But still no sweater in sight. It was a fruitful vacation, though in truth I took very little time off from work. I just spent the holidays sequestered with DVDs and various knitting projects, chief among them a pair of socks on a magic loop. Oh how exciting!

I'm up to the cuffs now, so I hope I don't lose steam. I also made myself a pair of furry slippers as a brief diversion. I used a pattern for Pocketbook Slippers--called that because off the foot each one looks like a little handbag.

Hairy slippers

As a gift for a friend I tried my hand at cables for the first time, and it's true -- cables are way easier than they look. I'm so glad I made this hat; it has completely obliterated my fear of cables and opened a door to loads of exciting projects. Finished cables are insanely satisfying stacked up against how easy they are to knit. I've been sitting on all this red Cascade 220 -- now I know what to do with it!

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While I can't say that I've made much headway on this year's gifts, I certainly have been productive in the knitting sense. Four pieces of head wear (not all pictured), half a shrug and a sweater also half done just in the past couple of months--not bad. Basically all the little projects have been brief diversions--pick-me-ups!--from the lace cardigan that will likely drag on into the new year. Starting and finishing a project in a short amount of time is reeeeaaaaalllly satisfying, so it's easy to justify the knitterly tangent

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A baby hat ...

Baby beanie

... made from the same yarn as the ol' Calorimetry. Super soft! Knit in the round on size 8 DPNs, 2x2 rib. I cast on 64 stitches and knit rather loosely until it looked to be a good size for a little guy. I love this yarn -- it both hugs & gives.

And now, back to the cardigan.

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Tweed raglan

There's lots on the needles these days. After ripping out the pretty red v-neck sweater I'd been working on since New Years or so, I was somewhat reluctant or sheepish or something about starting another sweater. To date, I've only finished a single wearable sweater, but I've come quite close (2...) on all but one of my failed attempts (...out of 3).

I really love Stefanie Japel's sweater-making style, so she's pretty much my inspiration. I'm not using a pattern for this piece, but it's extremely simple. There will be no fancy shaping apart from the raglan increases at the shoulders. I thought about working in some darts in the bust area, but that's a little too advanced for me right now to just wing it.

You'll notice a rich raspberry hank of Cascade 'Pastaza' lying there -- that will be for contrasting neck/arm/waist ribbing. The main yarn being a tweed has lots of little colored flecks, but more subtle are the fine, bright threads of almost fuchsia throughout. It's very pretty even though I'm not generally a pink/magenta-wearing sort of girl.

Vertical eyelet lace

Rust orange is also a bit of a departure for me color wise, but nevertheless I picked up a sweater's worth of Knit Picks' 'Gloss' in Pumpkin back in the spring to make Knitty's "Thermal".

I ended up losing interest in that pattern, so having seen a nice lace cardigan pattern named for the inimitable (try as some might) Katherine Hepburn I decided that was how I'd like to use this yarn.

Here you see the start of my lace swatch. It's called Vertical Eyelet Rows, and it's very easy. I am certainly capable of lace work, but I want to keep it basic for such a large project as this will be my first pattern that will require lots of seaming.

I will have to break down and figure out kitchener stitch it seems. I reeeeaaaallllly hate seaming, but for the look I want it is imperative that I learn. And how can I really call my self a knitter without properly knowing how to sew up seams? Of course, there will be a great many firsts for me on this project: shoulders and tubular cast-on to name a couple--both self-inflicted.

Crunchy baby hat

And to wrap up, I've begun a hat for my friend's 2-year-old son. The design is one she saw on Etsy, and since the seller had no plans to make more of the sold-out hat, my friend asked if I could make it for her.

It just so happened that I had in my stash the very yarn and colorway she wanted--seems fated, no? I love a yarn challenge, so I swatched to find the right stitch pattern (not all that visible in this pic) and the gauge for size 9 needles, sketched the basic arc of the journey, mapped out the decreases and have left the final bits to pure chance and experimentation.

It's such a pretty yarn the Noro 'Kureyon' with its various shades of peacock feathers. And with that I'll say bye-bye!

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I haven't really been knitting that long -- a couple of years -- and while my technique has improved immensely my grasp of reality is shaky as ever. Luckily, I think I'm not alone in this -- it appears that a lot of knitters get all pumped up in the summer months about what they'll be knitting as gifts for the holidays, and then wind up knocking out a series of hats and scarves at the last minute if we're determined. Ah, delusions of grandeur! It's not that I'm not productive, I just wind up re-knitting or I get sidetracked ... or both.

So, yes, I'm in scramble mode at the moment. For the past week or so my living room has been strewn with yarn and sundry items for gift-making, not to mention a few WIPs and FOs. I actually had completed a cute little shrug for my sister this past summer, but it wasn't quite right. So I sat scrutinizing it for a bit trying to decide whether I'd re-do it, and if so how, or just knit something else. A hat seemed more likely to see the light of day, at least before Christmas, so I dug out that chunky handspun (posted earlier) and embarked upon a hat, a floppy beret perhaps. Pattern? Nooooo.

I knit up a square in stockinette, and then did a few rows of 1x1 ribbing. I stitched up the seam about halfway, and out of curiosity pulled it over my head to find that it was tight on the noggin. Figuring that there was no way for this to turn into the hat I had originally envisioned I turned the half-hat upside down. Now I had a sort of medieval-looking cap with full ear coverage. So with this inkling of inspiration I frogged the part I had seamed, and put the square on smaller DPNs and continued in the round. After having closed up what I thought was the top of the hat, I tried it on again flipped the top of the hat to the back of my head. Lo and behold, a fancy bonnet!

This is lab work, here, people!

My join had been a bit sloppy, so I needed some kind of finished edge to class things up. I snooped around free patterns online and found a simple knitted flower. Perfect. I twisted up a couple of cords for the ear flaps and I tell you it's divine. I am in love with this bonnet. I hope my sister loves it, too. My roommate thinks it's weird, but he concedes that if he saw a girl wearing it, he'd think it was really cute. I like blurring that line of weird & cute, so, like, um, mission accomplished!

Ladies bonnet

Bonnet rear view

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