Works in Progress

I've started my sky blanket! So much fun. 

The weather is so changeable at the moment that the sky can look totally different within five minutes, so I'm looking out of the window / up at the sky at midday each day and using the weather at that moment as my guide for the day's colours. It's fascinating how many creative choices are involved in translating the English weather into a mere two colours.

I've been noting down my colour choices on my calendar (a pretty one I got free with the craft magazine Mollie Makes at the end of last year) so I can knit the squares in the evening, and (most importantly) keep track of what square matches what day so I'll sew them together in the right order!

I'm definitely in the mood for knitting at the moment. I'm still quite tired after the busy Christmas season, and am spending my evenings curled up on the sofa watching lots of TV and doing some simple knitting. 

My current project is a black scarf - basic garter stitch on big chunky needles, using one strand of soft faux-mohair yarn. Black is always a pain to work with in bad light, but this is so easy to knit that I barely need to look at it (bonus: I can read the subtitles while watching Borgen and still keep knitting, hurrah!) It's very light and fluffy, and quite wide but I'm not sure how long it will end up being yet.

Work-wise I'm mostly doing admin at the moment (yawn), but I have made a start on the slow process of getting restocked after Christmas - beginning with a pile of poppy brooches.

I've also been making some progress on those knitted cushion covers.

The new one is almost finished (all the squares sewn together, all the ends woven in). The two older ones (the pink and the blue) also needed a bit of work as when I first made them I rather short-sightedly stitched the cushion inserts inside them without any way of removing the covers for washing... They've now been unpicked & washed, and all three covers are getting a row of little snap fasteners along one edge so they can easily be removed in the future.

As if I hadn't already sewn in enough yarn ends this week (oh my gosh, so many bits of yarn), I've started sewing in the ends of this stripe-y something that was lurking in my WIP box...

 ... and I've come up with a project for using six of the remaining eight blanket squares leftover from making the knitted cushions. I'm sewing them together in matching pairs...

... then lining them in matching acrylic felt and adding a mini zip...

... to make little coin purses. I've just finished one so far, it was a bit of a "don't measure or plan, just sort of wing it" job, but it turned out quite nicely and the end result is pretty darn cute if I do say so myself. I popped a few of my business cards in this one to add a sense of scale for the photo, but when they're finished the three purses are destined to be gifts for my two sisters and for my mum (who, of course, will get first dibs). 

Now I just need to come up with a plan for the final two non-matching squares. Hmm...