Happy Christmas!

My Christmas knitting this year consisted of one thing: my niece's stocking. It took hours of charting, days of poring over tiny swatches on the internet, and weeks of knitting. Happily, I finished it well before Christmas, and now it is blocked and beautiful and ready to hang.



The charts and colours are my own design. The foot of the stocking was a combination of the Falling Snow Stocking and the Royal Christmas Stocking. The wool is all Jamieson and Smith Shetland Jumper Weight, in a variety of pretty colours. It took less than a ball of all the colours save the light blue and the green.



This very pretty type is a free alphabet for knitting from Little Cotton Rabbits.

I am quite pleased with the dogs and the horses too. Check out this fuzzy little Jack Russell.



The horses are duplicated stitched on. Handy, since I had the flu and not much else to do.



And the hanging loop? I wanted it to match the latvian braid so I did some fingerloop braiding, which I learned at summer camp years ago. I used this lovely tutorial and video to remind me how to do it.

It's lined with a pretty robin-and-holly print, but I don't have a photo of that. I just didn't want little fingers getting caught in all that stranding!

I wish everyone a happy Christmas. May you eat and drink well, be warm and cosy, and enjoy yourself!

I had the 'flu this week, and it really did a number on me! I was pretty ok when I was resting, however, so I got lots of work done on the Christmas stocking. (Duplicate stitch takes forever!)

Winter Woollies

November in the UK is blustery and cruel, the nights drawing in, the storms off the Atlantic battering us down. My brain cries out for warm things! I've been working on my Knotty Gloves, which are all finished save the fingers of one hand.

Here's the completely-finished one:



I've also been chugging away at designing my niece's Christmas stocking, an assignment passed to me from my mother, who had originally planned on doing it. I wanted a nice fair-isle-y challenge, so I've been working very hard on charting dogs and horses.

Here's the whole colour plan:


The bottom of the foot is based on the Royal Christmas pattern. (Ravelry link.)

Here's the chart:



And the stocking in progress:



Stranded knitting is fun! I've been using a strickfingerhut (knitting thimble, but isn't strickfingerhut just so much fun to say??), and I'm having a good time with it this time around, it seems to strand just enough and I don't need to worry about tension except on long sections.

And that bit with the horses? You'll notice it's not there. After thinking through all the intarsia in the round options, I decided to just duplicate stitch it!