Thursday, December 6, 2012

Done! And Happy Holidays!

First things first: I managed to finish my NaKniSweMo sweater on the morning of November 25. It was blocked and I was wearing it on November 29.



I'm pretty happy with it. Is it my favorite sweater? No. But I'll definitely wear it. I have a khaki dress I think will go perfectly with it.

So, then I blinked my eyes and it was suddenly December. What the heck?! When did that happen? 

As I have mentioned before, Purdue does a little thing called "24-hour Library" during prep week and exam week every semester. If you follow that link, you'll see what I accomplished during Spring 24-hour Library. In December, it's a great opportunity to get caught up on (or actually start...) Christmas knitting. This year, I am only knitting for two people: my daughter and my niece, Chloe. 

Tori fell in love with the Tank Girl Socks in the book "Knits for Nerds." She doesn't have any idea who Tank Girl is, but she loves the socks. So, I shall accommodate. 


That picture was taken yesterday morning around 4:30 am. By 8am this morning, they looked like this:

(That isn't really blue, it's more of a turquoise. And, now that I'm looking at the picture, I wish I'd have made the stripes mirror images...oh well.) If you are a knitter and you've actually seen the pattern, you'll notice that I'm not really following it at all, except that I'm using their charts. These socks are toe-up. The pattern is written for top-down. I'm knitting these using Cat Bordhi's Riverbed Master Pattern as the basic sock and inserting the color chart from the Tank Girl socks. The yarn is Brown Sheep Nature Spun Sport. I was limited to stock on hand at River Knits because I didn't want to wait for something to be ordered. As a result, there's no green, but I substituted orange, which I'm perfectly happy with. So far, so good! 

Chloe, on the other hand, is seven years old. She has an American Girl type of doll that she just LOVES. So, I'm going to make matching sweaters for her and her doll. I did the same thing last year for my other niece, Abby. Her reaction was amazing. You'd have thought she'd died and gone to heaven while riding a unicorn on a rainbow ramp. 

I'm going to use the same patterns (February Lady, adapted for a child's size, and February Doll Sweater). Chloe's favorite colors are Pink and Purple, so I'll be using those instead of green and blue. Abby's sweater took me 5 days, and the doll sweater took about 2 days. So, I don't feel too bad waiting to start them until the socks are done. 

Are you making any Christmas gifts? I think it would be really fun to do a Handmade Christmas one year, where all the gifts are (what else?) hand made. Of course, I thought of this around Halloween, which really doesn't give enough time for that kind of thing. Maybe next year.... but we'll need to make the decision in January, I think.