I have the u-necked "Back to School" vest (from Fitted Knits) almost finished:



All it lacks are neck and collar bands, and I didn't quite have the energy to (a) hunt up the correct needle for that from my needle collection and (b) pick up all those stitches.

But I do love this vest. I particularly love the thermal "waffle" stitch:



I worked on a couple other things last night. I picked up the stitches for, and began the "straight" part of the crown, on the Lady Detective Hat:



It doesn't look like much now but I'm hoping with finishing and blocking it will look a bit more chi-chi.

I also started a new amigurumi:



And it's true - the cheap acrylic yarns are easier to work with for these.

I've always liked making toys. They were about the first project I ever made - I learned to hand-sew when I was 6 or so, and learned to crochet at 8 (Knitting came two years later). I was young enough when I learned to do those things that being able to make my own toys - my own "friends" - was kind of magic. (Oh, I realized, even in those early days, that they were "just" toys. But it still seemed kind of magic.)

I was sort of a lonely child - I didn't have a lot of friends, and many of my friends lived on the other side of town and I didn't get to see them often. So I spent a lot of time alone, making stuff or creating elaborate situations (like little stage-plays) and moving my various characters through them - I think my two favorite types of toys were my stuffed animals and those little plastic zoo (and farm, and other - I had a set of "dog breeds of the world") animals that used to be so common. (You don't see them much any more - they used to be a very common toy at places like Woolworth's - a plastic bag of maybe 20 or so different animals, made of plastic, ranging in size from about an inch to maybe two inches).

Being able to make toys was kind of a big thing, though - for one thing, I didn't have a lot of allowance money to spend on toys, so getting a new one from the store meant weeks of planning (and going without things like the penny candy they sold at a little store in my hometown called The Attic). But making toys - I could ask my mom if I could use some bits of fabric or yarn she had (she almost always said yes).

The other thing was- there was the idea that I had something that no one else had, exactly. You could go into the dimestore and all the little bags of zoo animals were more or less alike - or you could go to Reserve Exchange (another store in my hometown) and buy a little Dakin stuffed toy (probably made in China, even then) and have it be the clone of thousands of others. But when I made my own critters - especially when I made up my own patterns - it was totally my own.

And I think I became more attached to the toys I made - I guess I felt that I was their "mother" in a way that was different from the store-bought ones. I still have some of them (I think a year or two ago I posted a picture of the fillyjonk doll I made when I was 10 or 11.)

I continued to make the toys - heck, I continue to make them today - even past the age when it was generally considered to be okay to be playing with those sort of things, or even really having them around. But the magic and the fun of it never quite went away - I never grew out of it. And just like the famous C.S. Lewis quote about how what some people view as "childish" books are not that - that there is no book worth reading at 10 that is not worth re-reading at 50 - I hope that I never grow out of the feeling of happiness and, yes, a little magic that I feel when making "critters."