Another project finished, and a new one halfway done

Finished Emily's purple curly whirly scarf last night - here's a picture of part of it wrapped around Emily. It's enormously long, about 8 feet, so it takes several wraps around her neck! for more pictures, see the Curly Whirly Scarf blog, or my Flickr gallery.

She has also been nagging all week about needing gloves - fighting back the temptation to enquire where all her other pairs have disappeared (buried somewhere in the bomb-site that is laughingly referred to as her bedroom, no doubt), I refused to knit a pair of gloves - even on 2 needles, I find them rather fiddly to do - but compromised on allowing her a pair of wristwarmers in some spare purple yarn. One is complete, and the other will be finished by tomorrow (Just say no! to Single Wristwarmer Syndrome), and Emily says they make her feel like a poor victorian writer, "like that man in Bleak House, Mummy".


I didn't bother with a pattern for these as they're pretty straightforward to do, but I did manage a couple of nice touches on them that I'm quite pleased with - in Elizabeth Zimmerman's "Knitters Almanac", which I was looking through for something else entirely (often the way these things happen), I found a simpler way of twisting right over 2 stitches, which makes really nice neat little cables, so I used these for the wrist part, and then switched back to ordinary 2x2 rib over the hand and thumb parts.

Holly is not bothered at the moment about having any scarves or wristwarmers - actually this is fine by me! she's used up all her credit this week by demanding (at the last minute of course) a skirt to be made out of her old jeans (what goes around comes around! - I can remember doing these for me as a teenager) to wear to the school disco on Friday evening. Fortunately this is a relatively quick job, but getting my sewing machine out is not - if you look at the bookshelves behind me, my sewing machine usually has to do double duty as a shelf to stack books on, so to get it out you have to move all the books. Still, one happy daughter, even if irritated parents ... hooray!

James has just surprised me by a) asking for a pair of wristwarmers, "just like Emily's, but black" and b) demonstrating the really good bit about ribbing which is that wristwarmers for a 10 year old stretch to fit a 16 year old. In fact I will probably knit them slightly larger, but it will only have to be a few stitches extra in width.

On the hat front, I've made a small posting to the Hat blog, but until I can dig out a few previous makes, no new pictures ...