After a fairly major session of stuffing and sewing up yesterday....

How very clever you are. I went to Aldi last night, they have lots of stuffing and sewing items in at the moment

Oh they look brilliant!

Fantastic Witzend, good luck on stuffing the donkey! My donkey ended up looking like Eyeore!

I love Eeyore! As long as it looks vaguely like a donkey, I'll be happy.

BTW I'm not at all clever, Mosaicwarts - the actual knitting is very simple. The clever one is the person who worked out such simple patterns for knitters like me to manage! Not to mention the meticulous instructions to go with them.

The Jean Greenhowe knitting books are great, I treasure them.

Well done, Witzend; they’re absolutely lovely! I can knit, but goodness knows what they would have ended up like at my hands!

Witzend Are you really doing this all on your own? I'm gobsmacked! I'm a member of a craft group working on this knitted Nativity to raise money for charity and we've been doing it for a while now. I've done the baby and manger which were pretty straightforward and I'm now doing a wise man and he's proving a bit more of a challenge, very fiddly and lots of counting... how you can tackle the whole thing on your own is beyond belief! Good luck, please post a pic when it's complete. Incidentally, our version of the pattern (Jean Greenhowe's Christmas Special) doesn't have a donkey, which seems strange. We do have 3 sheep though!

JoyBloggs, the donkey is in another Jean G book - Christmas Treasures. I gather she had a lot of requests for a donkey so it was added later.
This is actually my 2nd Nativity set - I made one last year. But yes, it's very time consuming!

Thank you Witzend. That's interesting, I thought it was odd, there not being a donkey, usually an important part of the scene. However, my friends and I are just seeing a glimmer of light at the end of this long, winding woolly tunnel so I may well keep quiet about the donkey pattern Maybe next year...

Knowing that you are single-handedly working on your second set leaves me full of admiration! Perhaps there is an element of 'Here's one I made earlier...', which helps you on the second time around?