Glanalaw - delighting in pure song

So, as you may have gathered, I'm kind of a fan of Doctor Who.  And in fact the whole family is coming round to my way of thinking... so when I saw this pattern for a KNITTED DALEK I knew I had to make one. Fortunately it was just before Christmas and I was also trying to think of something fun but lightweight to send to my brother who's stationed in Okinawa.  Perfect! This guy was really fun to knit.  He took a whole day - I cast on after breakfast and sewed in the last ends before bedtime.  The bobbles added quite a considerable amount of knitting time, which I hadn't expected, and they're a bit tedious but I think you'll agree they're worth it!  (The pattern suggests sewing on buttons if you don't care to knit bobbles, but I think that would be even MORE tedious and would also make your Dalek less cuddly.) Unfortunately I didn't get any really good photos of him, since I had time constraints before we shipped the package and it kept sn...

We have been having the strangest weather this week.  Saturday and Sunday we had a huge snowstorm, which dumped well over a foot of snow on the whole of southern Michigan and followed that up with high winds and significantly sub-zero temperatures - part of that "polar vortex" thing that's been going around.  Schools were out for two or three days because it was so cold.  Then yesterday it got really warm - for January in the north, anyway - with above-freezing temperatures.  And now I look outside and it's snowing again.  (Was that a polar vortex or a bi-polar one, guys?) When I haven't been shovelling I've been mostly inside, catching up on my tv shows and knitting madly at the incredible number of custom orders I've got on my list.  But I realised I'm a bit behind at showing you some of the things I've finished recently that weren't Christmas gifts!  This one was knit for the new nephew of my college roommate.  He was a fun project a...

Here's Kat's Christmas gift - a tea cosy for the pot she has at college.  (It looked a little cold last time I went to visit!) I measured the pot but didn't get a chance to try this on as it went, so I hope when she gets it back to school that it will turn out to fit correctly.  We can but hope! I've realised that while I love the way these cosies look and fit and function, I really don't enjoy knitting them.  Stranding the yarn along behind the work, and dropping one yarn to pick up the other every ten stitches, is fiddly and tiresome.  I wish there were an easier way to produce the same effect!

  Mum got a pair of my Bad Wolf Bay mitts for Christmas, in a colour my camera totally fails to capture.  The Canon thinks it's a bright pink/magenta, while it's actually a dark, saturated pinkish-purple.  Change of light and settings didn't make much of a difference, either.  How odd!   I sized these down a little bit as I used fatter yarn than in my original design (and Mum has thin wrists anyway!)  Warm and soft in the dk-weight Gloss yarn from KnitPicks.

Happy New Year!  I hope you all have had a lovely holiday and that 2014 started well for you.  My year has involved so far a good bit of knitting, some cooking, a lot of snow, and plenty of time hanging out with friends and dancing.  I also played broomball for the first time ever (think ice hockey but without skates and with brooms instead of hockey sticks) - I ended up falling, hitting my head quite hard, and bending my wrist backwards, but it was so much fun that it was worth the pain ;)  What did you all do for New Year's Eve? Here's another installment in the Christmas-knitting parade.  This is the scarf I made for my older brother.  He's hard to shop and knit for, but I hope he will use this a lot! Knit lengthwise in the "transverse herringbone" pattern from one of Barbara Walker's pattern treasuries.  The long edges are done with a tubular cast-on and bind-off, and the slip-stitch pattern makes a fabric which almost looks woven, so it ...