Christmas Knitting

I went to stay with my daughter’s family over Christmas and I decided to make everyone a small ‘stocking filler’ present.

For my son-in law I made a pair of knitted fingerless gloves

to match the hat I had made previously.

It was a useful way to use up the yarn I had left over from making the hat. I made up my own pattern using a bit of guesswork with regard to size. I didn’t have enough yarn to make them longer though there was a little left over when I had made the second one to match the first.

I did have a bit of help from a pattern I found on Ravelry which unusually made the thumb hole by increasing near the middle of the piece. I liked this and tried to make the join along the side of the hand, making the mittens as mirror images of each other. It didn’t work out spot on but wasn’t too far out.

When I had finished the first one I could see how I could have improved it but the yarn was not the sort to take kindly to being undone and reworked so I decided it would have to do.

Luckily my son-in-law said he liked them and they were the right size.

For the friend/lodger who lives with them and has become one of the family, I made a knitted purse that is the equivalent of the leather Morocco purses you can still buy.

I have always liked the clever design.

I can see that I forgot to take a final photograph of this as it was much squarer when I had finished blocking it.

Again I had had resort to Ravelry for ideas and found this pattern – https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/pinwheel-purse-4

I started making it in four-ply yarn as indicated but it came out much too small. So I changed to some of my Stylecraft Special DK. It did require a lot of blocking and days of drying before it was satisfactory but James seemed to like the clever way these purses fold themselves shut.

It would have been hard to take a photograph of it open, but if you haven’t seen these purse before, they start as if they are four sides (and base) of a box with a diagonal crease in the sides. The creases then mean that the sides fold down to close the purse. The photographs with the pattern show this more clearly.

For my next post I will show you the presents I made for the two female members of the family.