Cold weather, warm hands

With the snow and below freezing temperatures reappearing mid-week and giving me great light to work in I have managed a couple of knitting finishes this week - a baby blanket for a friend of a friend and some cosy fingerless mittens.

The blanket was a rescue mission as the friend who was making it fell up some steps and broke her hand a week before Christmas and still can't knit, meanwhile the baby it is for keep on growing (as they do), so I just carried on with it until the yarn was used up. Easy knitting for watching TV and taking to my craft group.

The mittens are from this Really Clear pattern and I took a class at Stitch Your Art Out to help me with the techniques for knitting on lots of double-pointed needles. It is actually only a set of 5 (or 4 if you prefer) but feels like 20 when you first start! Now I shall have warm hands as I sit at my PC in our basement.

First mitt completed

Second mitt in progress

My sewing machine has not been totally ignored. I made 3 Dresden plates in varied purples for the January's Rainbow Scrap Challenge and have made progress on my remaining sub-units for my En Provence quilt.
 

I hope to get those final sub-units finished over the weekend, then I can get onto assembling the blocks.  The purple petals came from leftover fabric from En Provence.