knit teddy bear

Sometime last fall, my mom had come across a large stash of yarn at an antique store, and she bought a lot of it - such a bargain! Most of the skeins were acrylic, but one was a lovely sport-weight wool blend in a perfectly almond-brown color that just begged to be a teddy bear.
I began my online search for free knitted bear patterns - not an easy task! Most bear patterns I found were for crocheting, which I don't terribly dislike, but I vastly prefer to knit. I did make a crocheted bear once. Once, because I'm pretty sure that it did not come out to scale, and because it took a lot of motivation to get me to crochet something! This blue crocheted bear (and the knitted one above) will belong to our "someday" babies.Finally, I came across a cute pattern which was originally printed in Simply Baby by Debbie Bliss. I found the pattern in PDF form, here. My teddy bear was pushed aside many a time to make room for other projects - baby booties, Christmas presents, presentations for school - but I finally finished it last night! It doesn't look much like the pattern picture, at all, but I still like it!
Since I was working with just one skein of yarn, and I wasn't sure at all of how the pattern would work out, I actually ended up scrapping the "snout" of the bear in favor of a sewn-on yarn nose. There wouldn't have been quite enough yarn for his ears, otherwise!