you search 'crochet fidget'. They can be soft and fluffy, with knots in their tales or filled with marbles. I borrowed a simple pattern from Stitchbyfay and using a heavy weight yarn made a snake big enough to fit a marble. In fact I got carried away and gave him two marbles, which makes it look like he is digesting a heavy meal! I also wanted his tail to be big enough to tie in a knot. 

 

Do you have a box, or draw or stash of weird odds and ends you have found and collected because they 'might come in handy one day'? I really hope it is not just me! This weird collection came in handy more than once in this blog post. In this instance it is where I found the green eyes. 

 

There are lots of ideas which include beads. The juxtaposition of smooth hard bead and soft crochet, plus the gentle tap-tap in your hand gives a multi-sensory experience. The simplicity and colour possibilities of Cozy Fox Hollow's Beaded Stress Ball appealed to me. It uses a worsted weight yarn and Pony beads. I had never heard of Pony beads before. They are plastic beads with a large hole making them perfect for crochet. Normally you would thread beads onto your yarn before beginning to crochet. Unfortunately this makes the bead sit on the reverse side of the crochet. In order to get the beads to sit on the front surface of your crochet you need to pull the working loop through the bead. The hole in a Pony bead is 4mm which is why they are so useful. But, I did not have any Pony beads so I just used some wooden beads and a very small sized thread crochet needle in order to pull the loop through the bead. For the rest of the crochet I used a larger hook with a 4ply yarn which left large holes behind the beads. Had I stuffed the ball in the normal manner the stuffing might have leaked. Instead I used a small cloth pouch of weighted stuffing beads, the kind you find in stuffed Teddies or juggling balls. This has added an extra dimension to the Fidget, making it sit in the palm of the hand with a very comforting weight, while still allowing it to be nicely squidgy! 

Remember that weird collection of odd things that I have? Well, it also contained a little box which I had carefully labelled 'crochet beads' and then I'd inconveniently forgotten about it. It turns out these are Pony Beads. So stress ball No2. I used a fluffy yarn to create a sensory contrast between the hard beads and the soft yarn. This one got a soft stuffing so it is comfortingly squidgy.

I was really surprised by how satisfyingly tactile these simple balls are. I ended up using a heavy weight cotton yarn with Pony beads and making a couple more, both stuffed with little bags of the weighted stuffing beads.

All of my fidgets have homes to go to. But I have to say, despite it's simplicity, the little Beaded ball is my favourite and I'm keeping the tiny one for myself!

 

Fastening off... 

Crochet Linen Doily Part 2

 As I promised last month, I'm attempting to draw inspiration from a pair of very elaborate tea-towels to create a linen doily. This time we are looking at the 'blue' tea-towel which presents new challenges.

I lied to you in the last blog post, I have been corrected, the linens were bought in Bahia, Brazil. From there they travelled to North America before finally crossing the Atlantic ocean to arrive here in cold and damp Lancashire, the traditional home of cotton manufacture. I just love the symbolism that this handmade item was made by, bought by, and gifted to craftswomen from three different nations.

 

It has a rolled edge, which I've found to be impossible with the stiff coarse Linen that I've chosen, so I'm going to just make a folded hem. It appears to have either spike Dc (Sc-US) or blanket stitch over the hem all around the edge. After careful study I find these stitches are set two threads apart. They form the base of the crochet edging. There is one edging that goes along the sides and another at the end. Although it's a relatively simple and repetitive design it proved confusing when I attempted to draw a stitch diagram. It is quite hard to tell whether I am dealing with Trebles or Double-trebles (Dc and Treble-US). I think the only way to find out will be in practice.

Now I can decide how big my doily will be.  I know that the pattern repeats over 30 stitches, plus one extra stitch at the end, which means it repeats over 60 threads. I am not going to be counting out all those threads! Handily I have inherited a little magnifying gadget for counting the threads so I can see that there are 26 threads to 1 inch or 2.5cm! Now I can work out how big I want my doily to be.

For my doily, I've decided to use No8 DMC Perle Cotton thread in blue and Anchor Pearl Cotton thread in Cream, as I  have plenty in my stash. The thread is a little finer than the original thread used, but as I discovered last month, the cream coloured yarn will be more visible against the white cloth.

