Oliphant Kat: With A Little Help From My Friends

I've been blessed to have the most amazing people in my life, and their support of my hobbies has been beyond belief (having a conversation with someone who's sitting there knitting must be a somewhat off-putting experience). As I've said before, my family's always put a lot of importance on presents, so with Christmas in December and my birthday in February the new year always sees me with a lot of new stuff. This year was no exception - amongst some pretty accessories and clothes (thanks Steph!) I ended up with some awesome craft-related presents.

For my birthday, my lovely friend and soon-to-be housemate got me a new knitting book. I always find pattern books a bit hit and miss but this is more of an encylopedia than anything, and it has a stitch dictionary at the back full of cable and lace patterns that I'm just itching to try out.

I love knitting in the round. I can't stand sewing at the end of a knitting project, and circular needles mean that you just don't have to seam a sleeve or two. The only problem is that every project seems to call for a different sized needle with a different length of cable, and buying all the different combinations individually has ended up being somewhat expensive. My parents got me an interchangeable knitting set - it's from Knit Pro, and it's brilliant. There are eight different sized needles that screw on to four different lengths of cable, so effectively it's stopping me from having to buy 32 different sets of needles!

Last but definitely not least, Nick got me a new sewing machine. I can't actually express how excited I was. Up until now I've been using my mum's old one which has been a bit unreliable. My machine's from Singer, but I'm not giving a link to it because I'm too scared to Google it - my mum took one look at it and went "that looks expensive!". It's so awesome to not have to stop and unpick mistakes that the machine's made, and it has a whole range of stitches. My favourite one so far has been the overlocking stitch - it makes edges look overlocked without actually needing an overlocker.