Tis the season for too many hand made presents

Every Christmas I get way too ambitious and tell myself I'm going to make a zillion and one hand made gifts.  This year, I really went overboard.  After making my halloween costume, I realized my yarn stash had grown unmanageable and needed a serious purging.  It was time for some one-ball wonder patterns to use up the various odds and ends hanging around.

My first stash buster is a pair of fingerless mittens knit for my sister-in-law.  They're made from Plymouth Yarn's Trabajos del Peru using this pattern.  I thought the cuff on the top looked dorky though, so I replaced it with just some simple ribbing.

Those were so quick and easy to knit up that I decided to whip up a few more pairs.  I found this cute pattern for wrist warmers, and set about making two pairs.

I found the perfect buttons at JoAnn.  Little owls for my friend Kelly, who wears a sunny yellow derby helmet and has an adorable kitschy style and the skulls for my friend Jenn, who plays for the Damas de los Muertos and is just generally fabulous.

I really liked the seed stitch pattern, and decided to try to get a little creative with it.  These wrist warmers have a nice girly flair, and were made with just adding stitches in four places as I went up.  They were gifted to the lovely Thu.

I also knit a gorgeous lace cowl for my step mother in law and a cute spiral scarf for my sister in law, Indigo, but I forgot to take pictures of them before wrapping them.  Even without visual proof, I can still check off three relatives on my Thirty Things Item #17.  Yay for progress!

Fuzzy Monster Costume

I wanted to do something cute but simple for Halloween this year, so I whipped up a fuzzy monster hat and some matching wrist cuffs and leg warmers.  The project took up most of my spare team for two solid weeks, but I don't have much spare time so that's not saying much.

The hat base uses the Russian Winter pattern from Stitch and Bitch Nation as a guide.  I knit it using Vickie Howell's new Stitch.Rock.Love. Sheep(ish) yarn in red(ish) plus two strands of black Lion Brand fun fur held together.

This was the base of my pattern.

The horns were inspired by this blog post from knitforyourlife.blogspot.com.  I made mine several inches shorter than the pattern, but having an idea for the initial shaping was invaluable.  I hadn't used short row shaping in for ever.  The yarn is also Sheepish in Gun Metal(ish).

The eyes were initially going to be balls, not disks, but after making the first one I thought actual balls would be too big and awkward.  I used this pattern for knit balls, and just didn't stuff them, changing from black to white after row 6.  I couldn't tell you how I did the eyelids.  That's what happens when I take a month to actually sit down and write up a post about what I did.  There was definitely short row shaping involved.

The teeth were pretty easy.  I just picked up stitches and knit down in a triangle, 5 stitches for the little teeth, 8 stitches for the bigger guys.

Definitely NOT a scary monster.

The wrist cuffs knit up super fast.  Knit six rounds of rib in Gun Metal(ish), and I actually went down to only one strand of fun fur on these (I was running out and that stuff is expensive).  I cannot for the life of me find the actual pattern that I used, but I'm sure any fingerless mitten knit on size 11s would get you pretty close.

The leg warmers were easy.  Cast on 40 stitches in Gun Metal(ish), join in the round, knit 8 rows in rib.  Switch to red(ish) and one strand of fun fur held together and knit all the way down until they were long enough.

All told, I think I used 5 balls of fun fur and three balls of Red(ish) and one ball of Gun Metal(ish).  There was maybe 20 hours worth of work across all five pieces.  The yarn was all on sale, so grand total was about $25. Paired with red striped knee highs, a black t, and a black tennis skirt I think I looked pretty cute.  Or like a major dork.  You decide. Rar.