of pirates and ladybirds

So I saw audreym knitting a pirate hat recently and realised that it had been a while since I had made one. I'm quite impressionable, and essentially just a copycat. I was also due to attend a certain young lady's first birthday party. So I cast on for a slightly cheerier coloured version of the baby sized pirate hat that I made previously.

I do love this pattern - We Call Them Pirates from Hello Yarn. As you can maybe tell by the way it's my third go at the same pattern. I'm just not sure it's possible to knit anything more pleasing than stranded skulls and crossbones. The pink and green yarn is from my neverending skein of handdyed Green Eyed Monsters sock. It's the third project I have got from one skein and there's still a fair bit left! This yarn is so much fun, although possibly the skulls and crossbones are a bit less obvious in this colourway on a white background. But if you squint, hopefully you will be made aware of the need to immediately abandon ship before it's too late.

I also made these ladybird mittens for my little fella. (Sorry for the slightly twilighty photo, there's not a whole load of daylight left after work for photography these days, boo). The pattern is on flickr here. I was starting to feel a bit guilty, last year's mittens are now far too small, and it is getting mighty nippy out there. The child has also taken to getting the oven gloves out of the drawer and toddling around wearing them in a slightly ridiculous fashion. I felt that maybe he was trying to tell me something. The great thing about these mittens is that their comedy insect nature entertains the child enough to leave them on his hands. Last winter, when out walking I was stopping about every three paces to replace the mitts, a game which literally never got tired! It's the same yarn as last years actually, James Brett Merino DK, which i love for children's things - soft, cheap and warm and in a mega cheerful range of colours.

The dividing line between the wing cases is backstitched afterwards and the spots are duplicate stitched on. The species is Adalia bipunctata if you were wondering. A cynic might suggest I picked this one to minimise embroidery effort, but it is in fact one of my favourite varities of ladybird. Frankly, whilst very lovely, a lot of the projects in ravelry don't look like any species currently known to science. (And i'm definitely not celebrating the harlequin in knitwear, at the moment we are experiencing a neobiblical plague of them in our back yard.)

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finiiiished

This, unless I have any more last minute harebrained ideas, marks the end of my festive knitting. Only prezzies for my sisters this year, because one sister asked for socks and the other one would be jealous if I didn't knit her something too. (My brother has fallen off the xmas knitting list because he doesn't wear the nice handknitted-in-wool-from-local-farm hat I made him, favouring a cheap shopbought acrylic one that doesn't even fit his head. Hmph.) My sisters have Very Different Tastes. One likes muted neutral colours, and would consider some shades of beige to be too garish. The other likes her colours as bright as physically possible, and would probably enjoy wearing a garment made of radium.

I highly doubt any of them will read this so ta-daaaa! Above are the rather unadventurous socks for Muted Sis. Made from recently acquired Regia 4ply in shade 'I can't remember'. (Whilst in my possession it was so fleetingly in a unknitted state that I'm afraid I have failed to put it into Ravelry or save the ball band). Just a plain toe up garter rib. Interestingly, though, they are much baggier than the last pair I made, despite using the same pattern, the same needles and almost exactly the same yarn. I don't know what has happened to my tension. Initially I blamed gin, but the second sock is just the same so I think I am just slowly turning into a Loose Woman.

Dayglo Sis is getting these mittens. They are made from some alpaca from the stash, aran-ish weight, multicoloured and brandless but beautiful (a gift from some friends who went to Patagonia on holiday). I've started making various things with it before and abandoned them because they didn't really suit the yarn. I wanted to do it justice - it is very soft and warm and quite short colour repeats, which I think come out rather well in this design. I winged the pattern, they are very simple. I couldn't tell you what I did, I was using a new strategy: 'I can't be bothered to write down what I am doing as I go along, so I will make them fairly soon after each other and trust myself to make the same decisions each time'. It nearly worked, and the resulting mittens will be ideal for anyone with one fat thumb and one thin thumb. My sister doesn't really fit this description, but maybe if I distract her with a small dance while she opens the present she'll never notice...
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slightly belated christmas present round-up

I made a load of Christmas presents for people last year. It has taken me some time to get off the sofa and post them, because a) it is freezing in the computer room and b) Santa brought me a cornucopia of Nintendo games which have been taking up much of my time. However I do need to stop playing elite beat agents now as every time I blink I see a dizzying succession of decreasing concentric circles, and if I can make these go away before bedtime I feel it would be a bonus.

So here is a quick parade of the stuff I made in December 2K7:

Snowflake hat 1

Made out of King Cole Merino blend DK, with some contrasting scraps of white from the bottom of the cupboard. I just did a plain beanie with a stranded snowflake pattern.

