A very sad thing happened on Christmas Day. My raggedy man left me.

If you are a certain sort of person, you know who I'm talking about. That's right, I speak of The Doctor, specifically the 11th Doctor, who said goodbye to all of us devotees on Christmas Day.

So let me take this opportunity to let my Geekdom shine: Goodbye Matt Smith, we will miss you.

And in honor of your departure, I've decided to make this:

Yes it's Tardis mittens! Or, rather, Tardis mitten. Also I haven't got around to doing the thumb yet. But you get the idea.

Now, this is really my first try at modifying a knitting pattern and I guess I'll have to confess to not being completely happy with the result. These mittens were based on a Ravely pattern for a pair of Tardis socks, and so it doesn't really fit my hand that well, partly because it is, you know, a sock and partly because I used a sport weight yarn instead of a fingering yarn (the fingering yarn didn't come in Tardis blue).

Here's what it looks like on:

See how there's all that give at the wrist? Don't like that. But I'm not sure if I should do the second one just like it so they will match, or just start over and do two more. I'm pretty sure I could get rid of that give in V2 but I don't know if I want to devote that much time to it. Sigh.

Otherwise pretty cute, yeah?

I'm not going to say that my New Year's resolution is to update this blog more, because there's probably no better way to make sure that I hardly ever update this blog during 2014.

If you want to know if I'm still alive, you can find me on my other blog: Travel by Stove.

But I did want to make sure I carve out plenty of time for crafting and sewing this year. So I started off the New Year (on New Year's Day, actually), by making something simple. Because someone told me once a long time ago that you should spend New Year's Day doing the things you want to devote your whole year to, and I thought that making and finishing a simple project would be a good way to fit my crafting resolution in with a little bit of organizing and time spent with my family (my other two resolutions).

So I decided to tackle this ugly thing.

It's my heating pad, or rather the ugly blue cover for my heating pad, complete with "Do not put in microwave" warning label. This thing is so ugly that my house cleaners once threw it in the garbage because they thought it was trash.

So I fished around in my stash until I found some cute coffee cup fabric (sooo me) and then I just did a rough measure of my heating pad. I cut out the fabric, keeping a fold at the bottom and stitched a seam at the top and then down the sides. Then I made a buttonhole and added a wooden button I had on hand. Total time: less than an hour. And now my heating pad looks like this:

Oh that's so much better! Happy New Year!