belated happy returns

So yesterday was my blog's first birthday, and bad blogger that I am, I did nothing to celebrate it. This is partly because I have nothing new to show, since my exams started yesterday and, in theory at least, I have been concentrating more on those than on knitting. But I realise that there are plenty of things that never made it onto here at their creation, as they were all pre-blog, and so it is one of those that I will add now in belated celebration of my blog-i-birthday. (That looked sort of Welsh.) Voici Rhubarb and Framboise, two of my very favourite ever creations:

Rhubarb (on the left) came first, and was a present for my sister because she kept complaining that she didn't have any kind of cuddly inanimate object in Paris. Then when my mother met him she declared he couldn't possibly be happy without a girlfriend, which is how Framboise came to be. Fortunately they got on very well right from the start, and even fell in love (as you can see). They are quite self-sufficient - they have a fondness for all kinds of pink and red food (they are like flamingoes in that they have to work to maintain their colour), tabasco sauce and raspberry jam being their absolute favourites, and they happily help themselves whenever nobody is looking. They don't have an especially large vocabulary: 'schmoo' is about all they have ever learnt to say, but they don't mind. That dastardly mother of mine suggested hopefully, shortly after the creation of Framboise, that they might start having babies next, but so far we have managed to avoid this happening. Perhaps once I am freed from exams once and for all this might change.