The final accessories of your bear use all the skills you’ve used in previous weeks of the KAL. We would love for you to share your bears with us on Facebook, Ravelry, Instagram, or Twitter. We can’t wait to see how you’ve accessorized yours!

We’re continuing our KAL this week and it involves finishing up our bears. Next week we’ll finish them up completely with their accessories. After completing the body of the bear, you move on to the legs. When separating for the legs, you’ll bind off the middle and work each leg separately. Leave the dpns, or use the waste yarn trick from last week.

After you finish the legs, you’ll want to seam the bound off stitches so the only hole remaining is at the top of the head. Before stuffing, use a simple running stitch to close off the ears. We’ve shown it here in a contrasting color.

Give your bear some personality with a face. You can really have fun here! Use safety eyes or yarn. Give your bear a big nose, or small one. Make it a happy bear or a mischievous bear.

What will your bear’s face look like?

How’d the first part of your bears go? This week, we’re moving on to the yoke and arms. If you’re observant, you’ll see that the yoke area is reminiscent of a sweater, so it makes for good top-down sweater practice.

You’ll be using a lot of the same techniques as last week, so you may want to hop back and review the videos. This week, you’ll also be dividing for the arms.

This can get a little cumbersome with all of the dpns hanging off. I found that transferring some of the stitches to waste yarn was super helpful. It makes it easier to handle without getting poked, or the other needles getting in the way. You don’t have to replace them all, just one or two, and they’re super easy to slide back on. You’ll notice, I still have two dpns in the body section. The rest of the stitches are on waste yarn.

What has been the trickiest part of the bear so far for you?

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?