The Big Sneezy

The cold rages on, and I am so flipping happy that it's the weekend. Winter arrived quite suddenly today in the form of about 10 cm. of snow. Naturally, I had taken the car in for an oil change just yesterday, and I had contemplated bringing the snow tires along to get them put on, but Mat talked me out of it: "I figure we've got at least another couple of weeks before we'll need them," he said to me. Foolish boy.

But then, I'm the one who listened to him, so I'm actually the bigger fool there.

The annual downtown Christmas walk happened tonight. I didn't make it through the whole walk because it was cold and windy, but I enjoyed the little bit I saw: a Salvation Army brass quartet, later joined by a piper; a guy roasting chestnuts on an open (propane) fire; 20% off at the yarn store...I was good, though, and only bought one skein of yarn. (Dream in Colour Classy in Wisterious.) The chestnut--my first--was very good, though.

I have been meaning to share this project for a while, as I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. A while ago, back when I had borrowed GirlTuesday's spinning wheel, I turned this:

into this:

Like most of my handspun, it looked just fine in the skein and seemed pretty content to stay that way. Then, I was given a beautiful handmade teapot (with matching cream and sugar set) by Grrly as a wedding gift, and all of a sudden, my handspun knew exactly what it was meant to become:

The pattern is Baby it's cold outside, written by my friend Trisha. I had to adapt the pattern because of the Asian-style handle on my pot, but this worked out quite well for me since it meant that I got to knit it in the round. I did a buttonhole for the spout, and used ribbon to lace everything up. It works extremely well--I think I need to make matching cozies for my mugs.