Have I done any projects recently?

Did I knit any projects recently? I did in fact.

With the yarns from Kerry Woollen Mills I made some hand puppets. I’m always seeking projects where both sides of the fabric can show, and I felt hand puppets that can be turned inside out might be an idea, so I have done some experiments on them. I'm not quite happy with the heads yet, but problem is when I've done one I can't remember exactly how I done it; so how each head turned out had always an element of surprise. Also stitching on eyes and noses so that they look like that on both sides, and still manage to darn in the end of the threads is a bit of a challenge. Anyway, here they are:

The three on the right are the three on the left turned over.

I also made a little handbag with the Kerry Woollen Mills yarns to see how they felt. It finally turned out smaller than expected, but I still find the result quite cute and funny. The inside of the bag is shown as well here:

My mum was visiting - it's now already a month ago. We had a lovely time and it was nice knitting together. She also came with me to Knitaholics anonymous, the knitting group in Carrick-on-Shannon. It's "a free monthly meeting of knitters, cocheters, stitchers and folk who'd like to learn", and it meets every second Sunday of each month from 1 to 3 pm in the cafe of Carrick cineplex. I nearly forgot to mention that the group featured in one of the back issues of Simply Knitting.

My mum was impressed by the knitting method common in Ireland which is unfamiliar to her, whilst she impressed with her speed of sock knitting. Myself was at my first sock. After she was knitting so many socks for me in the past I took the chance this year to ask her to teach me how she does it. And I really got into it after a while, especially the straight parts became easy routine. Here is my pair finished. It looks exactly like my mum's socks, but I'm not cheating, I've done them myself:

Because the pattern swatches are still my main knitting activity, mum knitted a cushion for me whilst she was here in one of my colour stitch patterns. Two different colour sequences were used for each side:

The cushion was knitted with Traub yarns, and that reminded me that I haven't shown an earlier project knitted with the same yarns. It's a larger bag, also felted:

I will stick with the swatches for some time now I'm afraid. I've only recently discovered a new method that makes it possible to arrive at several new stitch patterns from each of those I already have. So there's much left to explore here.