Or, 'Here's One I Made Earlier'! This is what I have made this month while not working or playing in the snow.
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| Photos by Miss Adventure/Photoshop magic by Geek Boy |
At the top left is my hip flask and its cosy. Geek-Boy and I went for an overnight trip to the caboose a while back, and while he was packing his Coke cans, I thought a G&T might be nice with dinner. Not wanting to carry the weight of a 1 litre bottle I looked for a smaller receptacle and found a spare water sampling bottle. It looked a bit boring though, so once we'd returned I painted it with silver nail varnish, and used some electrical tape to make flower templates, which were then filled in with pink nail varnish. Even though I had given it a couple of coats of clear lacquer from the mechs' workshop, I was concerned both about the paintwork getting chipped in my rucksack, and the bottle itself being damaged. Out came the knitting needles, and a few attempts later I had a hip flask cosy with drawstring closure - just what every self-respecting girl-about-base needs!
The wildlife specimens are: Alanis, an Adelie version of
Pasha The Penguin made as a knit-along with the Doc, who is learning the ways of sticks and string; Sage, the white chicken and star of our
48-hour Film Festival entry; and Onion, knitted to stop Sage feeling lonely, now adopted by Geek-Boy.
Inspired by Cornish Blue storage jars in my grandmother's garage, I turned some empty food tins into Antarctic Blue tea storage jars, with the cunning application of electrical tape. I carried on the stripy blue theme to make a Nalgene water bottle cosy using an old camping mat and some fabric tape - portable hot Ribena for all!
In the centre is my wine bottle stopper. The mechanics have been running Mech School on Monday nights for the last few weeks, giving us the opportunity to learn about welding, engines, using the lathe, or anything else mechanical. I have been spending time on the lathe learning lots about how to shape the metal in different ways. My bottle stopper is recessed in the centre with a protruding screw, so the cork is gripped and supported from both sides. Like most things that come out of the garage, it is probably somewhat over-engineered, but I enjoyed making it.
At the bottom centre are my (semi-finished) sock blockers, one of them modelling my
Pomatomus sock. I used an image downloaded from the internet, then scaled up on the photocopier and cut out to form a template. At the chippy shop I taped the paper to the wood, attempted to draw neatly around it (and in the process demonstrated why I failed Colouring In at Primary School) and then used the bandsaw. It was much harder than I had anticipated, and necessitated a certain amount of tongue-poking-through-teeth. They are only semi-finished because the paint-brush kept losing bristles in the varnish; I picked them out of the first coat and lightly sanded them again, but I have left them in the second coat. On my return to the land of paint-brush shops I will pick out the hairs, re-sand them, buy a decent brush and give them a final non-hairy coat of varnish. For now though, they are functional, and will be used when I make the second sock.
Lastly in the bottom right is a square of my blanket. Progress has slowed somewhat from my initial start-of-winter enthusiasm, but I am still hoping to finish it by the end of winter.
My aims for August are to:
- finish the 5th strip of my blanket, and have at least started the 6th;
- knit the second Pomatomus sock and block the pair;
- knit a dinosaur (pattern as yet undecided) for a certain base member who saw my chickens and said, 'I want a chicken! No, wait, I want a DINOSAUR!' (he did nearly chop off two fingers while making my Mid-winter's present, so I suppose he deserves a dino if he wants one);
- make another bottle stopper, this time a bit bigger, for an empty whiskey bottle which will probably become a salad dressing dispenser when I get back to the Real World; and
- start making a swift (whirly knitting contraption).
