Keeping everyone's hands warm

The Niece

My sweet 12 year old niece has been into crocheting for a couple years now, and recently picked up knitting as well!  I'm really proud of her (and impressed!) and it makes her a great receiver of handmade gifts.  Last year I bought two skeins of a kinda hideous yarn (mostly black, with purple, green, pink and blue accents) for $1 a piece on sale.  I thought it would be fun to make a simple ribbed scarf and probably just donate it somewhere because I'm not a big scarf wearer myself.  My niece saw me working on it one day and was fascinated by it.  She asked what I was doing with it and when I told her I planned on donating it to a shelter, her face dropped.  Insert deciding to give it to her for her birthday.  A few months later she said "Hey...did you ever finish that scarf?"  I played it off, cuz I'm a playa, and she got to open it on her birthday and was thrilled.  So, kids out there who could care less for handmade items?  She's not one of them.

I decided to make her and her brother some gloves for their birthdays in 2012, and I made hers with

Plymouth Yarn Happy Feet yarn in a beautiful red colorway (beautiful, yes, and hard to photograph!).  I bought it a week before her birthday, because I'm a masochist, deciding to knit gloves with sock weight yarn in a week on top of work and other plans.  Her party was at noon on Saturday and on Friday night I only had one glove done.  I started knitting around 7pm that night, stopped at 3am, got back up at 7 (and had to make a treat for the party, nice job planning there) and I finished weaving in the ends just after 11am.  They were a labor of love.

She loved them!  She said they reminded her of Coraline's gloves (which I later looked up, and Coraline's had green stripes in them, but I'm at least glad I inadvertently made something she liked even more because of that comparison).

The Sister

My sister loved the gloves I made her daughter so much she asked for handwarmers in the same colorway, and this time I did not wait until a week before Christmas to work on them (not too close, anyway).  Ravelry link.

The Nephew

In a not-as-interesting part of our saga, I made my nephew some gloves too.