Emergency Winter Woollies

Recently, my depuartment acquired a new staffmember from the other end of the country.

Crossing all those latitudinal lines in a hurry causes a small problem.

It is  MUCH cooler down here and they're just not used to it yet.

(There is a reason why we call out-of-town students 'Scarfies'. They're almost never seen without 2m of wool around their necks.)

Bored and itching to do some colourwork, I offered to make this poor, frozen northener a woolly welcome gift.

They asked for black and red.

Black and red?

But. . . Those aren't Warriors colours. . .

. . . you sure you want the Canterbury colours?

But. . . but. . . THESE ARE OUR BOYS HERE!

Do I really have to use our Arch Rivals colours?

. . . Welcome-to-town present; so yes.

Yes I had to.

At least it turned out looking moderately Goth instead of screamingly Cantabrian, so I feel like a little less of a filthy traitor for using red and black.

Hopefully they'll keep our poor northener from freezing to death before spring ^.^;

The patterns used were the Waffle Stitch Fingerless Gloves and Snowflake Slouchy Beanie from Ravelry. They're very fast knits, I was able to knit both hat and gloves up in 3-4 days while catching up on some reading.

Both patterns knit flat and sewn up later. In my opinion those gloves would be excellent for stash-busting and stockpiling for Christmas gifts. The beanie would be excellent for a first colourwork project. It's got a nice simple chart and you don't have to wrap stitches very often. (Wrapping while purling=DISLIKE)

I have a sneaking suspicion that the colourwork bug has not been fully satisfied. . .

This can't be good.

~Topaz



(Also: Thankyou SuperXV for the rugby booty photos)

A Tasty Trainwreck

I've broken a 20-year Cake baking drought with an utter monstrosity.

My partner wanted a chocolate cake for his birthday, so I obliged.

I may or may not have needed to make an emergency supermarket trip after discovering that we were missing about 40% of the ingredients. . .

Please note that I have no idea how to do that "pretty" icing thing. I just grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer and started slopping it on there.

Then when I was tidying up the mess I made, I saw that we had sprinkles.

In the words of The Doctor:

Um. . . yeah.

By the time I was done both the cake and the kitchen looked like a complete disaster area.

A disaster area as delicious as it is ugly.

Mmmmmmmm.

~Topaz