Christmas knitting

During Christmas time it is common to knit huge amount of all kind of soft gifts to put into package.

This is what I made to have happy faces at Christmas eve.

Plain mittens

I continued knitting while my sisters cat was present. He loves to follow while I'm working, for him it seems to be an exiting soap opera he can watch for hours.

I begun to make these very warm and thick mittens to be wore at the coldest time of the year. I wanted to have something extra for the look so I decided to make plains. First I had problems with the thickness of the yarn, since I had to consider the decrease that thicker yarn causes, and at the same time remember that thickness also takes more space. Plus when making such big plains the mittens also get narrower.

I ended up having 40 loops at the beginning. At the end of the wrist I added ten backward loop into all of the backward spaces to have the right amount of loops for the palm part of the mitten considering all the things mentioned above.

I used Novitas' "Tempo" yarn. It is 64 % wool and 35 % acrylic. The recommended stick size was 7 to 8 but I used 4. I wanted to have thick mittens not ones with holes on it.

The color I chose was one of my favourites. I love the colours of autum. I would like to wear more of those colours so I decided to have one pair for myself. I will post the picture of these mittens before the first use.

Cats' pet mouse

My sisters cat got a nice Christmas present.

I made this mouse by croching. I found a ball of old grey yarn from my attic and decided to surprise Urho the cat.

He loves to play with this mouse. I guess it is right sized to be a prey in real life.

In fact, he even carried the mouse to the kitchen and dipped the woolen mouse in his drinking cup. I heard he does it quite often.

OrangeBrownie

I made this hat for a friend of mine. It was the very first hat I have ever made. Although since I had never made one before I had some problems making it the correct size in the first try. So I ended up making two hats where the second one turned out to be properly sized for my friend. After making some modifications I donated the first hat to my boyfriend and he is now wearing it constantly. Apparently he likes the pattern.

Anyway the hat design is my own. *The idea was to make a hat that can be carried both ways. The pattern consists of right loops (orange) and reverse loops (brown) where those two are bound to the colours. On the back side of the hat the extra yarn which travels when using other yarn has to be made to travel the same way in every turn of colours so that the pattern forms the same on the reverse side of the hat. I choose the colours with my friends backpack colours in mind. The yarn is Slovenian Nika which is 20% wool and 80% acryl. I run out of the darker coloured yarn at the end of my second hat and none of the knitting shops in Maribor had the same yarn in stock. I had started to crochet a hat with the brown yarn earlier which I then had to take apart to have the rest of the brown colour to finish the OrangeBrownie hat. So at the end I had *four hats.



Picture Jernej Burkeljca

I started to make my very first woolen jumper. It is just a sample one, not made for my self. The purpose of this project was to learn the scales of each part of the jumper. As you can see the top part is not quite the right sized, so I had to took it apart and fix it to look more normal sized.

The front side of the jumper is 2/3 of an adult woolen jumper. Im not sure for what aged kid it fits, but certainly for very small one. Any ideas?

This specific jumper is not made for kids though, it is not made from the right wool. As far as I have understood kids need their special wool that is not as itchy as the wool used for adults.

When I have enough time I will make a pullover for myself but from cotton.

These socks I made for a friend of mine as a birthday present. I used Slovenian yarn which was slightly different from Finnish seitsemän veljestä yarn that I usually use. The ball of wool I got was the same size as the one in Finland, but the difference was that it was 1/3 thicker than the one I was used to. So instead of 150g I got 100 grams. It also mixed up my usual numbers of starting loops in the sock, so after a while of knitting I realised that this is way too big sock for a woman with this number of loops per knitting layer. So I had to took it apart for couple of times before I finally got the right sized sock.

I used 44 loops per knitted layer. If anyone else will ever come across with similar type of wool which is 33% thicker than normally used, now they will know the scale of new loops. It doesn't go along with the percentage of 33%, then it will be too small for normal sized lady foot (38/39). For example if I usually use 48 loops, it won't be 33% less loops (=33 loops). The more closer number of loops to be used is 44 that I used to reach the same size of shoe size. It took a while to find it out so I decided to write it down if anyone else has a trouble with the same issue.

The wool I used is called Nika. It is 20% wool and 80% acryl. It can be washed in a washing machine in 30 decrees of Celsius.