Recent visitors to the shop may have seen us crocheting snowflakes. We entered the Christmas Window Competition and as the theme was ‘Winter Wonderland’ we decided to fill the window with a snowstorm. We started crocheting snowflakes as and when we had a spare few minutes and we had accumulated a small pile of them when we realised that actually to fill the window we would need around 200. So the heat was on and for the past 10 days we had a target of 20 a day between us which was more gruelling than it sounds!

So you could recreate this in your own home with our free snowflake pattern! It’s in the free patterns section. We used Sirdar Blur for ours.

We are also running a competition to guess the number of snowflakes in the window. We didn’t count them before we hung them so we won’t know the answer until after Christmas when we change the window. We are giving away a Kaffe Fassett sock kit to the person who guesses correctly or nearest. There are 3 ways to enter. Every customer who makes a purchase in the shop gets to make one guess, every website order gets one guess and anyone who leaves a comment on the blog can have one guess. Good luck!! All guesses must be in by Saturday 22nd December and the winner will be announced early January.

Here is our latest window, coinciding with a turn for colder weather, it is mainly scarves. Everything in the window is knitted with Mission Falls 1824 wool or cotton. Both are interchangeable and absolutely beautiful to knit with.

The shawl on the left is from the East & West book which will be on the website next week. It’s covered in cables and bobbles and has lovely twisted tassels all around. Thanks to Janet for knitting it for us!

The bag was knitted by Mary and is in the Recollection book. She has lined it with pretty fabric and it has great touches like the cute buttons on the ends of the straps.

The sripey cardi which you can just see on the right is from Wee Knits 3 and is knitted in the cotton by me! Even though the sizing only goes up to 2 years old in the Wee Knits books, they are quite generous and with a bit of extra length it does fit my almost 4 year old.

The scarves are dotted in all the other books and we all had a hand in those. each of them seems to have a great scarf pattern! Please as always e-mail or ring the shop for more info if there is anything in the window which takes your fancy!

The website now has some goodies for Christmas. We have lots of Lantern Moon accessories, new kits and some great knitting needles.

I think I am a bit behind this year again!  Still got two scarves , a doll’s blanket and a throw to go not to mention a few sewing projects.  I am a great believer in the saying ‘ that if it wasn’t for the last minute nothing would get done.’

I have been knitting fingureless gloves from the RYC Accessories Book.  It is a good way of trying out some yarns.  Sublime Merino DK has great stitch definition and is lovely knit.  Rowan Tapestry is very pretty and has made a really snuggly pair of gloves.  Will try Rowan’s Felted Tweed next.

A few Saturdays ago when I was working in the shop, the Webmaster let the kids watch Dr. Who and the Daleks and they LOVED it. They each picked out their favourite daleks and spent the rest of the weekend doing impressions. Claudie announced that she wanted a Dalek teddy so I scoured the internet but perhaps unsurprisingly you can’t get them. Luckily I stumbled across this pattern which I think is brilliant so now I’m knitting a red and silver one. If I have time I’ll knit Jake a blue one but you know how this christmas knitting gets. Good intentions turn into stress around mid-December. It happens to me every year. Still, now I only have 1 sock, 2 scarves, 6 bookmarks and 2 daleks to knit for actual christmas presents, that’s around 1.5 projects a week. It sounds do-able at this stage. Oh, but I bought some fabric at the Quilt show to make a christmas tree skirt and saw a great pattern for some hohoho bunting which I thought I’d have a bash at too. I’m sure it will be fine…