Snowmen Ornaments

I have been knitting quite a few things lately, but as most of them are gifts I am reluctant to post them until they've been given!  I can post a picture of these snowmen ornaments I've been working on.  I'm making them for the kids of my friends.  So far these two are the only ones I've finished.  I hope to make a total of at least seven - now that I've gotten the pattern down, I'm going to knit all the pieces first and then assemble them all at once.  I got the pattern from Knit List here: Snowman Ornament Pattern.  One change I made to the pattern was to not knit the colored stripe on the hat - instead I knitted the whole thing in black and then tied a piece of yarn around the base.  I also knitted the ornament with size 10 needles, making it larger than it would have been with size 7.

I'll be knitting like crazy this week so I can finish all my gifts soon!

Baby Blanket

Wow!  This blanket was definitely the most time-consuming project so far.  It took me over a week to finish.  The pattern I used was called Easiest Baby Blanket from Ruhamas.com.  Originally I planned to knit it with size 15 needles and by holding two strands of yellow sport weight yarn together throughout.  However, I knitted a few rows with that yarn and I did not like the big holes it created (though later on vacation I saw a very nice baby blanket knitted with large needles and light yarn - in the finished product the holes didn't look strange).  So I went back to the store and purchased Red Heart Baby Clouds super bulky yarn in Blue Sky.  The bulk of this yarn makes the holes much smaller when knitted.

Unfortunately, I did not follow the directions very well.  For some reason I decided that casting on 75 stitches was not enough, so I cast on 90 instead.  This made the blanket very very wide - about 49 inches.  I then knit 102 rows, which made it 34 inches long.  I had been hoping for a finished blanket that was square, but by the time I got near the end of my third ball of yarn I could see that if I did make it square it would be gigantic so I stopped.

The hardest part of this blanket was alternating knitted rows with purled rows.  It seems to take me twice as long to purl a row than to knit one.  I probably could have finished it a lot faster if I had just knit the whole thing.

It may not be the prettiest blanket ever, but hopefully my friend (and her baby!) will like it.