Day 1 Challenge: Lion Rattle Toy

So...I cheated on a few of my challenges.  Some of the projects I listed were ones I had started but never finished.  I was using the challenge as a way to motivate myself to get things done.  Anyway, my lion rattle was such a challenge.

When you are expecting a baby you will find (or may already have found) that EVERYONE who has just had a baby is super excited to give you stuff that they don't need anymore.  At first I thought it was super friendly, now as Terrance and I accumulate more and more things I see that it is because this stuff takes up a lot of space!  But what do you do with perfectly good things?  You give it to someone else!

Yeah so, in my haul I got a lot of great things that I plan to use...but I also got a few things that I would be just fine without.  Among these things was a plush rattle.  It was a cute toy but a bit dingy.  Not something I really wanted to give to my newborn babe.  But!  It had the most wonderful rattle sound.  Not like pebbles shaking around or something like that.  It's more...I don't know...musical.  Like the parts are made from bits from a music box.  That's when I got the idea for this project. 

I gut the toy and pulled out it's cylindrical musical center (that sounds awful, doesn't it?).  Then I crocheted around the rattle part and padded it a bit with stuff (but not too much because I didn't want to muffle the sound).  After I finished the body I made a round little head and added a tail. 

Now here's where it got tricky for me.  How was I going to do the mane?  I didn't want to root the toy with yarn because I didn't want the baby to pull out the little bits and try to eat them or something.  Then I remembered seeing other toys with curly heads of hair and through some YouTube and Google research came across the loop stitch (experienced crocheters will probably laugh at this, but I would like to remind you all that I'm completely self taught and up until very very recently everything I've done has been freehand with experimental stitches I just made up lol).  So I learned the loop stitch via craftpassion's awesome video and made the lion's mane.  Lol...I have to admit, once I got the hang of the loop stitch I got a bit addicted to it.  It's so cooool!

I've started using plastic eyes for my toys and, even though I can't even pull the things out once they're in, the worried momma in me was concerned about choking hazards.  So I stitched on a very basic face.  I wanted to keep things simple so the baby wouldn't have many things to pull on or pull out. 

When I was finished I sort of felt like the toy looked like a bear dressed as a lion than a lion.  Lol.  What do you think?  I like it anyway though, so I didn't care very much.

Even though my challenges are only supposed to be a day, this one took me a little while.  On top of that I wasn't able to finish it as soon as I had hoped because I traveled somewhere with Terrance and forgot to bring stuffing!  So, for a whole day the tiger only had two legs!  Poor little guy!

Eventually he got his front legs and I added a little "J" to mark him as the baby's :) (Julian). 

Overall I'm really happy with the results.