A quick loomed cowl

There's a new yarn shop in my local area and they have a 'Knit night' on a Thursday evening. I went along one Thursday, met some really nice ladies and had fun. I had taken my big purple Knifty Knitter round loom along and picked up some Artesano Superchunky alpaca and wool blend yarn. Before I knew it, I had a third of this cowl done by the end of the evening. It didn't take me very long to finish it off either.



It's lovely and warm. I love the colour too.



Now I have a nice cowl wear when the day is cold, the weather's decided to take a bit of turn and it's gone pretty mild around here. Typical.

Hope your week's going well, friends.

Hat number 10

I finished all my hats in time for the date my work colleague had set for the making up of the office shoeboxes for the Operation Christmas Child Project. Whew!

This is hat number 10.



Made on my green Knifty Knitter round loom with half a ball of leftover Rowan Big Wool yarn. It turned out to be a lovely warm hat with a nice little rolled brim.



Missy Moo wholeheartedly approved.

9 down, 1 more to go

I am very close to achieving the target of 10 woolly hats which Missy Moo set for me when I first embarked on this year's hats for the Operation Christmas Child project. Here is hat number 9 on Dinoboy.



Of course Missy Moo had to inspect it too for quality assurance purposes.



This one has a little rolled brim instead of the usual doubled-up one. It's kinda cute.

The past week and a bit has been pretty busy as I've been trying my hand at pumpkin carving. I'll show you my efforts in my next post.

Hats for Christmas

Last year I made about a dozen woolly hats on my round loom and they went into wrapped shoeboxes that some colleagues at work were putting together for the Operation Christmas Child project. I enjoyed making them very much and thought that I'd do the same again this year.

Missy Moo has set me a target of 10 hats to make. I've made 7 so far (8th is very nearly done) and here they are. I haven't had to buy any yarn this year - just trying to use up the yarn I got last year or yarn friends have given to me towards the project.



DinoBoy and MissyMoo tried them on for size and said they were very soft and warm. MissyMoo expressed her gladness at knowing that these hats were going to be part of some christmas presents for children in another part of the world.



I had to throw this next photo in for a giggle - this is what you get when you tell your subjects to say "Fromage" instead of "Cheese".



I am glad it's the weekend. The weather people on telly said that the weather might be quite good this weekend. I hope so. Wishing you a wonderful weekend wherever you are, friends.

I know Christmas might seem ages away yet but ...

... I am nowhere near my pledged target of 24 woolly hats for the Operation Christmas Child project.

I need to back up a bit and tell you about how I got started on this. Last Christmas, a colleague at work introduced us to the Operation Christmas Child project. This organisation asks people to donate a shoe-box of gifts for children in under-priviledged parts of the world. The idea is that you would wrap up a shoe-box, fill it with gifts for a girl child or boy child of a particular age and take it to a designated collection point. The OCC staff will then collect the boxes, take them back to their warehouses, check the boxes are OK and the gifts suitable, then they send the boxes to children in Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. My colleague started volunteering at the local warehouse in our region at the beginning of this year. She told me that often, the boxes they received would be under-filled or perhaps filled with inappropriate items. She said that OCC needed hats and other simple items as back-up / filler gifts. So I had this big idea that I would make some woolly hats. There was just one big problem, I do not knit or crochet.

A fellow crafter suggested making hats using a loom. I figured I could do that. Have you seen a round loom before? Here is the small loom I started off with.


With a loom, I can make these hats.


Or these hats with the pom-poms.


They look really cute on kids. Here's one on my son, DinoBoy.


I've made 9 hats so far. I still have some way to go! The good thing is they're quick to make.

After my big idea about making hats, I had another big idea. Haha! You'd think I'd had enough of the big ideas right? Well, this time, I thought I could sew simple drawstring backpack bags for the OCC boxes. I tell you about those in the next post.