merry ho ho

as 2006 rolls to an end, i would like to take this time to wish everyone a safe, happy and wonderful christmas and a great crafty new year! thanks so much for stopping by to read my blog and especially those who leave comments to let me know you were here! enjoy the holidays everybody!

the house that hooks built

and yarn. and tissues. because the tissue box was just so hideously ugly and/or cold, i made a cosy for it to cover up its grotesque...tissueness....either that or i saw the pattern and thought it was pretty cute and a little kitsch, and so it began. the construction of the house itself was pretty easy, but as is always the case, the devil is in the details...not hard to do, just...fiddly. and lots of scraps needed for all the little fibre gum drops, etc.....but since i have about sixty bajillion billion balls of yarn it was pretty much cake. it's quite festive and i think the tissue 'smoke' coming out of the chimney somehow completed the whole quirky masterpiece.

did you drop a trail of breadcrumbs to get to my blog? because the twisted part of me can picture a teeny witch crouching just behind the door waiting for you to get closer so she can grab you and stick you in her cooking pot...it's funny but now that i'm older i can see the witch's side... if some snot-nosed little ankle biters were eating pieces off of my house i'd be pretty ticked off, too...probably--probably?--not enough to go the extreme of cooking them for dinner, but still...

that looks dangerous

yes...the double points again. cee's camo (tea cosy) hat needed partners in crime, so this poor, punctured ball of camouflage yarn became these:

notice the interesting colour pooling in the mid section on each glove...i have no explanation, but cee thinks it's neat and they look pretty spiffy on him. now he can drive in warmth and still look dapper, oh yeah, i said dapper.... yes, you've seen this pattern before...it's the knucks pattern....i'm growing to love it more and more each time i make them.

if your poor tissue box is as homely as mine or you just think the pattern is cool, you can find the gingerbread house cover pattern here

if you can't stand it anymore and simply have to make the knucks, you can find the pattern at knitty here

festivus

it's beginning to look a lot like...well, no, it isn't actually. we don't have any of that white stuff on the ground...you know, that four-letter word that most canadians hate to say in the time of winter? well, we did have some here, but it all melted....not that i'm complaining, mind you. no, no, i think i speak for all of us when i say that s**w is only really welcome on Christmas eve and Christmas day and then it's welcome to go away...well okay i'm not that militant about it. but i don't know anyone that likes driving in it, in fact a lot of people seem to forget how to drive on it and end up in accidents on the first winter storm day or any day that it's s**wing while they are driving...you'd think they would remember, because after all, it happens every year, just like tax time.

the neighbourhood looks a lot like Christmas...everyone seems to have gone all out this year. lights and inflatables everywhere you look. even our next door neighbours, the "loud talkers" have gone whole hog and lit up their house and yard...of course all of their unsightly cords have been slung over the fence to our side so that they don't have to look at them, but we get the pleasure of it, which i thought was so nice and particularly neighbourly at this time of year...what's that you say? maybe our garbage should be strewn about their yard in friendly reciprocal fashion?...nah, we're not that kind of people.

uh...is this your idea of decorating for Christmas?

no, but don't these two look happy as pigs in you-know-what? pleased as punch with their scrap yarn haul. i had a bunch of yarn piled on the table (big surprise) and happened to look and see this and thought it was kind of (absurd) funny so i grabbed the camera. i think this is actually meant to hold candies, which are infinitely nicer to eat than balls of scrap yarn, but can you knit a sweater out of candy? oooooh...a candy sweater....