Happy New Years Eve!

On my fb page this past year I kept track of all of my knitting projects. I should have done that on my ravelry profile, but I'm slower there to input projects....but whatever (as my kids say).

My last project was a plain vanilla pair of socks, in anything but a plain vanilla color. While visiting my friend in England I was admiring this yarn in a shop and she mentioned that she really likes the zauberball yarn. I'd never knit with it, but have seen it in many shops. I liked this green color and decided to give it a shot. Looking at the yarn I couldn't decide if I wanted to knit it up with a fancy pattern, or just a quick plain sock to let the yarn shine, so to speak. I decided to let the yarn shine, and I'm glad that I did. The plain Jane is a quick knit, no pattern to worry about, no fuss for holiday visiting while knitting, just knit happily away. I am happy with the end result and think they will be a favorite in my wardrobe (of odd clothes and socks). In keeping with my plan to track everything I knit this year, I finished them up this morning....a mere 16 hours before we ring in the new year.

Here is a list of my year in knitting:

11 fish hats
1 pair slippers
1 brooch
3 cowls
2 felted bags
1 felted kindle case
5 shawls
1 doll shawl
2 scarves
1 baby hat
1 baby sweater
1 beret
5 1/2 pairs socks (I ripped out that 1/2 of a pair)
2 vests (one child sized one grown up sized)
1 doll sweater
and about 1/2 of a sweater for myself

Happy New Year. May 2012 bring wonderful things.

Not so much holiday knitting

I'm not a toe up sock person. I've knit a couple of pair and find the fit to be odd. I've done an afterthought heel and a short row heel and this pair has a gusset heel. I do think that the fit is better with a gusset, but we'll see. Perhaps my thoughts are colored by the fact that I knit my socks from the top down.

Holiday knitting has pretty much come to an end around here. Of course with Christmas staring me in the face about the only thing I'd be able to finish in the next couple of days would be a book mark...and only if it were a small bookmark. We've had snow days around here and some delayed starts to the school days. I have had my girl child at home with me the past couple of days, which really throws a wrench into things. She loves to stand next to me coughing and hacking and asking if she can help. Only from afar.

Happy Holidays to whoever may see this post. Enjoy!!

Those odd skeins

One of the LYS's I visit on occasion has an "orphan" basket of odd skeins near the check out. These are usually discounted 15 or 20%. Often, being a lys and all, these are very nice skeins that just happen to not have enough yardage to pull off a very big project. Often these are skeins that do not have enough yardage to be featured in a "One Skein Project" book. You just don't see a whole lot of patterns dedicated to that odd 50 gram 195 yard skein of sock yarn. Faced with a couple of these "50 gram not enough yardage for more than one sock" beauties I decided that I would find something to knit with them. Something useful, something to throw into the one small skein pattern pool, which is how I came up with my "Dainty Chevron Cowl", which I do plan to figure out how to publish as a pdf instead of how it is here as a blog post.

So I dug through the orphaned skeins and found a lovely skein of some Mochi stuff. I'd never knit with it but a friend loves the stuff and soon will have a lovely cowl of my own (since I wrote up the pattern and have knit several of the cowls I thought it might be nice to have one of my own).

My limited Christmas knitting is done. I don't knit a lot of gifts. I find that knitting gifts is a complicated thing. If people don't knit they may not appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into the project. Then there are those who think that the whole home made gift thing is a way of being "cheap" (quite the opposite actually). My very own mother will say "but why would I knit you something? You knit beautifully and can knit anything that you'd like" (but I can't knit the hand knit gift from you, my most precious knitted items are not the ones that I've knitted for myself, but the ones that are gifted to me). If anyone besides myself reads this post, you and I both know that hand made gifts are lovely (and perhaps I've just been lucky, but I've appreciated every hand made gift I've received).

Happy Friday blogland. I didn't think I'd enjoy having my work day rescheduled today, but it's been nice to slow down a bit....even if I should be doing the holiday craziness!