Knit, Sew, Repeat, Enjoy

I've spent the last couple of weeks mainly knitting and avoiding catching up on other things like blogging, with the result that I now have rather a backlog of things to post. So long as I can pin down the time, I'll do my best to catch up, starting with the handmade Christmas gifts.

For my baby nephew, I couldn't resist making this Penguin Pal Hat by Lucie Sinkler (for which I improvised some matching mittens):

As his grandma collects penguins, I kept it a surprise for her as well, though it was really hard keeping the secret. The hat and mittens were knit with Adriafil Regina, using intarsia for the hat, and a combination of techniques for the mittens. For the mittens, I performed intarsia more-or-less in the round: working in the round until the tummy starts, then working in one direction, twisting the yarns, turning the work and purling back to the other end, and then rejoining in the round for the black. I used duplicate stitching for the beak and eyes (with a quick stitch across for the top of the eye). This resulted in a lot less ends to weave in compared to the hat!

For my sister-in-law, I had sewn an apron, which I sadly forgot to photograph. I made the baker's apron from Martha Stewart out of striped denim (periwinkle blue on dark blue). It went very well except for turning the straps right-side out, which was frustrating. This has convinced me I should invest in a loop turner to assist in the future.

Almost ready to head out to dinner!

For my husband, I had been knitting a bow tie using double-knitting in a silk laceweight on 1.5 mm needles. I later realized that this was rather insane (especially as the tie was coming out too small after all), and decided to sew one instead. In fact, I did sew two: one just winging it by tracing one of his existing bow-ties (helpfully already fastened to the correct size), reducing the width of the bow section slightly, as I knew he wanted a somewhat narrower tie, and the other using this tutorial for bow ties, which suggested cutting them on the bias and using interfacing. He was pleased (his existing bowties are getting a bit frayed), and wore one to Christmas dinner.

For my youngest cousins, I knit some sweaters to dress white mice that my mom had found at IKEA. She wanted a couple of red sweaters for her mice (one is a vest, partly because it's cute, and partly because I was losing patience for picking up armhole stitches), and the other three are for the cousins' mice. I made up the pattern as I went along, fit to the mouse. The snowflake on the vest is embroidered, the other patterns are stranded.

I drew my mom's name this year, and here she is with her new gloves, which she seems to like:

Jazz hands!

These are rather loosely based on Silka Burgoyne's Lace and Twist Gloves.  Although I found them quite lovely, I felt that lace would not be warm enough for our climate, and switched up to stockinette, modified the gauge for greater density, re-sized them slightly to fit me (and my mom, who has hands about the same size), like a, well, glove. The original pattern is very well written, and pays excellent attention to details such as the differences in starting points for fingers on the hands. They're very comfy, and being made from Misti Alpaca's fingering weight yarn, are very warm too. Thanks so much to ChristinaZ who, having the yarn in the colourway that I needed, shipped out the yarn to me in plenty of time to knit these up for Christmas!