Panda Pillows

A while back I stumbled upon some dish towels at Anthropologie that had the Marimekko panda design. They were on clearance, but still expensive for dish towels. Instead of thinking of them as dish towels, I thought of them as fabric and bought two. Originally I had some sort of bag-making plan in mind, but it never fully developed, and the towels then languished with the rest of my fabric collection for a few years.

Until suddenly I had a need (or a want, more accurately) for some smallish pillows, and thought the towels could work.

I love them. It's the best use of the towels I can think of, although a bag would have been pretty cool.

I made them envelope-style for easy removal and cleaning.

Snail hat

I just finished this cute little "snail" hat from 2 balls of Diakeito Diamusee yarn. I bought the yarn years ago at some sale where I just couldn't resist the beautiful colors, but had no plans for it. I decided to make this hat to show off the pretty color changes, and I think it worked out well.

The pattern is free but in Japanese. It's mostly just a chart (with non-standard symbols, as far as I can tell), but heathermione wrote out the instructions on Ravelry. It's a very simple concept:

Knit a parallelogram:



Then sew it into a tube and close up the hole at the top. That's where I ran into some trouble...closing up that hole at the top is hard since there's no decreasing first, and mine still has a small hole at the top.



But I think it's a pretty cute hat, even with the hole. Here's the standard awkwardly-posed self-taken hat photo:



Ravelry link