Little Cotton Rabbits

squeak!

Firstly, thank you so much to everyone who entered the giveaway in the previous post. I so enjoyed reading all the comments, by turns funny, warm, moving and altogether a lovely reminder that it's so often the little things that make us all happy. I've drawn the winners and posted them at the bottom of the giveaway post.

 

 

 

The last few weeks I've mostly been sat here at my computer working on the patterns for the mice and yesterday I decided it was high time to call them finished (it's all too easy to become just a little obsessive with infinite tweaks to wording and layouts). So I've uploaded them to Ravelry and Etsy where they are now available. I've yet to update my pattern page links from here - it's quite fiddly but I'll get to it in the next few days.

 

 

Today is the last day of school before the start of the half term break so next week will be full of wet and windy woodwalks for Toby and me and Amy will be having fun performing in a musical version of the Adams Family with her theatre group. I'll be back after the break as I want to tell you a little more about the making of the mouse pattern but until then I'll wish you a good week and say thanks for dropping by x

 

Giveaway time, at last :)

As mentioned over a month ago, I have just celebrated the start of my 9th blogging year!

I published my first blog post in September 2006 on the day before Toby started school - he was still 4 years old and much, much tinier than he is today! Amy was 6 and loved Disney princesses, colouring books and ballet. One of the first bunnies that I made for her was a ballerina bunny so it seems appropriate to bring that into this giveaway.

For all of you knitters out there I've written up a free supplement pattern for any of the girl animal patterns. It has instructions for a ballerina wrap cardigan and a simple circular net tutu. If you've bought a copy of any of my animal patterns and you'd like to knit up a ballet outfit for them you can download a copy here.

 

 

For all of you non-knitters, I am giving away the two ballerina animals pictured above, one to each of two winners.

To enter the giveaway just leave a comment on this post and let me know what things are making you happy at the moment. I'll leave the post up until next Thursday (October 23rd) at which time I'll use a random number generator to pick two winners - the first number picked will be given the choice of the rabbit or the elephant so I'm afraid the 2nd winner will have to settle for whichever animal is left.

Thanks again for visiting here with me. Whether you're a new visitor or one who has been with me on my little blogging journey since the beginning, I really appreciate you stopping by. I'll leave you with a picture of some ballerina bunnies that I made back in 2006 and my lovely girl as she once was (now she's all eye-linered up and clad in black with purple Doc Martens - how times have changed).

 

 

 

PS: Just a quick note to say that if you are a knitter and want to enter the giveaway for the 2 animals, that's absolutely fine - I didn't mean to make it sound as if you weren't allowed x

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Thanks so much to everyone who entered the giveaway drawing. The random number generator picked numbers 257 which is Caroline Roberts and 926 which is Wanda (the winners have been notified).

 

autumn days

The last few weeks have been much busier than anticipated, mostly due to the complications of family life. In the meantime Autumn has arrived here, bringing wet and windy weather, falling leaves and cooler temperatures which happily has meant I've not been told off for lighting the fire (H must run hotter than me as I'm always chilly and like nothing better than snuggling up by the fire on a windy autumn day, whereas he's stripped off to a T-shirt and goes round opening windows). The biggest news is that I am now mum to two teenagers, with Toby turning 13 yesterday and Amy 15 last week! Doesn't life whizz by at an alarming rate?

The other stuff that has kept us busy is neither newsworthy nor of any interest to anyone else, so I'll not bore you with details but I am going to bore you with pictures of my homegrown red kuri squash, which I am rather proud of. I grew them as an experiment, fully expecting to have either no fruit at all or at best some the size of golfballs but in fact I managed to grow 3 whoppers - which leads me to the conclusion that they must be very easy to grow.

 

 

I've roasted them and made my usual spiced squash soup, which has such a lovely, warming autumny taste.

 

 

 

 

The colour of the soup has been featuring heavily in my autumny knitting too. In fact I've been just a bit obsessed with gorgeous mustardy-coloured yarn recently (as my friends who recently came yarn shopping with me might of heard me say once or twice).

Here, I'm using 2 skeins of MadelineTosh's new yarn home to make a really thick and cosy cowl. Pattern: Gaptastic Cowl, Yarn: MadelineTosh Home in 'candlewick', needles: 8mm

 

 

I have made one change to the pattern - using double moss stitch instead of the single.

 

 

and I might have a few other little mustardy projects on the go too...

 

 

Well, it's nice to be back here again and I'm looking forward to catching up with what everyone else has been blogging about recently - I feel horribly out of touch yet again. I plan to be back here later in the week with that giveaway that I promised weeks ago. And my work on the next patterns is going well - I'll give you a glimpse of what is coming up before the end of the month.

Thanks as always for stopping by, J x

 PS: here's the birthday boy enjoying his helium balloon and laughing at his own reflection!