Wednesday Wonders: Giant Skeleton

 Quick one today.  I hope!

In our neighborhood there is a family who has a 10 or 12 or 15-foot skeleton on their front lawn.  This skeleton showed up in the fall for the first time and was duded up for Halloween. Shortly afterwards, early in November, he became a Pilgrim.  So very cool.  Then Christmas he was a Santa with a Naughty and Nice list with the names of children in the neighborhood which their parents had supplied.  So very cool.

Here he is today:

May I say I do think this is rather fun!  I saw the creator of this icon as he was dressing up for Thanksgiving and asked if the family was going to carry on through the year.  He said they were going to do their best.  I think that is admirable and a good way to get their money's worth out of that skeleton, which had to be a significant outlay...plus it gives all the neighbors and their visitors a smile.

Knitting Today: Pumpkins!

 Many years ago a granddaughter said to me that I should decorate for holidays. Finally I am doing a little decorating.

There is a pattern called Velvet Pumpkins, so named because of the Bernat Velvet yarn which is a bulky weight yarn. This yarn was not available in a store near me so I chose other yarn.

Here is what I made.  So far...

This a mini pumpkin, a small pumpkin, and a medium pumpkin.  There is also a large pumpkin but I have not yet made that.

The yarn for mini and small is:

This orange yarn was held with just one strand.

These two yarns were held together for the medium pumpkin.  I used US #8 knitting needles for the knitting.  The stem on the medium pumpkin had an add-in of some chocolate brown I Love This Cotton that I got for another project that I have not yet started.

When you look at the original knitting pattern you will see that those pumpkins in that Bernat Velvet yarn have definite lobes in them.  I felt that the delineation in these plain pumpkins was good enough.  They are now sitting on our dining room table for us to admire and think about autumn every time we  walk by.

The pattern states that it will take about two hours to knit a pumpkin.  That may be true. I did not manage to time the knitting.