Some pre-Christmas gift sewing

October is, I realise now, a dress rehearsal for Christmas. 7 birthdays.....
This year there were one or two gifts that I could not find in the shops - oven gloves to coordinate with a Birthday girl's new kitchen:

A beanbag at a price I was prepared to pay (58 quid for a bean bag! - for that amount you could buy a proper chair!!!)

For the oven gloves I adapted a pattern from this handy book which is a lot better than its predecessor which did not live up to its name (make != embellish).  The bean bag was a slightly adapted version of this pattern, instead of the velcro closing I inserted an overlapped zip.