Owl Keep Your Cup Cozy

Please allow me to introduce my very first finished knitting project, the owl coffee cup cozy!  (For those not on ravelry, here's a link to the pattern on their blog.)  Okay yeah I know, it's a bit complicated for a first project, but I've also got a cable knit scarf in the works, which taught me most of the stuff I needed for this.  But scarves take forever and I banged this off in an evening, so it beat it out for first place. 

I used some the left over blue wool from this toque (Cascade 220, and I still have some left over!), and some black wool for the eyes.  I didn't like the googly eyes the designer suggested and didn't have any buttons even remotely the right size, so I figured that french knots would be best.


As you might've guessed from yesterdays post, knitting in the round with dpn (double point needles) is hard.  I will admit, it did get easier as I went, but my goodness look at that pointy mess!  There's FIVE NEEDLES in there! 

The only real problem is that the cozy is a bit big.  I'm giving this to my roommate, and I'm pretty sure it'll fit her travel mug just fine, but I'll reduce the number of owls from 5 to 4 in the next cozy.  (This might've been because I used size 5 mm needles instead of 4.5 mm, but other's on ravelry have mentioned the same problem.  Maybe it's also that the wool is too heavy?)

Here's the list of skills learned (and links to the places I learned them from) in this project:

• Cable knitting (already learned from the Yukon Yarn Bomb cable knitting workshop)
• Knitting in the round
• Joining in the round (same link as above)
• Increasing a stitch
• Decreasing a stitch (sort of guessed at this by sticking my needle in two stitches instead of one)
• Binding off circular knits
• French knots

Also, I have started and plan to finish reading every post that TECHknitting has ever posted, because my goodness that woman knows her knitting!

So...think I'm ready to start this sweater yet?