The One With All the Colours and All the Hats!

Any pinterest fans here? I know there are a few from the knitting group who love it (me being one of them). It's easy to loose hours of time there. The reason I bring this up is because of this stunningly beautiful quilt made by Magdalena. As I mentioned before she has been making quilts for each of her children. This one belongs to the lovely Zuzanna (and I'm not at all jealous). This is the sort of thing I would see on pinterest and pin it with the knowledge that I would never be able to do something like that. It's the rainbow colours that I love plus you can't help but admire the time and effort that has gone into it. One day I will petition to be one of Magdalena's children.

I also had to show you the back too. Magda picked up the backing years ago and is an old duvet cover. It goes perfectly with the front design. Everyone admired it almost as much as the front. Magda is now making quilts on commission. Once she has a page all set up I will share it with you. Just think you could be the new owner of one of Magda's beautiful quilts.

I had mentioned before that everyone was loving the Hitchhiker scarf which Helen brought to our attention. Both Elaine and Helen finished one each. Of course I took that as an opportunity to photograph them together.

Helen's was done in shades of blue and white. Blue is one of my favourite colours so of course I loved this.

Elaine's was also in blue and white but her blues were darker with more white between it. I think it gave it a more nautical look. Very effective.

I think we have another doll knitter in the group. Janice came along with this lovely doll that she had not long finished. I didn't catch who it was for but whoever the new owner is, is very lucky. I personally love the platted hair.

Just to put as all to shame on her Christmas preparedness Margaret finished another Christmas card. I love the outdoor winter scene. It's set off by the metallic stitching round the edge. She stitched this one for her Father in Law.

 Anthea has been working on this lovely baby blanket for the last few weeks. She finished it on Tuesday. Again I love the colours. The bright blue is very much set off against the creams. Everyone also loved the edging which just brought the whole thing together. And you know us, we are all a sucker for a granny square.

So Tuesday there was our deadline for the hats for the Big Knit. Everyone was to bring along all their fancy hats and any they had finished that I had yet to collect. The week before June had given me hers in as she knew she wouldn't make it along. Sadly I never got the chance to photograph them. They were in a separate bag though and you can see them here having been photographed when I got home.

Janice managed to get a few more in and there were quite a few impressive ones in the mix. I couldn't post a photo of them without a close up of this one. It's Harry Potter!

These were all knitted by Margaret.

These hats were knitted by Ally and her friend from work, Karin.

More hats from the lovely Helen.

Last but not least we have our Isabel back and she knitted these lovely hats.

We had two wee competitions. The first was to knit the most unusual or inventive. I had everyone hang onto these hats until the last day and then we brought them all together. You can see them here on the table.

Isabel and I managed to narrow it down to our favourites (which was a task itself). We then roped in the help of Alison to choose the winner.

Finally we picked out our favourite (which was extremely difficult). Caroline won with her teapot.

You can see it here on top of an innocent drink which Helen kindly brought along. How can you not love that hat?

Margaret won for having knitted the most. She was leagues ahead of everyone else and managed to use up all of her odd balls of yarn. She knitted a whopping 260 hats. Stephanie was the closest to her with over 100. The winners received just a little prize. Chocolate, a little hook to pick up stitches and Russian Doll stitch markers.

I had thought we were only slightly behind the 1000 mark in total so a production line started and I got three more hats before the end of the night. Turns out we were more behind than I thought.

You can see all the hats collected on Tuesday alone here. Over 200 of them in that pile.

Finally, here they are all bagged up and waiting to be posted out. There are 951 in total. I think that's more than impressive. Well done ladies and thank you.

One last photo before I go. Annee, who is our friend from the management suite, has a friend who was an avid cross stitcher. No longer able to cross stitch she wanted a good home to all her supplies and Annee suggested us. As you can see it was very much appreciated. Thank you Annee and Carolyn.