The first Cthulhu mitten

Here we have the first of the two Cthulhu mittens!
I'm really happy with how the run parts came out, and the little raised bands look really good. There was a bit of a problem with miscalculating the lengths of the two sides which meant the thumb had to be moved a bit higher up than I'd planned, but I think this works well, it stops the wrist from stretching the band of runes.

The seams are really not good though, and they don't lie straight. I think that's because I sewed them all wrong, and I'll probably have to take it apart and do this again properly, if only to match the second one which I'm expecting to sew better.



Also, I'm still planning to add a couple of highlights at the end - I'm going to duplicate stitch the little circle at the centre and a couple of the runes on the wrist in red. I'm hoping that'll add some... something to the design, but I'm starting to be less sure, because I'm really quite keen on how they're looking already.

Hugh.

Snail torus

So, I was talking about knitting a torus animal for a friend, and we decided a snail would be nice. The plan is that the shell will be made up of three tori which will slot into each other(kind of like russian dolls), and an extra piece for the snail body.
The three tori will be blue, green and purple, these being favourite colours of said friend, and the body will probably be black, but we'll have to see how well this goes with the shell colours.
Being different sizes, I need to recalculate my original torus pattern to make the shell, and I'll need to add an extra couple of rows in the middle to give a nice flat middle to the tori which will help them hold each other in place better.
I'll knit the body as a tube and use short rows to make it curve. The hard part will be making sure that it'll be able to stand up - to make this work I might need to add some pouches with weights on the bottom, rather than spending too long trying to work out where it's centre of mass will be. This should make it a lot more stable in the sideways direction too.

And yay, graphics! I found a friendly bitmap editor to draw this in - it's not ideal, but I'm sure it makes more sense than my attempts to describe this in words :o).

Hugh.