Pre-Valentines Decorations

Wow, I just realized that I've done pretty much no knitting posts this month. That's surprising, and also soon to be remedied.

I made this little chain of hearts a couple of weeks ago, actually, using this pattern. I think I have six or seven in total, all strung up on a little crochet chain. Each one takes about ten minutes to make and the pattern is really easy to memorize. I'm considering making about a hundred more in the next ten days and showering the table with them on Valentine's day. 

Not that my family celebrated Valentine's day much. We used to get plastic cups filled with candy hearts every year, but not anymore. I think we usually forget it's the fourteenth and move onto the next day. But it'll be nice to have a little decoration like this on my bookshelf. Unfortunately, once I put it up it'll probably stay up till next year or longer (seriously. we only took our Christmas tree down today).

I grafted the ends of the first few, but I didn't like the look of that so I did what the pattern said, and that turned out much better and was easier. I used Red Heart yarn (I hate the stuff but it's good for things like this) and US7 needles. 

Wishing you a happy Valentine's day now, 'cause I'll probably forget on the actual day. 

All A Bit Harry Potter

I think that it's in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that the Christmas trees are decorated with live golden owls. Of course, this may be in all the books that include Christmas at Hogwarts, but I read the Goblet of Fire most recently so that's probably just what I remember.

Well now our Christmas tree has a little owl, though when I made it I was not thinking in the slightest of Harry Potter. I was probably thinking more along the lines of The Hobbit (which I haven't seen yet but am hoping to either before or shortly after Christmas) or Merlin, or possible Artemis Fowl, the audio book of which I was listening to while I knit. He's sort of supposed to be a barn owl- you know, the ones with the heart shaped faces, but heaven knows I'm terrible when it comes to knitting fair isle hearts. They always turn out sort of wonky.

The exciting thing about this owl is that it gave me the excuse to learn to graft stitches, i.e. take two unfinished edges of knitting and graft them together so it looks like a continues knit stitch. I tried and sort of failed to snap a good picture depicting this, but I rather liked the one I took anyway.

If you can see, where the green ribbon is sticking out of his head is where there would be an ugly seam had I not grafted the stitches. 

I used sport weight yarn and US2 needles, and I used the magic loop method (just so that the knitters who want to make an exact replica of this owl know what to do). I'll also put the chart for the heart on my ravelry project page hopefully tomorrow. 

Snowflake Tutorial

A beautiful Christmas decoration is paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling on nylon thread. For what seems like all my life, we've hung snowflakes to the ceiling every year and taken them down when winter is over.

However, these snowflakes were made mostly by small children who weren't particularly gifted with scissors, so the snowflakes weren't very pretty. A few years ago, my talented sister Mary Margaret discovered a snowflake formula that never fails. Last night, we had a snowflake making party, and we're going to replace almost all of our old snowflakes (which are by now yellow with age as well as inartistic) with new pretty ones.

I was inspired by our party to do a tutorial for a perfect snowflake, so this afternoon I set out with paper and scissors and a camera and got cutting.

What you need is a piece of A4 paper and a pair of ordinary kitchen scissors. 

 Fold the paper like so and cut off that chunk at the top so you have a triangle that's folded in half...

 Then fold that triangle in half.

 Now you have to fold it into thirds. Just make an estimation and fold both sides in so one is on top of the other and it's more or less folded in thirds. You want to make it as exact as you can.

 There you see, you've just got a couple of things sticking up and once you chop those off you have a triangle that's folded into thirds.

 See?

 Now it's time to get out of the origami stage and onto the snowflake stage. I drew some shapes on my triangle and shaded in what I was going to cut out so you could see, but you don't have to do that, I usually just wing it. You want to cut out blobs that have no specific shapes. And don't forget to give your snowflake a decorative edge by cutting the top of the triangle fancily. The trick is, you don't want it to look beautiful when it just has the blobs cut out of it, you want it to look boring. You also want to leave as little paper as possible. but don't cut out the center or it'll just sort of flop about and not be too snowflake like.

 And then you open it up and....

 You have a beautiful snowflake! yep, that gorgeous piece came from that boring little triangle. It's a lot of fun to unfold them and see what you've created.
Here are some of the ones I did last night:

 I couldn't resist doing a nerdy one. This one isn't particularly pretty but it does have little Tardis' all around the edge so it's awesome.

Have fun making snowflakes!