New Year Knit

Resolution - To Knit

I learned to knit when I was quite young, but apart from a few scarfs, never really got very far with it, but after looking in the Japanese zakka books at how they use small knitted squares in their designs I have decided to get back into it and see if I can remember it all. I dreamt last night I was knitting and when I woke up this morning I felt as if I remembered it all. Time will tell. Here is the test wool I bought in the great John Lewis wool bargain bucket for £1.40

Wrapping

So here are the final presents wrapped with labels. Another year done.

Christmas Wish

What I want for Christmas. Every year for a few years my sister bought me a church chair from the expensive castle Gibson shop in Islington. Then I had the inspiration to ask for a cushion for each year on ever subsequent year. This year I asked for another, but she is sighs whenever I mention it. Here is the last one I got, it's ace.

Christmas Wrapping

Finally blogger has upgraded my blog. It looks exactly the same to me. I hope it all works okay.

Anyhow i've been thinking about how to wrap my presents this year. I like wrapping. In fact it's one of the few things I can honestly say I am not bad at. I think it's a combination of having a mother who taught me the indepth skill of sticky back plasticing all my school books from an early age, being a virgo and studying packaging design at college.

People in my family can get quite into the whole Christmas wrapping thing. It started with my mum using her crazy thick multicoloured wools to wrap presents then kicked up a gear when my sister did hers in brown paper and gold thread one year. And everyone remembers the year she had these huge pink furry pipecleaners she twisted into cork screws, it was a hard act to follow.

So this year I decided to do some white flowers to put round my presents which will be wrapped in white tissue paper. I'll see if I can dig out some pictures of previous years to show you the 'Themes'. Last year was purple thick ribbon, purple glittery humming birds, black shiny paper and ornate long labels with white writing. Here's a bad photo, you can't see much though.

Another Monkey

I saw these fancy Burlington Socks in john Lewis when I should have been Christmas shopping and after making the yellow monkey out of posh socks, wanted to try it again so I could improve on my last attempt. I wanted him to be less rigid with less of a slaphead, so here are the results. This time I made the forehead smaller, didn't stuff him too much and weighted him a lot more as he is needed more help loosening up. Behold Fritz, the newest member of the growing sock kingdom.

I have four monkeys watching me as I type now. Two are soon to depart for exotic new homes, but Fritz and Fleabas are staying here to keep me company. The only thing I would change with Fritz is the colour thread I used on his forehead surgery. I guess I didn't think green would show but now he has a very thin green scar, Poor Fritz, he doesn't mind. All he wants to do is eat wieners and impress everybody with his posh voice. He likes to stay up late talking about 'The State of the World' with which he draws many parallels between the Die Hard movies in order to support his arguments.