Giving and receiving

Receiving first - I'll put up photos of yarn and stuff tomorrow but I received two Finished Objects this Christmas and it was so exciting!

In order of receipt - my friend Sue (who is blogless, sadly) stitched me this cat ornament (from this year's Just Cross Stitch Ornament Issue) - this was absolutely my favourite from the magazine, and evidently I managed to convey this sometime-or-other!



And then on Friday Jan and I got together, and she gave me this!

(The throw, not the cat or the chair. I had them already. Took 13 minutes for Tilda to discover the throw, which was less time than it took me to hunt down the spare batteries for the camera). Isn't it beautiful? The flash has made the colours look a bit harsher than they are - here's another pic which gives a better idea of the colours in lamplight but is blurry

And here's a picture of the stitch detail. I don't know whether instructions for it will be in this book, but I'm hoping so...


Giving, next. Now that the final piece of Christmas knitting has headed to its recipient, I can put up some photos.

First, some socks

From left to right, these were for friends Jan, Stewart, Pete and Helen. They're all in Opal - Jan's pair is in Magic, Stewart's in Rainforest (Chameleon), Pete's in Lollipop and Helen's in Brazil.

Now some scarves. As well as these ones (for my aunt and mam) and this one (for my Dad), and this one for the lady at the cattery who both collected and delivered this Christmas, there was also a purple curly-wurly which can just be seen in this photo, and there were also these two

for my in-laws, who keep in touch (the left one is from the free Cloud pattern from Get Knitted in Cherry Tree Hill merino laceweight, and the right is the DNA scarf in Phildar Chiné, which is now discontinued). And yeah, for anyone with eagle eyes, that is a spreadsheet for tracking the progress of Christmas presents on the top left. I can be freakishly organised that way.

And there's also the bunny:

for my cousin Kevin. The yarn for this bunny is handspun angora; if that wasn't special enough, it was spun in the late 1980s by Chilean dissidents in internal exile (I'm actually not making this up; the dissidents in question were university friends of my French penfriend's parents, and a relative used to go over a couple of times a year and smuggle yarn back in for sale in France to keep them going). Last year I realised I was never going to wear the boxy 1980s sweater I knitted with it, so with much tribulation I unravelled it, and it's not suffered too much. I still have most of the yarn and will make something else with it...