I finished the "sample" (pair for me) of the fingerless gloves and began the gift pair for my mom. (I finished the first glove; you can see it in the photo below.)



The pink pair (my pair - the one I made to be sure there weren't any kinks in the pattern) is of Soy Wool Stripes (Paton's). It took perhaps 3/4 of a skein but as you can see I didn't bother to match the striping pattern. I think you would need two skeins in order to make the striping match.

The second pair is a Christmas gift for my mom; they are being made of Caron's Felt-It, which I chose mainly because it would match her winter coat. It's an okay yarn to knit with; you can't pull too hard on it because it's kind of like roving and if you use too heavy a hand it will break. I think I'll get both gloves out of a single skein of this, too.

The pattern is the "Fingerless Gloves" (the marching band mitts) from "Not Another Teen Knitting Book."


"The bartender said, 'Why the long face?'"



I made one of the sock horses like the one I linked to. I had no pattern; I just kind of figured it out (it's not that hard). The "leg" part of one sock became the back legs and the heel became the horse's ass (sorry). I cut the very tip of the toe off to turn and stuff on that sock. From the second sock, I used the leg part to make the forelegs, and the foot part to make the head (the toe is the nose). The ears (and yes, he has two ears, you can't see one of them as it folds down a little) are from scraps from the heel of the second sock.

It's actually quite difficult to get a good photo of this. Here's another one, showing the horse stretched out full-length that's a bit less foreshortened re: the head:



I only put button eyes on there; sometimes, with some toys, less is more in the features department. I kind of played around with pinning on "nostril" buttons, and laying embroidery floss on for eyebrows and such and in the end decided that he looked best with just simple button eyes and nothing else.

(Actually, if you look closely at the toe of the sock forming his nose, the seam is on the underside and looks faintly like a smile, and the decreases for the toe suggest nostrils).

The horse is yet unnamed. The naming of toys can be a complex business. Sometimes, the name comes to me immediately but not on this one.

I often went for rather grand, sometimes literature- or mythology-inspired names when I was a kid - I might have tried out Bucephalus on this horse had I been, say, ten. But grand names don't seem to work for this fellow. And either Hwin or Bree (from The Horse and His Boy) are even a bit grand.

I do have to admit I toyed with the idea of Harry (both because the horse is made from a herringbone sock and because I watched one of the Harry Potter movies - which are being run on one of the cable channels right now - while working on it). But now I'm leaning more to something like Brumby, which is from a term used to refer to Australian wild horses.

I also like "Esquilax," but it's both inaccurate and perhaps a bit grand for this simple horse.

I will have to think on it a bit more. As I said, the naming of toys is a complex thing. Perhaps more fraught with meaning when one is a child, but it does retain a certain complexity when you're an adult (or perhaps only when you're a childish adult, I don't know).