Now that the hol­i­day’s over, I can show you the Christ­mas gifts I made and all the fun I’ve been hav­ing since the fall! This was one busy elf!

So I made a num­ber of wash cloths, to give with arti­san soaps that I got from craft fairs, very prac­ti­cal gifts that I thought every­one could use :) The but­ter­fly wash cloth is from this Pail­lon Cloth pat­tern, which was a lot of fun to make with a var­ie­gat­ed cot­ton. The tiny fish ones are for my niece and nephews, from this pat­tern on Rav­el­ry. The hang­ing tow­el was a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the Cir­cle Cloth pat­tern. Also made a cou­ple of these pineap­ple hang­ing tow­els.

 

I took a work­shop in Novem­ber with my co-work­ers at a glass shop mak­ing mille­fiori pen­dants. I’ve made one for myself before and it was a lot of fun, so I made anoth­er for a gift :)

While mak­ing pom pom hair ties for my sin­cere sock cup­cake project, I thought I’d also try mak­ing some soot sprites hair ties for a cou­ple of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li fans :D

Caught in a per­fect­ly tiny tin! :D (that used to hold some spark­ly tea)

These hedge­hogs mitts are for my niece, made almost entire­ly in com­mute. Excel­lent pat­tern from mom.me.

Spent a cou­ple of Sun­day after­noons at the Gar­diner Muse­um drop-in clay class, and made an army of orna­ments and tea bag hold­ers! It was a great way to spend a week­end after­noon cre­ative­ly, must go back sometimes!

And my newest inven­tion — sushi sock rolls! :D For my dear friend’s baby. I used this 2‑needle baby sock pat­tern, but had to mod­i­fy it quite a bit to get the black part long enough to roll around. So the socks are faaar­rr too big for the baby right now, they’re more for a tod­dler. But they’ll fit soon enough! And the idea is that when the child out grows the socks, they can be rolled up and sewed togeth­er per­ma­nent­ly and be used as play food, or a pin cush­ion :D

 Now, the biggest project ever under­tak­en — behold the polar bear blanket!!!

I’ve been work­ing on it for months and it’s for my par­ents! Wish I have a bet­ter pic­ture of it, but it’s just so big! I did­n’t have the room in my place or my par­ents’ for a good pho­to shoot. So here it is on my par­ents’ bed :) This is my first attempt at cor­ner-to-cor­ner cro­chet as well. I first made the polar bear blan­ket from Sim­ply Cro­chet mag­a­zine (issue 50), then thought my par­ents would prob­a­bly like a larg­er blan­ket. So I thought I’d add squares around it. I used the pine cone pat­tern from Make & Do Crew, then found and mod­i­fied some knit­ting and cross-stitch­ing graphs to make the snowflakes and the north star. Dis­cov­ered that Microsoft Excel is a great pro­gram to draft cro­chet charts! 

And now, one great gift I received from my sis­ter — from the awe­some Out of Print cloth­ing, a Miss Pere­grine shirt!

Stay pecu­liar and lev­i­tate!

(Well, maybe not too much lev­i­ta­tion this year. I haven’t tried tak­ing this kind of pho­tos for a while, and then after­wards my knees were a bit sore… anoth­er year old­er, after all. But stay pecu­liar, definitely!)

Hap­py first week of Jan­u­ary! Hope every­one had a re-ener­giz­ing hol­i­day and have a great start to the new year! :D