Sparkly, Shiny Hedgehogs

Well, my Berenice sweater was finished a couple of days ago and has been washed and is now blocking.  Once it's dry, I'll take some photos and show it off.

As mentioned in a previous post, a while back I bought a couple of balls of King Cole Tinsel yarn with a view to making each of the girls a knitted hedgehog (you can see the pattern at the bottom of the page I've linked to).

The pattern said to use a 5mm needle for the tinsel part, and a 3.25mm needle for the head, but I decided to go with a 4.5mm for the body and 3mm for the head to get a firmer fabric so the stuffing wouldn't show through.

I also decided to knit it in the round rather than flat and then seaming.

The knitting was quick.  I started a purple, large-sized, hedgehog on Friday afternoon and finished it by lunchtime on Saturday.

The red one (medium) was started on Tuesday and finished on Wednesday.

I also bought a ball of pink Tinsel yarn, which will be made into another large-sized hedgehog.  I think I prefer the head/face on that one.  Because there are more stitches, the decrease rate towards the nose is different, which gives a bit more interest and pointiness to the nose.

Not that DD1 is going to be getting one; DD2 has decided they're all for her and, in fact, took both completed hedghogs (or hedgepigs as they're known in our house) to school with her today.

I used the leftovers from my Berenice sweater to sew the eyes and nose, which I think works well as pure black might have looked a bit too stark.

I've now got four more balls of King Cole Tinsel on order from Wool Warehouse as I've had a request from Pat, the lady who keeps order on DD2's taxi to and from school and hubby has asked if I'd knit one for the four-year-old daughter of friends of his as he thinks she'd like one.

In the meantime, I succumbed to Wool Warehouse's sale of Drops sock yarn in the plain colours.  I'm planning on knitting another Relax sweater as I've got (I think) eight balls of variegated sock yarn I bought at Lidl a good while back and can use some of the beige I bought from WW to put in some stripes to make it a bit longer than the last one I made (that ended up with shorter-than-I'd have liked sleeves).

I've not actually got a great deal on the needles at the moment.  The beginnings of a hat and a blanket that I'll show you another time as I think I've gone on enough for now.

I might cast on the pink hedgehog later, although knitting at a much smaller tension than usual is a bit hard on the hands.