Ornaments for the holidays

After my return from sabbatical, I wound up with a fair bit of leftover yarn from my office decorations:

what to do with it all?  Perhaps a little upcycling was in order…and some holiday/thank you gifts as well for my co-workers…

For the person who instigated the whole thing, I knit up a wee weasley-esque sweater.  Knits up in the round just like a real sweater!
Pattern: Zimmer-Minis – great pattern for seamless sweater ornaments complete with several different types of yoke.  The author of the pattern thoughtfully provided charts for each letter of the alphabet to make the duplicate stitching that much easier 🙂

Unfortunately, the sweaters do take a fair bit of time, and I was not going to be able to complete one for each person in my group before the holidays, so the hunt was on for another ornament…preferably something relatively quick to make and that would look good in the colors I had to work with…

After perusing a bunch of patterns, I thought these might fit the bill.
Pattern: Super Stars Amigurumi – they were cute, and they worked up fast, but they took quite a bit of tugging at their corners to get them to all look star-like.  Several could have passed for five-petaled flowers…The work on these didn’t go for naught though – these small stars are now festooning my small holiday tree 🙂
Luckily for me, one of my online friends happens to do crochet designs and had been working on reverse-engineering some stars she had seen elsewhere.  She was kind enough to post her results and share her pattern 🙂
Pattern: Granny Star – these work up quickly and once I completed a couple of them, I had the pattern memorized.  I opted to go with a ch3 rather than a ch2 on the last round as that resulted in better points on the stars.  My coworkers seemed to enjoy these ornaments, and I received several photos of my stars on trees – it’s always nice to find that a handmade gift is appreciated and cherished!