I finished these fingerless mitts about a month ago. They're made from this handspun yarn.
I have been woefully absent from my blog lately. This photo is from almost two weeks ago (since last Thursday was Thanksgiving), and I have so many other lovely projects I've been meaning to post about. The tea cosy is nearly done - since this photo was taken, I've finished the top, so all I have left to do is the lining. However, it has been put on hold so some more urgent projects can be completed. 
Robert and I are going to his cousin's wedding this evening. This pink ballet wrap sweater is the only nice sweater I currently own (and the color is much nicer than the picture shows - it's a lovely tulip pink). When my mom was visiting last weekend, she helped me pick out a new dress to wear with it - a grey knee-length dress with lace and bead-work. The only problem was, the sweater had a hole. Right under the armpit, where a seam opened up a few months ago (it's kind of a sculptural sweater, and not super-easy to get on and off). As Robert can attest, my usual reaction to clothes with holes is to toss them in the trash, but this sweater is way too special for that, and it was only in the seam, so I just stopped wearing it until I could fix it.
My church's fall fundraiser/auction was on Saturday night. I donated two things - a pair of custom hand-knit socks, and a flannel rag quilt baby blanket. I spent a good part of a weekend cutting flannel squares, matching them up, and stitching them together to get this:
Then over the next week I clipped the huge (1 inch) seam allowances into little fringes. Then I washed it. The point of a quilt like this is that the fringes will soften as it is washed and loved into fuzzy ridges. It gives of a LOT of lint and little threads in the process. After I machine dried it, I removed an inch-thick layer of lint from the dryer's lint catcher, and we are still finding little flannel threads around the apartment. I think it turned out well. Here's a picture of the blanket finished, folded, and ready to be dropped off at the church. You can see the back, which is smooth. I think it turned out well, but I didn't do such a good job of matching the corners. My favorite fabric is the little birds.
My mom is visiting us this weekend, so in her honor I am posting one of her projects (that happens to be in my possession). My Mom knitted this sweater for my dad at least 20 years ago. It is a lovely soft and drapey alpaca (if a little itchy), and it is very warm and cosy. It has probably been about ten years since my dad last fitted into the sweater, so I've taken possession of it. When I was in college, my roommate Lisa also had a sweater that her mother had knitted for her father, so we wore our hand-me-down sweaters around the dorm in the cold winter.
I finished one side of the outside of the tea cosy in CMS and Colloquium yesterday. It wasn't much fun - both talks went completely over my head (I wasn't even following the first five minutes) and the waffle stitch pattern you see in the picture is pretty fiddly. I guess I've been spoiled by knitting so many socks and things that are nice lace, ribs, and nice knit/purl textures. This involved knitting into the stitch in the previous row, dropping one of the loops, and then picking it up again on the following row. Not so much fun. I chose the pattern because of its name - waffles are my favorite breakfast food, and I want the tea cosy to be breakfast-themed. My stitch dictionary, Super Stitches Knitting, doesn't really have any other breakfast-relevant patterns, so for the other side I picked one that looked pretty nice - clam stitch. I got through about two rows of the pattern by the end of colloquium, but it is even more fiddly than the waffle pattern, so I think I'm going to rip it out and pick a different pattern. Maybe one with leaves, to represent tea leaves.
