Knitting gifts

A friend is expecting a baby in early February and several of us at knitting group had made things for the baby, so we had an evening of handing over presents. They don't know the sex of the baby, so I played safe and went with purple yarn. This is another Beyond Puerperium, as I love the pattern, it's very clearly written with multiple sizes and yarn weights possible. The yarn used is Rico Baby Classic DK, which I've used before for this pattern. It has nice colours and it machine washable, plus very soft and doesn't feel like acrylic, even though it is. According to my notes I only used 70g of yarn, although that doesn't seem like enough?!

I found these immensely cute ladybird buttons at the local haberdashery. They had red ones too, but that didn't look quite right with the purple. I also found this style of button much easier to sew on.

We had a great evening admiring the ingenious things that had been knitted by the group.

And, last week, I received some yarn in the post. This was from Mostly Knitting, who had come joint first of the Sock Sniper competition, and so had won loads and loads of skeins of sock yarn. She offered to post a skein of it to someone who wrote a comment on her blog about why they deserved a skein of sock yarn. I pointed out that I was the one who got her into knitting in the first place, and this gorgeous skein was posted to me:

Especially good timing as I was having one of those weeks, and this cheered me up no end! It is Butterfly Moon by Alina Shea Creations and the colours are amazing. I may already have a plan for it, but more in another post...