The Countdown is On....

According to the internet there is 10 days, 1 hour and 59 minutes left until Christmas. Where has the time gone? It was the beginning of December yesterday. My tree is up, my lovely Snape angel is complete and taking pride of place at the top (although he’s still a little bit big for it, but far more suited to the role than any of my other Snapes have been) and I have at least managed to make and write most (although not all) of my Christmas cards. I haven’t yet started wrapping the presents, although I have drunk the wine I bought to drink while I was wrapping.

Strangely, although I’ve been wearing my Christmas tops (including a rather fantastic snowman dalek, which satisfies both my nerd and Christmas sides at the same time), have my workstation decorated with more tinsel and fairy lights than Santa’s grotto and have already been to the works Christmas dinner (a bit of a disappointment to be honest, All Bar One) I’m not really feeling very Christmassy. Partly this is because I’ve got other things on my mind which are detracting from me enjoying myself and partly it’s because of that pile of presents still needing to be wrapped.

This weekend is the Wizarding Winter Fair, which is a replacement for the Snow Ball and is being held in Macclesfield. Unfortunately I can’t make it, which would explain why this year, instead of being snowed in (as has happened the previous two years when trying to get to Edinburgh), it seems that with the exception of a bit of wind and maybe a storm, the weather will be fine. Gutted as I am not to be able to join my fellow wizards for some pre-Christmas wrock and fun, Mrs H3 and I will instead be spending Friday evening celebrating our own early Christmas (due to my imminent departure to Spain) at Bluewater with a meal, presents and Robert Downey Junior (phwoar!) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. I’m hoping that by Friday I’ll be feeling a little more in the spirit.

It occurred to me that I’ve never documented my Harry Potter Christmas tree properly before and so I’ve taken some photos of the tree, Snape angel (I made the wings from decoupaged glitter card in the end and they look fab in real life), and the decorations so you can see just how wonderful they are.        

I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to post again before I go to Spain as I’m pretty busy for the next few days, but if not I’d like to thank you all for reading my blog, sporadic as it’s been over the last year or so and wish you all a very merry Christmas (holiday season etc.) and a happy and healthy New Year!

Knitting

When I was in my teens I used to knit all the time (it started during a phase where I made all my own clothes). I knitted some fabulously intricate patterns: from a jumper covered with multi-coloured Egyptian hieroglyphs and a jewel-bright Pharaoh’s collar to match, to fashionable tops containing the latest and most interesting wools. Nothing was too difficult for me to have a go at as several large fluffy cable knit jumper dresses and a very difficult to knit (and hugely expensive) silk and alpaca cardigan showed.

And then I stopped.

Thinking about it now I have absolutely no idea why. I’m not even quite sure when I stopped as I can remember days of sitting at boot fairs, knitting my way through balls of angora wool and I remember showing Jane how to knit when she got pregnant, so that she could make some baby clothes. But at some point I stopped, and although I made a couple of scarves a few years ago, I’ve not really been involved in serious knitting for years.

Until now.

A few weeks ago I was trawling the interwebs trying to find something to go on the top of my Christmas tree (my beautiful Severus Snape dolls are either too big, and thus too heavy or too small and not imposing enough) when I discovered a knitted Snape doll which I thought would be perfect, both in size and weight. There were two choices: I could buy the doll ready-made, which was quite expensive, or I could buy the pattern and knit it myself. I decided to go for the latter and have spent the last few evenings immersed in trying to create this doll.

But somewhere along the way I seem to have lost my ability to knit, or at least, I’ve lost the ability to do anything but row after row of stocking stitch. Increasing without creating holes in my work is a problem I need to solve (Snape’s face depends on it) and, sad to admit, I even had to look up how to cast off because I couldn’t remember how to do it. Fortunately knitting is a pretty well-covered hobby on the internet and so there’s a million tutorials on every possible subject and even helpful videos, so hopefully the holey face will soon be sorted, but working on the doll has re-kindled my enjoyment of knitting and I’m seriously considering making a jumper … perhaps I’ll make a Weasley sweater for Mrs H3.

Mrs H3 is knitting too. She started making me a Slytherin scarf for Christmas about three years ago and I’m still waiting for it. She has recently moved home and is currently without television or the computer so I told her she might want to finish the scarf for something to do, a suggestion which she didn’t seem too happy with. She has promised that I’ll have it by my fiftieth birthday though – so only another five years to wait!

Photos of the doll will follow once I get him finished. Now, I wonder where I can find a pattern for angel wings?