Warm off the needles

 A couple of knitting projects.

I started out by making these elbow-length hand warmers for one of my nieces. She is into photography, and I know from personal experience that in colder weather, either fingerless mitts (or better yet, flip-top ones) are the way to go. She liked them.

So then I decided to knit a shorter pair for my aunt, with the remnants of some beautiful blue-faced Leicester wool, hence the blue-faced sheep on the tag.

And I'm currently knitting a pair for myself in a dark blue wool, not quite as nice a wool as either of these, but with the merit of being machine washable :D. Not that I have ever found mittens needed washing that often, it was purely that I was out of nicer remnants in the right weight.

But before I started mine, I used up some of the chunky pink from my recent jacket to knit a cowl for my sister. It's  a chunky (bulky) wool, 80% merino with 20% angora, and it's wonderfully soft and cosy. 

She gets a pink sheep on her tag. The main photos of the cowl, the colour of the wool is pretty true. I took the tag late in the evening, because I need to wrap this up and take it to work to post on the way home. In that case, the colours in the tag are pretty true, but definitely not the wool. 

Ever since I went back to work on the 3rd, I have been seeing tree-pruning going on all the way along the central avenue through the park. They start early, even though it's still dark. And often when I'm coming home, I see them all sitting around on chairs and whatever they have gathered at the back of one of the trucks enjoying a warm mug of tea. A workers' tail-gate party, as it were. Anyway, with the moon this morning and a very stormy cloudy sky, I stopped to take a photo. It was pretty windy, I would not have liked to be up in that cherry-picker.