Snowflake hat 2

Yes, I am snowflake obsessed. This is another plain beanie that I embroidered a small snowflake motif onto. I got a bit carried away and put beads on the embroidered bit at strategic points. First time I've really attempted this and I did a pretty rubbish job. It probably took me as long to embroider the motif as it did to make the whole hat. Made out of lovely undyed Wensleydale longwool (from a black sheep, obv). The wool was left over from making:

Boring ribbed hat

For my brother so I toned down the motif-related tomfoolery and went for a more sober item of headgear. It's lovely and soft and warm though. This one is from a pattern - cashmere ribbed hat (or, not cashmere if you're a cheapskate like me).
And finally...

Crocodile mitts

I was quite pleased with these. I made them up completely - started them a while ago. Redid the fingertip bit from the original post to give them a more rounded end for a less sharp-fingered wearer. They are lovely and warm, made of Twilley's Freedom Spirit 100% wool in , er, crocodile colour. I did write down the details after the first mitt, to make the second one the same, so if anyone has a burning desire to make their own crocodiles I could probably attempt to put up some kind of pattern.


Snowflake close up..


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lookylikeys (again)

A mitten i just made	Aaargh it's a crocodile!!1!!1

In a frenzy of Christmas knitting at the moment. So I randomly picked up some Twilley's Freedom Spirit the other day and thought it was time for some mittens. I think the best thing with this sort of crazy variegated yarn is to keep it really simple, but at the same I felt it needed a little bit of something going on to stop me from losing interest in the whole process. So I made up this mini-cabled mitten, and it worked pretty well. The beauty of 1-stitch cables is that you can do a dodgy manoeuvre involving some seat-of-your-pants style mid-air stitch swapping, which helps if you are too lazy to reach down and pick up a cable needle. So I've done one mitt, although I may yet unpick the fingertip bit to make it a bit less pointy. I know it looks a bit like a crocodile, but there's no need to be too scared.

RaaaAAAAAarrr! Actually you can hardly see the pattern here, when it's not stretched out on the hand. I quite like that. It's like the croc is hiding in the shadows, waiting to eat you!!! (don't have nightmares, kids)

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glovely

I finished these endpaper mitts about 3 weeks ago, but it's incredibly difficult to take a picture of your own hands wearing gloves. So after a couple of fruitless afternoons trying to train the dog to be a photographer, I got someone else to take a photo. And here it is! These mitts are made of 4 ply cotton, which sounds like some kind of insanity. And they aren't particularly warm. But for the purposes of cycling around, they are pretty good - they stop my fingers freezing onto the brakes in the morning, and they cushion my hands from the continual bouncing around over loose stones/potholes/squirrels. So I kind of like them. The yarn was on spesh (jaeger discontinued, again) so the pair cost less than three quid. I really enjoyed making them - stranded knitting is great fun, and I need a lot of practise to get to the stage where the work done by each hand looks vaguely even. Rather than randomly creating hotspots of slackness, where i came back from the pub and attacked the knitting with drunken bravado.



There's also one stitch which is in the wrong colour, that I left in because I couldn't be bothered to rip back. You can see it in this photo. One pint of beer* will be awarded to the person who can tell me where it is. I actually thought it would annoy me more than it does in the completed object. A positive feature of these mitts is that they are symmetrical, so you can wear them upside down and never see the stitchy maverick.

*
Terms and Conditions
Prize to be redeemed at any drinking establishment in Manchester, England.
Spot it in under 5 seconds, and I might consider throwing a packet of salt and vinegar crisps into the bargain.

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balticness

There's a bitter chill creeping into the early mornings these days. As I'm cycling into work, I am rather exposed to the elements and can notice this as my fingers one by one cease functioning. Usually starting at the outside with the little finger and working inwards towards the thumb. But I kind of still need to use them, principally to make v signs at motorists who cut me up, so I felt a solution of sorts might be these endpaper mitts. I had two balls of jaeger siena in the cupboard which i'd got for about a quid each in the john lewis sale bin. It's 100% cotton and may or may not actually confer any warmth at all, but I liked the colours and couldn't think of anything better to do with this yarn. I may yet need to make another more heavy duty pair of wool-based gloves for the really bitter mornings. Like these maybe. Still, these are quite comfy and stretchy enough to go on easily. One particularly nice thing about this pattern is that you can keep trying the mitt on as it grows without needing to take it off the needles.

After an extremely disorganised week last week, I also failed to either a) find a smaller size of needles for the ribbing or b) learn how to do italian tubular cast on. So I just did the usual long tail cast on - sorry Eunny. I just had time to grab my usual 2.5mm needles, yarn and shadily print out the pattern on the work printer before leaving for a trip to Ireland last weekend. Approximately 8 hours on the ferry and in the car gave me plenty of time to get started, for the parts when i wasn't driving, feeling seasick or playing dance dance revolution in the ferry games room (in fact it occurs to me that possibly these last two activities could be related).

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