bacon and elephant ornaments (plus pattern + directions)

The story of the bacon ornament: I'm in the process of making a bacon scarf for one of my friends, but it's boring and I'm easily distracted so it's only about 8 inches long and I have no plans to work on it in the immediate future. I decided to make it double knit with four different bacon-y colors, so it's very slow work and not super portable. I doubt I actually invented more than two color double knitting, but I had never seen it before and just experimented with it until it looked right. The idea is to double knit like normal, but hold the extra colors between the two layers. You also have to make sure that your pattern doesn't require the same color to be knit on both sides at the same time. So I feel bad because he lives up north where it's already snowy and cold and bacon scarf-less. Then yesterday I was playing with scrap felt and realized the red and brown pile on my desk looked a lot like bacon so I decided to make him a bacon ornament to make up for the fact that he probably won't get his bacon scarf this winter. It's just two pieces of felt cut to appropriate bacon shapes and hand stitched together. The ribbon is just sewn on the back so it's not reversible but it could very easily be a two layer piece of reversible bacon.

Now elephants!

I made these cute little elephant ornaments for my FMIL (she looooves elephants). They were super simple and are just made of scrap material and other things I already had.

Here's what my pattern looked like:

On the elephant, the vertical line is where the ears attach and the star is where the tail pokes through the seam. This pattern includes my seam allowances.

To make the elephant, cut out two elephants and four ears. Put the two pretty sides of the elephant together and place a piece of string at the tail place (remember, the long end goes inside!) Machine stitch from 1/4 above the tail, down around the feet, then trunk, and stop at the top of the head. Clip the corners--this is very important, otherwise you end up with a potato with nubs. Turn the elephant right side out. I used a pencil to help push the trunk and legs out. Stuff the elephant starting with the trunk and legs. The pencil was once again useful in stuffing the extremities. Once well stuffed, fold the top opening inside, pin, and hand stitch across to close. Put the pretty sides of two of the ear pieces together and stitch. Repeat for the other ear. The ears have no stuffing. Hand sew the ears on while forward, so when folded back the seam won't show, then fold back and stitch once or twice to keep them folded back. Sew seed beads on for eyes. I used one long doubled thread to do both ears and eyes so in the end I'd only have two ends to sew in. Finally thread a piece of embroidery floss or yarn or ribbon or whatever, stab the elephant in the back (haha get it?), and thread through so you have something to hang the ornament with. Hope that's clear enough!