Witty Little Knitter

And here I'm again failing to think of one. Without the 'likeable' I would have said Felice from James Barclay's Ascendants of Estoria-books. She makes a great villain because you can understand her reasons for her hatred of the main characters (quasi-immortal teenagers with powerful magical powers in a world where nobody else has proper magical powers? What could possibly go wrong?) but you still have a hard time justifying her actions (cutting throats of children is just generally speaking...bad) so I hate her but still think she's an awesome villain.

In A Song of Ice and Fire there are a lot of likeable characters that are morally...dark gray but I wouldn't call any of the 'proper' villains likeable.

There are of course a lot of sympathetic murderers in crime-novels (in Mankell's The Fifth Woman or George's Well Schooled in Murder or A Suitable Vengeance) but I'm not sure if murderers really qualify for that question.