A productive and restful weekend.

I had the house to myself over the weekend. Things have been so hectic at work lately, I was looking forward to a whole weekend of relaxing and crafting and doing whatever I wanted. It was wonderful. It is always surprising to me just how much you can accomplish when you are not really thinking about what you are trying to achieve; when I reflected back on the weekend after my husband came home, the list of things I did was actually quite impressive!

I read three books (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and The Pearls of Lutra). I watched most of Children in Need (my favourite part being the Strictly special, although I did get a little bit excited about McBusted), two international rugby games, this week's Strictly Come Dancing, several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and one and a half films (Life of Pi, and half of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End). I spent several hours wandering around town and acquired new socks (I know, I know, I ought to be knitting them all. But I needed new socks now), new nail varnish and some new clothes. I utterly failed to buy fabric for a LARP costume I am meant to be making for Jamie. I bought two pairs of curtains and successfully hung them all by myself (although, now they are up, I am wondering if perhaps I ought to have ironed them first!). And I did some knitting.

Tomato Hat

One of my friends in work has a four year old daughter, who declared the other week that she absolutely had to have a hat which looked like a tomato. What's a knitter to do?! I whipped this up on Saturday evening; it was a nice quick easy knit and the end result is fab. I am eagerly awaiting the verdict - I understand four year olds can be quite harsh critics...

On Sunday, I decided that it was now cold enough for me to knit myself a pair of gloves. Back in April, I lost the gloves I made to match my Free Rapunzel hat. I've had the yarn to knit the replacements in my stash for some time, but just hadn't got around to it. A short time figuring out how I'd made them the first time around, and I had cast on and flew through the pair.

Sadly, the replacement pair do not match the hat for colour, as the hat is brown and these new gloves are purple. Not the end of the world though, as purple happens to be a favourite colour of mine! I've made these longer than the original, and fixed the placing of the cables that always annoyed me with the first pair. I also used a stretchy bind off this time, which I hadn't done on the previous pairs of mitts I've made from this pattern.

I stayed up later than I should have done last night in order to finish them, but was rewarded with a lovely warm squishy pair of gloves to wear to work today. I have enough yarn left over to make another hat, and for the moment I am thinking of knitting this one as I do love chunky cables and this Debbie Bliss Cashmerino looks fab in cables. It should knit up nice and quickly too. Who knows, I might have that done by the end of the week!