Hamster Herd

WARNING: A shameless plug for my business will be in this blog post.

I'm sure that anyone reading my blog will be sick of hearing about how great 'Stitch 'n Bitch' is, so I thought I'd shake things up and write about a whole new book. Great.

At Christmas, whilst shopping for others, I fell into the common trap of wandering off to the craft section in Waterstones. It was there that I found this book and immediately fell in love with the cute creations therein. 'Knitting Mochimochi' (Anna Hrachovec, 2010, Random House) is the most random knitting pattern book I have ever come across but it is WONDERFUL! I know that I don't need to knit a pencil, or a sofa or even a squirrel on roller skates, but that doesn't mean I don't want to.

Anyway, I took the book with me at Christmas to my mum's because knitting makes family tedium easier to take. (It really does. That's why I learnt in the first place.) My niece, 7, got a whole heap of Zhu Zhu Hamster rubbish on the big day but still seemed upset that she didn't get a litter of baby hamsters. 'Aha!' I yelled. 'I've got just the pattern!' and I brandished pg123: Hamster Herd. I then made a rod for my own back because I spent the rest of Christmas necking port and knitting sodding hamsters. The pattern is tremendously easy to follow and each hamster takes about 30 mins to make from start to finish. The legs are i-cords and very effective. The only problem is that they are knitted on US size 1 (UK size 13) double points, so it can be a bit of a faff.

Now Bon, the best kitsch company in the world ever, are having a stall at a market in Consett tomorrow (Citizens' House, 10am-4pm) and have been asked by the organisers to focus on knitwear rather than jewellery. This left me with a quandary - how can I increase knitwear in just three days so that our stall doesn't look bare? Hamsters! Yes! So that's what I've been knitting for the last two evenings. Feel free to come and see them decorating our stall tomorrow :) That is if I can get them away from John, who has been playing with them for the best part of half an hour...