First of all, I'd like to show you two cuties:

Mr Apricot, blending in with the blankets. What a sweety. He was mewing at me the whole time to quit taking his photo and give him a pat. He likes to think he's big and mean and tough, but he's not.

And

A huge hairy spider we've dubbed "Spideyman". Obvious, I know. He's currently hiding behind a box of Pepsi Max in the kitchen. I hope he doesn't scurry across the floor when people are viewing the house before the auction today.

What do you mean s/he's not cute?

Lastly, the knitting!

I finished this hat

from Vogue Knitting's Caps and Hats.

Here's the hat shown from the top. In the book it has a tassel, but I left that off. It's such a confection already that I thought adding a tassel was just going too far.

I really love the Vogue Knitting on the Go books. I'm after Caps and Hats Two, and the Chunky Hats and Scarves books next.

Finally, here's what I'm working on now!

This is a test-knit of a Shetland Kerchief pattern from Beeton's Book of Needlework from the mid to late 1800's, which you can download from project Gutenberg here.

It's an amazing book, I'm planning on working up a collection of the knitting patterns once I finish the Home Work collection.

I will be changing this pattern slightly though. So far I've corrected the edging pattern as it had many errors. If you look at the red lines in the first repeat of the pattern you can see that the zig-zag effect went the wrong way because half that line of instructions was missing and I didn't get it right first go

:-)

I fixed that, but I think the whole thing would be much nicer if the even numbered rows were knit, not purled, to make it a garter stitch lace. I also don't like the "slip 1, yo" sat the beginning of some rows on the shaped edge. I'm thinking of knitting the 1st sts and putting the yarn over right on the edge, but I'll have to test how that looks since some increases are worked into the yo's on some rows.

Well, our house goes up for auction in 2 hours and 21 minutes so I'm off to knit and panic!