Before I began the edging row I tried a sample using blanket stitch. I felt that the top of the stitches were too small, so I reverted to the spike Dc (Sc-US) that I used last month. As before, I used a 1.25mm hook for these initial stitches, but after that I went with a 1.5mm hook just because I find it easier and my stitch size easier to control. Making sure that I got my stitches two threads apart was tedious, time consuming and honestly quite painful! If I did this again I would want to come up with a better technique.

The corners on the tea towel are not all made the same way. At this point I was not really sure how to approach them. I had added around 5 stitches into exactly the same place on each corner. I realise that as I work the next row of crochet I may have to make a few adjustments, in case I do not have exactly the right number of these spike stitches. 

The first round of stitches (chain2, Treble x 3) could be worked all around the square. Unbelievably, I had almost exactly the right number of stitches on each side. There was one too few on one side and one too many on another. I was able to make the adjustment near the corner under a chain2. 

After that I worked the two ends, one after the other with the shell design. After experimenting I decided that these were treble not double-treble stitches (Dc not Tr-US). I had also spotted that in order to make the stitch-repeat fit Round1, and for the centre of the shell to always fall into the centre of a chain2 space, I had to skip one chain somewhere in each repeat. I had drawn that into my chart before I began.

The final round is in blue thread. This could be worked continuously all the way round the doily. I wasn't sure at this point how the corner would work. On the linen towel the corners were different, so once again I was left with making it up as I went along!

On the simple edges, I think the stitch pattern is (Dc, Trx3) into the chain2 space below. (Sc, Dcx3-US). On the shell edges, the pattern is a repeat of previous rounds but with picots. The corners turned out to be quite straightforward.

So far I am feeling more than a little bit smug that is has worked out this well, so far!

I wanted to include some of the ribbon work on this doily. This is something I have never done before and I have no instructions for how to do it. Unfortunately I had already hemmed this square before I discovered that I should have drawn the threads before hemming! I had, however tried to make the hem as narrow as possible and I think my technique had improved since the first doily I made last month. Practise makes perfect!

Where to put the ribbon border? Because I am the mistress of procrastination I suddenly decided to make the cross-stitched element first as I could not envisage how large it would be. These days I have neither the patience or the eyes for such fine work, but I decided that I should at least add a small detail in the centre of the doily. I used some odds and ends of DMC Perle thread. I then spent a ridiculous amount of time deciding whether my flower should be pink or blue like the original towel. In the end I thought perhaps yellow would echo the cream coloured border. What do you think? Should it have been blue?

 

Now I have to make the ribbon border! 

The ribbon is 3mm wide and the drawn threads cover a 6mm gap, so I removed 6 threads. I cut one weft thread in the centre of the fabric and pulled it out back to either hem where it is then hidden. Pulling one thread at a time makes it easy to create the right gap.

If you imagine the ribbon is a thread on a needle, it is sewn into the weft threads rather like back-stitch. The needle goes *up and over 13 threads, back under three, (up over 6 threads, back under three) repeated one more time. Then the pattern repeats again, but this time it goes over 16 not 13 threads. This leaves three neat little blue stitches at the back of the fabric. How can I centre the ribbon pattern on my doily? The only way forward was to count the number of warp threads I had to weave over. I ended up with 178. For the sake of my poor eyes I had to assume both ends of my doily would be about the same number!

 

At this point I was really really confused. Eventually after a few false attempts I worked out that the pattern repeated itself over 19 threads. Many scribbled diagrams and poor maths later I could work out how to centre the pattern.

 

The problem at the end is how to fasten off the ribbon. If I had done this work before hemming I could have folded the raw end of the ribbon inside the hem. Instead I have to carefully fold the end and stitch it to the underside of the hem. Lesson learnt!

At the end of the day I think I have reminded myself why I crochet rather than practising any other handicraft. While I have enjoyed the challenge, I feel I have to apologise to the women of my family who came before me, to the tailors, lace-makers and embroiderers. I just do not have the patience!

