Portrait of Asherah

My husband is in serious love with our cat. He always points out to me when she's in a particularly cute sleeping position. This gave me inspiration for his Christmas present, a portrait of our kitty Asherah, all curled up.



I made this using the aforementioned thread sketching, although this really stretched the limits of the medium because I used, and overlapped, SO MUCH THREAD. In some places the needle didn't want to go through all the layers!

Here's a close-up so you can see some of the detail:



I'm really pleased with how this came out, and I'm gaining a lot of confidence in the medium. It's also a lot more fun than embroidering by hand!

Olympic Fever!

It's been two days since the beginning of the Knitting Olympics (also the Ravelympics), and I've been knitting like crazy to get a good head start on a pullover for my husband. Knitting for boys is easy, since they're just long tubes. Thus, I have a short tube which I felt was maybe a bit boring to show off.

Instead, you can (finally!) have a look at one of my Christmas crafts. I discovered the art of thread sketching and decided to have a go at it for Christmas gifts. (There are more of these where this one came from, but I can't show them yet.)

Of course, it's another magpie. :)



I know it's not black and white... I felt it wouldn't have enough depth or character if I used a black fabric for the contrast, so I used most of the rest of my Kaffe Fassett shot cotton, which has lovely colour-shifting qualities. I stuck it to unbleached cotton using Wonder Under, which worked beautifully.

Here's a bit of detail of the head. It was fun to make!



I made another thread sketchup recently for Liz's birthday. She likes owls, so I thought, why not an O RLY? owl?



You can see the finished project in the mosaic here.

Finally, I am pleased and flattered to have been declared the winner of the Snowcase Contest.

Hey look ma, there was a point to dressing up and making a fool of myself on my blog! Now, I don't mind winning to be sure, but I wish some more of you out there had decided to make fools of yourselves show off all your handknits as well! Warmth loves company! :D

Anyways, many thanks to Felix for running yet another fabulous contest! :)