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January 1, 2004

Hello?

Here I am!

As the holidays approached, I got into a time crunch that too often meant that I could knit or I could blog. I suppose I probably could have squeezed a few posts in here and there, but bad habits quickly become hard to break.

My end-of-2003 slackage notwithstanding, I'm back now! The Cherry Mango for Mom was a huge hit -- she wore it at our traditional Christmas Day Orphan's Brunch. Starting when I was little, my family has invited other family friends who do not have extended family in the area, to spend part of Christmas Day at our house. It has typically included a core group of about five or six other families, all of whom have children around my age. It was initally a Christmas Day Orphan's Breakfast since we little people would have the grown-ups out of bed at the crack of dawn and all of the presents opened not long after that. As we've grown up (and let our parents sleep in), the whole thing has gotten pushed back to noon, and now it's a brunch. ANYWAY, my mom wore her pink sweater and got tons of compliments -- which kept me blushing most of the afternoon.

Though I never blogged about it, I also made the Strike Vest for my dad. I used the Rowan Wool Cotton in Deepest Olive, and I (like Alison) made the V-neck version. Because my dad is a big, barrel-chested Scot, I had to add some stitches to the XXL size to make it broad enough. It's possible that I over-did it a little bit, but there are just too many stitches in that dang vest for me to even consider ripping. My dad loved it -- I was really worried that he wouldn't like it, but he kept asking everybody on Christmas day if they had "seen my vest?" He made sure that I sewed one of my "Hand Made by Shannon" labels into it, too. Awww....

Remember Henry's cute little sweater and socks (another picture here)? There's good news and bad news. The good news is that Henry (and his parents) came to visit a few weeks before Christmas. The bad news is that I took one look at baby Henry and realized that the sweater was going to be much too small. It was about a week before Christmas. when I started ripping! I realized that part of the problem is that my gauge had been off, so I went up a sweater size and a needle size. It wasn't done in time for Christmas but the good news is that it will be done before I see him this weekend. (Bad news? I'll be sacrificing the socks and harvesting the yarn from them in order to finish it. *sigh*)

So there's the wrap-up of the most important Christmas knitting projects. The hand-knit dishcloths were also a hit with the older woman who rents me a parking space (and, I recently learned, is/was a knitter!) and I still have one left-over Christmas scarf to finish. Then I'm getting back to something for ME ME ME!

Posted by shannon at January 1, 2004 2:55 PM | For related posts: Knit Gringa, Knit!

Comments

Posted by: alison at January 2, 2004 8:15 AM

Posted by: Lynette at January 3, 2004 4:30 PM