O W L S progress

I've made lots of progress with my O W L S jumper - chunky is SO fast to knit with, plus it's a very easy pattern to pick up and take along to knitting group. It is also fine for knitting whilst watching TV with subtitles (The Legacy, I'm looking at you), although I decided not to risk doing the actual owl cables like that! I've got as far as the yoke now and the owls are almost finished.

These are some owl feet. I had to make some modifications to the pattern as I went along - I'd read on Ravelry that some people had had problems with the back being a bit baggy, so I moved the back waist decreases to the side, which should hopefully solve the problem. I also found the sleeves (knitted in the round on DPNs) too small for my arms, a problem several people had encountered, so I increased until they were comfortable. That meant I had more stitches at the yoke than I should have for the second size, so I've decided to finish off using the pattern for size 3, which will make this an 18 owl jumper!

I've also found time to do a bit of sewing. This is an envelope cushion cover from the Learn to sew with Lauren book. Again, I wanted to test out a few more things with my new sewing machine, so this involved sewing with thicker fabric and using the zigzag stitch function. Both were a piece of cake - it really is so much easier than my old machine, which would have really struggled with this fabric. The fabric is  made by Textiles Vilber and shows bits of the London map (it's not totally geographically correct!). If I'd had enough fabric I'd have tried to make the back with the envelope match all the way across, but I only just had enough to squeeze the pattern out of, as I'd only bought 0.5 metre of it whilst on holiday!

The pattern also suggests top-stitching 3mm from the edge, but I want to get a 50cm cushion pad for it first and check that that fits OK before doing that. Don't want to do the stitching and then discover it's too tight a squeeze!

As the Owls is nearing completion I thought I'd better start looking for another knitting project to cast on this week, and I've settled on Liesl, which I've been meaning to make for ages. I enjoyed knitting Wee Liesl last year for my god-daughter. I'm intending to use some leftover purple  Araucania Toconao yarn from my stash.