Rainy Day Posting

Been feeling contemplative and sleepy today, with the grey sky (there you are Bay Area winter!) and rainy, chilly air.  (Nothing like the winters the rest of you are facing, I know.)  So I thought I'd share a few things that have been going on with me. 

First up: a belated christmas/something present that's almost done.  I need to figure out pom poms, and then wrap it up and send it off. 

Made with more of the lovely Shelter yarn.  I really wish there were a few more colors. I think I've hit pause on my dream of a giant scarf for now--I just can't settle on any of the colors.  Maaaybe the red.  But no rush. 

I know this should go on another blog, but I'm going to wait till I have a prettier picture.  This was the first trial of my new baking stone.  Way to break it in, right?  Since then, I've used tons of cornmeal, and everything has been beautiful, but too beautiful to not eat quickly.

These aren't knitting either, but they do fall under the other craftiness category.  Pillows!  I think this will be more impressive once I have a bunch more, which hopefully will happen tomorrow.  Just need to get some pillows to actually cover first.

And finally, the thing I couldn't stop myself from starting, even though I have other knitting commitments that I should focus on first. I had to do a  bunch of trial runs before I could settle down for the real thing, but I think I'm nearly ready to go.  So pretty!  So exciting!

elf! and baby elf!

I don't have a better picture of these hats, but it's still fair to say that they were my most successful Christmas knitting, both for the reaction they inspired and because I actually finished them on time. It's the Pointy Elf Hat, from More Last Minute Knitted Gifts, a pattern that I can't recommend enough. I used Blue Sky Cotton held doubled and added the stripe, but otherwise knit as instructed for the toddler and baby sizes. I wish I had film to share with you of my nephew's reaction but it went something like this:

T: "Elf! And baby elf! On parade!" [marching, while urging his sister to crawl along behind him]

He then proceeded to wear the hat for the rest of the evening, despite the fact that he seems to usually be too hot and want to wear less clothing. My niece, who couldn't express herself quite so verbally, seemed equally delighted upon seeing herself in a mirror with a pointy thing on the top of her head and burst into laughter each time she was held up to a mirror. Considering that each hat took me about 2 hours, I thought that the pattern's time-spent-knitting-to-amusement-of-recipient-children ratio was pretty good.

running out of yarn hasn't stopped me yet

I actually finished some of my Christmas gifts by Epiphany this year, largely because I didn't put as many on my list as last year. (We'll see about some of those last-year-gifts getting done by Valentine's Day, okay? Okay?) But I didn't manage to finish these two in time to gift them in person, which really disappointed me. Luckily, the recipients didn't mind as much.

For my grandma, I was so inspired by this cowl that I forgot that I have a really hard time finishing garter stitch log cabin squares.
Albers Cowl, knit in various colors of Plucky MCN fingering. Ravelry details here. I ran out of several colors of yarn, leading to interesting (and time-consuming) modifications. I am glad that my grandma likes it as much as she does, because that was the only thought that got me through it.

For my grandpa, I knit the popular Turn A Square pattern out of Plucky Cashmere fingering. (Ravelry details here) I had to modify the pattern for the thinner yarn and then had to modify again when it became clear that I was going to run out of Rustica, the brown yarn. But every grandpa loves an ombre, right?
(And thanks to both my parents for modeling these before they were mailed off. After my dad modeled the hat, it was strongly suggested that he probably needed a similar one to line his Christmas hat from last year... I accepted this as the price for asking someone to model cashmere and did knit a liner out of the leftover blue yarn, but got no pictures before sewing it in the old hat and returning it to my dad.)