Tea-45

I'm getting ready to move on from to a new job. I love where I am at the moment but after the wedding and honeymoon last year it just felt like the right time to move forward, especially after 3 years here.

As a parting gift I've made them a tea cosy and cafetiere cosy, in exchange for my P45. Considering how much tea we get through in this office they may well prove more useful for productivity than I ever was!

Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo

Princess Aura: Look! Water is leaking from her eyes.

Emperor Ming: Its what they call tears. Its a sign of their weakness.

Slow loris

Inspired by this classic Youtube vid , I created this little amigurumi loris for my boss as a secret santa present.

Slow loris are threatened because poachers kill them for their eyes, which they use as a traditional medicine. But the cute loris isn't without defence...

They have a poisonous bite and if that fails they can cunningly drop from their branch and roll away in a tight little ball. Too cute.

Back from the dead

Spooky happenings over the weekend. A creature, given up for dead, emerged from the depths, drawn by the presence of its true master...

The story begins in the inhospitably cold days before Christmas. Hiding away from the un-godly weather, I turned the power of my opposable thumbs to crafting a creature of the night for my cousin Michael. He likes that sort of thing – monsters, zombies, skeleton armies etc etc. Rummaging through the endless scraps of DK I found just the right kind of knobbly ‘rotten flesh’ shade of tweedy wool and set about a pattern from Creepy Cute Crochet.

He turned out a treat. All drooling blood and brains, wobbly cadaverous head and dragging knuckles.

I took a couple of snaps for posterity but when I went to wrap him a few days later he was nowhere to be found... We searched the house, terrified of the horrific, evil acts he could be inflicting on other knitted creations, but to no avail. It was a mystery, only explainable by a possible accidental ejection amongst the recycling.

Months later, as Spring tried desperately to break through the bleak, black Winter... Michael came round for a game of Settlers of Catan (fun board game involving trading wheat, bricks etc to claim dominion over the island of Catan – try it sometime) and to watch Big Man Japan (weird Japanese monster movie involving a giant Gary Glitter look-a-like pummeling various monsters including a giant potato with an telescopic eye in place of his manhood and a family of cosmic looking giants that give a mean wedgie)

Within 5 mins of his arrival, I moved a cushion to make more seating room and out crawled the zombie from the nether regions of the couch, slightly squished and looking even more decomposed but otherwise still in good fettle. Or at least as much as the living dead can ever be.

It was like Thriller all over again.

Jim the giant squid

Having knitted many a Jean Greenhowe character and crocheted lots of teeny animals for the tables at my wedding last year, I'm now of the mind that amigurumi are so much more fun to make than garments, which always seem to turn out a bit odd for me.

My brother bought me 'Amigurumi Knits' by Hansi Singh for Christmas and its got some cunning patterns in there and nifty techniques I haven't tried before, like short rows.

The hermit crab looks awesome but he's listed as a 'lengthy project' so I honed my needle skills on the mythical giant squid 'the kraken', in a fetching day glo green and yellow combo.

He turned out quite well. I was going to give him away as a present because my house is overrun with knitted creatures, but as soon as I gave him eyes I bonded with him and now he's staying. Admittedly I did have to crochet the eyes because trying to circular knit from just 3 cast on stitches reduced me to tears, but the end effect is still pretty faithful to the pattern.

He's called Jim.