Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

You know that someone has their finger on the pulse of modern style and taste when the reference Cliff Richard lyrics in their post titles.

The knitted vine you see below is my attempt to stem the slow, sad destruction of my faithful aural friends – my ear buds (or ear buddies, as I prefer to think of them).

These headphones have been my companions for many years now.  They have outlived portable CD players, 1st generation iPod nanos and are now on to their second iPod.  They have filled my head with such nonsense as the Flight of the Conchords, and played the complete catalogues of Simon and Garfunkel and David Bowie more times than they’d probably care to relate.  They have also played hundreds and hundreds of hours of audiobooks as I have knitted and travelled over these past two years.  So, it is probably no wonder that they look a little shabby by now.

Actually, they’ve had a few scrapes recently.  Firstly, I foolishly had them dangling from my handbag when I went to visit someone with a new kitten.  The kitten either absolutely loved them or was furious with their  presence in the house – I couldn’t quite tell among the frenzies ball of activity that the cat and headphones soon became.  Not long afterwards, possibly prompted by the recent feline-trauma, the earphones tried to commit suicide by wrapping themselves around the roller of a high-powered vacuum cleaner.  With bare wires in places, the casing sheared off in others, the wires were patched up with electrical tape and love, but the headphones go their revenge.  During one of their bids to join the graveyard of electrical accessories, the hard plastic casing that shields where the main wire divides into two cracked and part of it was lost, leaving a razor edge that Gillette could only wish they could get on their blades – any one of the 20 now compulsory on any ’shaving system’.

This piece of plastic seeks to cause daly damage to anyone still wishing to traumatise these headphones with their bad taste in music from the 70s, and that person is, invariably, me.
So, I am knitting these headphones an iCord wire cosy in a bid to stop, or at least slow, the destruction.  The headphones get to approach their retirement years in snug comfort, and my hands are now safe from that piece of vengeful plastic.

Ladies and gentlemen please be seated, for Flossie Bear is about to make her debut:

Standing at roughly 40cm tall and as cuddly as a cloud, Flossie is complete.  I actually finished the project on Wednesday, with only her little face left to embroider yesterday evening.  I chose to embroider her features rather than use intarsia as I thought I might get a neater finish that way, my intarsia work leaving something to be desired… Also this allowed me to play around with the spacing and placement of the features before committing her to a face she was going to have to live with and which I was going to have to look at.

The most significant deviation from the cuddling bear Flossie was intended as, though, is that she was created with a buttoned envelope style opening in the back, to allow a hot water bottle to be used inside.  As local temperatures dropped to around -19ºc last night, she needs some inner warmth to keep from freezing, and to warm up this Eskimimi’s town-centre igloo.

If you were to peek inside the envelope opening, you wouldn’t find the stark rubberiness of a hot water bottle, though.  No, this Flossie comes with extra comfort – she comes with extra cuddleability. This Flossie, you see, has more than one level of cosiness. Inside her fair-isle knitted exterior she has a plush lining made with a soft fleece baby blanket, hand-sewn into a double-layered covering, which is stuffed lightly with a fine layer of polyfill.

I got the idea of using polyfill from my favourite store-bought hot water bottle cosy, which in the shape of bagpuss.  He (Bagpuss) is similarly stuffed, and the insulating properties of the materials used help to stop the very hot bottle from causing discomfort, giving a beautifully warm heat rather than an exceptionally hot one.  As my other half described it when he gave Flossie a test cuddle ‘it’s like warm cake.’ The padded inner layers also helps keep Flossie at the perfect temperature for a lot longer, as the insulation helps to control the release of heat.  Of course, Flossie’s padded interior also makes her extremely squishy, and being squishy is her other main function.

I’m extremely happy with this project.  As Flossie was made from acrylic scraps and polyfill leftover from other projects, and uses a hot water bottle and buttons I already owned, the only expenditure on this project was for the fleece baby blanket which I picked up for 2 for £1 at the local pound shop, so she came in at a bargainous price and used up some of the acrylic scraps I have been saving for such a rainy (or, more accurately snowy) day.

This will be my last post for a little while now as I am going into hospital for a spell (though hopefully not too long) where I shall probably have say goodbye to my needles and the internet for a bit whilst I recover.

Knowing that I had this hospital stay approaching, I have been trying to get some more of my Christmas projects completed. I finally decided on a hot water bottle cover for my brother-in-law, and I decided that it should be a very Christmassy affair. Knit from a single skein of Louet Riverstone Chunky, I improvised the entire pattern. I don’t know how it came together, or what process of luck decided that it was going to fit, but somehow it did. Before felting in the washing machine, it was a truly colossal piece of knitting. I never had a camera to take a ‘before’ picture, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say it was huge.

Fortunately it felted to a perfect size for a standard hot water bottle, ready for decorating:

It is very much a ‘work in progress’, but I wanted to take some pictures whilst there was still ample light. I think the shepherd needs a few sheep, and it just needs a bit more detail and overall refinement, and I think the star needs a small bead at its centre, to catch the light (in this case I am going to ignore the ‘less is more’ idiom and insist that, actually, more is more), but I now have the general idea of the design laid out for when I am able to return to my projects and (hopefully) finish them in time for gift-giving.

Have fun knitting, everyone, and I hope to be back soon! In the meantime, please feel free to leave a comment, just to say hi, or to tell if you are busy with gift-knitting and if you think you are going to finish in time