For the last couple of years, Lloyd and I have been looking for the edition of the Chronicles of Narnia series that we remembered reading as children. These are the editions with the black and white Pauline Baynes illustrations at the beginning of each chapter and one or two in the chapter itself. These editions are out of print, so when I stumbled across a full set for sale, we snapped up two: one for us and one for our niece and nephew. However, since our niece and nephew aren’t quite old enough for these books yet, we decided to give them toys they could play with now as well.
The toys we decided on were Mr. and Mrs. Beaver from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for two reasons. First, there are two of them so Hadley and Jackson could each have their own toy. Second, the Beavers serve as the children’s guides in Narnia in this book so they seemed like the right choice to introduce children to the series.
My first step in this process was to find a knit beaver pattern. For some reason, I find it a lot easier to knit children’s toys than to sew them so I knew I wanted to find a knitting pattern. The one I decided to use can be found here and results in very cute beavers.
Next, I decided that I needed to “research” the beavers clothing and read the entire series again. This was a lot of fun, but Lewis never described the beavers’ appearance so Lloyd and I made it up. Since Narnia is a bit like England in the 1950s, we decided on a frilly apron for Mrs. Beaver and a tweed jacket for Mr. Beaver.
I had a lot of fun making the beavers and their clothes and everyone was happy with the result.