Just a quick break from the knitting to post a few photos. I finished some things..
(The hat yarn is Knit One Crochet Too's Paintbox, and I will never use it again, ever. I broke the yarn more times than I can count - it was barely spun in many places.)
A wee ornament for the boy's mom (she likes to get an ornament from her family members each year, and I'm basically family by this point.) This came as a free kit from the Loopy Ewe with one of my orders.
This won't be finished in time, but that's okay. By this point, my mom is pretty much used to getting socks late. I'm sure I can finish it up while we're at her house later this week.
The sister in law scarf.. ugh. I got to the second skein, found it to be full of knots and basically unusable. Also, the scarf was going to be way too short, so on Saturday I drove out to East Aurora to find replacement yarn for a new scarf. Ta da!
Pretty, cheap, and lots of it! The scarf is going pretty quickly, also, so I'm sure I'll finish it in time - I won't be seeing the recipient until Thursday late afternoon.
While at the yarn shop, I accidentally bought some sock yarn too. (I couldn't just buy one skein of yarn from them, not after they'd been so helpful.)
Lastly, I got a present from Emily! Yay! Along with some awesome tea and the most ingenious tea accessory I've ever seen, there was yarn!
And this... this I absolutely love. I've nearly ordered it so many times, and each time, Emily managed to talk me out of it without even hinting that she had gotten it for me.
Enough babble, there's knitting (and baking) to be done! Happy Xmas to all!
It's how close to xmas? Here's where things stand.
Mittens:
Another pair of Fetching. I swore I was done with them, after knitting 5 or 6 pairs last year. However, a friend lost one of hers, and was practically in tears when she told me. Sigh. At least I already had this yarn in the stash. Having learned to cable without a needle makes these go much more quickly.
An unfinished sock, on an unfinished blocker. This sock makes me happy though, I hope my mom likes them. I can't imagine why she wouldn't, although she seems awfully fond of STR, and these are just Louet Gems. I expect it'll soften up after blocking - right now, the fabric seems oddly stiff.
Lastly, the sister in law scarf. I'm not too worried about this one at the moment, since she doesn't seem to be talking to me anymore. Still, the fact that this is almost one entire ball of yarn (and I only ordered four) is disturbing. I may need to order some more if I have any hope of passing this off as a scarf, instead of a decorative washcloth.
I think this is the key to holiday knitting for me - if I can't be working on anything for myself, I have to have loads of other small projects around, so I can keep switching between them.
Now I would have to. Knit stamps! (Image borrowed from the post office website - would you prefer a blurry Photobooth version?)
I'm so bad at this. There are packages coming in the mail each day, and so far, it's all for me! I browse online to see what I should go buy at the mall.. and I find more stuff for me! This is supposed to be a time of giving, right? Not a time of buying loads of stuff for myself. I'm allowing myself one last "me" purchase today when I go to the mall, of a lipgloss set (it's really a great price, good stuff, and I did just throw away a bunch of old glosses, so I'm very low on them), and then that's it. The plan for today? Buying holiday cards, finding presents for the boy's family, heading to the gym (of course) and knitting as much as I can.
By the way, here's yesterday's mail, the yarn part of it, anyhow.
Loopy Extras! I think I'll have to make that little sock into an ornament for my tree (which I should put up this weekend).
So my sister in law got a new coat (for xmas, but she already has it, obviously), and remarked about how none of the scarves that I've made her match it at all, which is truly a shame. Now, she actually does wear the scarves I've made her, and wears them often, so a new scarf is in order. I went to a website that I shouldn't have gone to (have had problems with them before, though apparently I'm the only one who does), found some bulky black yarn that seemed decent enough, and accidentally ordered two skeins of sock yarn, to make a stripy pair of socks. The package arrived last night.
The black bulky yarn, SWTC's Gianna. I'll hold off on making any judgment about it until I've started knitting with it, but I would really prefer it if there weren't a picture of a little blonde girl on the label. It's just sort of wrong. I like yarn. I don't like children. In my world, the two stay separate. Those labels will be gone soon.
The sock yarn?
Then again, what would I do with 510 yards of sport/dk weight alpaca, in two colors? I would have loved it as stripy socks... but a stripy something else? I don't know. If I buy one more skein of another color, would that make it a usable amount, for a shrug or something? (A tri-color shrug. That might be a little much, even for me.) Meh. No idea. For now, I think it's going to sit in the stash. It's too soft to send back.
There has been very little knitting this week. The embossed leaves socks almost have a complete leg. I really need to get to work on the holiday knitting, though I do have ambitious plans for the weekend.
Hope everyone had a super Thanksgiving! I hung out with family and friends, did a tiny bit of shopping (yes, on Black Friday, but not crazy early, and I only went because I needed new gym shoes), some cooking and baking, and some knitting.
Huge chocolate chip cookies!
And a new sock. It's not for me though, it's for my mom. All that holiday knitting I said I wouldn't do this year? It's turned into a scarf for the sister in law, socks for my mom, mittens for my grandmother, socks for the aunt, fetching for a coworker, and a hat for the boy's mom, even though I swore I wouldn't knit for her again. Obviously, I've given up any hope of finishing Juno this month.
As for the holiday shopping, I'm trying to do most of that online this year, and actually got a huge chunk of it done this weekend. Hurray for me! Now the only mall traffic I have to deal with is because I live right next to a mall..
The hat. On my head. Look, it matches our couch!
Errr... did I say I was easily distracted? Yeah. Might have something of an attention span problem. However, I've decided that I want to wear Juno to the office party this year, which means it needs to be completely finished (and dry) by Dec. 14. That seems a more realistic deadline than the end of the month, anyhow.
(There are no progress photos here, because there has been no sweater progress. There has been hat progress though!)
Better photos to come tomorrow (hopefully), when I'll have better lighting. The boy has already tried to steal it from me. I used exactly half my skein of Lady Godiva to make this hat (it's the larger size, since my head is pretty big), and he suggested that I could just go and make another one for myself. Ha! Highly unlikely. We can't both be wearing the same hat, that would be sickening. Instead, I think the remaining yarn should become a pair of handwarmers. For me, of course.
Juno? What Juno? It's all about the Koolhaas here...
