Christmas knitting

I finished the tie and small scarf in the mystery rayon. The tie will be wrapped up as a Christmas gift, albeit one my husband knows about.



At the last minute, I decided on an extra few knitted gifts. Two are done, the other two are outstanding. One involved my making knitted bobbles for the first time in thick green yarn. I like them; they look like Shrek ears.



Ok, better get back to those unfinished presents...

Mitts for men

My husband loves his handknits, and is always interested in acquiring more. His old store-bought woollen gloves have worn out, and he'd like some hand knittted ones to replace them. I don't feel up to trying to tackle 10 fine gauge fingers and thumbs, so have offered him mittens instead. After initial scepticism about whether mittens were 'manly', he decided he would rather have these than nothing, so I set about finding suitable yarn and pattern. He specified natural sheep colours and nothing self striping. I followed the first stipulation but took a chance on the second, as I found some rather nice variegated Lang West yarn. Fortunately, he liked it, so I got to work using Knitty's mittens 101 pattern. Here's the training mitt.

A lovely present

A present from my sister!

2 skeins of Socks that Rock (my first!), a copy of the extraordinarily hard to find New Pathways for Sock Knitters and 2 pairs of Knitpicks Harmony needle tips.


A car journey provided me with enough quiet concentration time to make the first of the practise socks, using the sky architecture with increases across the instep. I'm not too sure about the result; the instep looks very high to me, and I have a fairly flat instep. The technique itself was quite easy, except that I found Cat Bordhi's right leaning increase tricky to do without leaving a hole.