 

fastening off...

 

 

  

Crochet Linen Doily, Part One

 Let's do some deconstructing, or is it backwards engineering? Let's make some linen dresser doilies, not with a pattern but by copying. As if that isn't enough of a challenge, let's do some embroidery as well. It may all end up being a terrible idea!

Back in the day, before the TV, women would embroider and crochet absolutely everything in sight. I was surprised, after a quick search on the internet, to discover that it is still possible to buy these lacy fripperies. It quickly becomes apparent that no one knows what to call them. They are doilies, doulies, placemats, covers, scarves and runners.

My wonderful friend, known here as The Researcher, sent me two tea-towels which she bought in Bahia, Brazil. I shudder at the idea of using them for anything so common place! They feature crochet, of course, but also drawn thread work, silk ribbon embroidery, cross stitch, and satin stitch embroidery. As there is so much for me to learn here, let's make this a two part blog, starting with the white design this month and the blue design next month. I already know I don't have the patience for all that cross stitch!

 

Before I begin I am going to need a magnifying glass and a whole lot of luck! At least I know that I have to wash and iron my linen to pre shrink it and then I need to hem my doilies. 

 

 

I'm starting with the 'White' tea-towel because it is the easiest. The first thing to do is to examine the work I intend to copy. The Linen is hemmed with a wide hem. I have a sewing machine foot to do this; but after a fairly disastrous attempt to use it I decided on the unskilled method!

 

The towel has edging at one end only, but I intend to copy it on to both ends of my doily. The crochet appears to be begun with spike Dc (UK, Sc-US) made over the hemmed edge and separated by three chain. The spike stitches appear to be about ⅜" (inch) apart. After roughly drawing out the stitch pattern I can see that the pattern repeats over 9 of these spike stitches and I will need one more at the end. So that's 9 x ⅜". The American readers will find this perfectly acceptable but my metric English brain is screaming! So I decide instead to make this ³/₁₀"! Besides the maths, I will be marking this by hand and it is much clearer to read from my ruler! Now I can work out how big I want my doily to be.

I've decided to use No8 Anchor Pearl Cotton thread in Cream, as I just happen to have a whole box full. The thread is a little finer than the original thread used, but I'm hoping that the cream coloured yarn will be more visible against the white cloth. 

I was nervous about pulling up stitches through the Linen, but it was easier than I expected. I used a 1.25mm hook for these initial stitches, but after that I went with a 1.5mm hook just because I find it easier.

 

As the thread is thinner than the original, I ended up doubling up the number of stitches used for the shell features just to make it look right. I made a sort of Treble puff stitch made of two pairs of 2 joined trebles. (Dc-US). I'm quite happy with how it worked out and I like the contrast of the cream thread and white linen.

 

The drawn thread work is more of a challenge as I have only ever worked a few samples. I began by cutting a single thread in the centre and began carefully picking it out until I reached the hems on either side. 

I have decided that this border is 6 threads wide. Now that I have picked out one thread it is easier to see and pull the others. The ends of the drawn thread can now be threaded onto a needle and slipped inside the hems so that the finish is very neat. Using the cream thread I can now weave it through the threads. In each set of 6 threads the needle does a little dance that twists the back three threads forwards. It goes under the back three threads, over the front three threads, and is twisted back so that the needle comes out of the cloth where it went in!

As you can tell I am not the greatest machinist in the world and my seams are not very straight. I realise now that I should have pulled the threads before I hemmed the fabric. This way I would have achieved a better finish. However I like the overall effect. The drawn thread technique is very fiddly but really very simple. I'm tempted to leave the design there but perhaps I should add a line of embroidery as well.

I drew out the running stitch design on squared paper, it was just visible when I laid it under the linen. This allowed me to position the design in just the right place. Then I left pin point marks with an air soluble pen on the fabric. The sewing needs to be done fairly promptly before the marks fade.

It's been a big learning curves but I've learnt a lot from the mistakes. No one will notice with a beautiful vase of flowers sat on it. After all that's the job of doilies, to protect what's underneath from what's on top. If lacy fripperies ever come back into fashion I'll be ready!

fastening off...