Welcome to week 1 of our Valley Yarns 670 Holiday Bears KAL! Did you have a chance to gather all of your materials? If not, there’s still plenty of time to join and catch up. This is a fairly fast project that we’ve broken down into 4 weeks, but if you’re ambitious, you could even finish a bear in a day!

For this first week, we’ll be working up until the neck. There are a few skills you’ll need, so we’re including some pictures and videos to help you out. The first thing you’ll have to do is cast on to your dpns and join without twisting. This can be a little tricky. I like to cast all my stitches onto one dpn then transfer the stitches to each separate needle. Then, I lay my needles flat on the table and check every needle to make sure all my stitches are facing the same direction. You don’t want to twist them!

For the head and neck, you’ll need some to know an increase and some decreases. The increase you’ll need to know is kfb (knit into the front and back of the stitch). For this increase, you knit the stitch just like you normally do, but don’t drop it off the needle. Instead, you go back into the back of the stitch and knit it. Here’s a handy video to help:

You’ll also need to do some decreases. The pattern includes k2tog (knit two stitches together) and ssk (slip, slip, knit). Here are two videos of those two decreases if you don’t know how to do them:

Have you started your bear? Do you have any questions we can help you with?