Last finished items of 2016

I hope you all had a Happy Christmas and enjoyed the New Year celebrations.  It was a bit full on here (as usual) and I worked my usual shifts on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.  Don't tell my husband, but I didn't mind that much as it was quite nice to get away from the excitement at home, especially as by the time we'd finished putting up the tree and the decorations, the downstairs of the house was looking a bit like Santa's Grotto!  We had a quiet New Year's Eve and all the decorations except for the outside lights were taken down, packed away and the boxes put back in the loft on 1 January.

I did manage to finish off a few things before the year's end:

Plain socks in Scheepjes Invicta Everest (I think).  A yarn I'd not used before and, whilst it's ok, it's nothing special, to be honest and I'm not sure about the striping sequence.  It would make a good stripy scarf though and it's a reasonably priced yarn.

Thicker socks in Regia Adventure Color 6ply.  Plain socks again (no point in doing anything fancy when the yarn's already patterned).  I used a 2.75mm needle for these and I think they used 100g of the 150g ball, so I've got to think of what to do with the rest of it as it's a shame to throw away one-third of a ball.  I'll have a search on Ravelry for pattern ideas.  These socks are very comfy and will be useful for wearing with my new ankle-length wellies (a Christmas present from my in-laws) when walking Jess in colder weather.

Hitchhiker scarf.  This is the second time I've knitted this pattern and probably not the last.  The yarn's some of my hadspun.  I bought a bag of pencil roving 'waste' from World of Wool and for this 180g skein, I pulled off random lengths and spun two bobbins of singles, then plyed them together to get a colourful yarn.  I wore this to our annual festive season family get-together and my brother-in-law admired it (and wore it), so I've let him keep it!

A Hitchhat (from the same designer as the Hitchhiker scarf).  This was more handspun from the same bag of pencil roving at the Hitchhiker scarf.  For this yarn though, I pulled off shortish lengths of the fibres and put them through my drum carder and made two batts, one blue-dominant and one red-dominant.  I then spun each batt into a single before plying them together, giving a heathery yarn.  I'm really pleased with how the hat came out as it's an interesting construction, knitted on the slant in four sections and then grafted together.  If I made it again, I'd probably go up a needle size as I did have to stretch it a bit when I washed it to get a bit more length.

So, that's it.  I had a fairly productive 2016, craft-wise and will do a round-up in a few days, once the girls are back at school and I'm able to get back into my usual routine.