Various Gifts...

... that I had sitting around while spending some time with my camera. Nevermind that I didn't take the time to photograph a complete stocking when I finished it. Anyway.

First: My mom's shawl. I started with a pattern from Interweave's holiday edition. Then I decided I didn't want to follow the pattern -- a bad habit of mine. So I frogged it. And wrote my own pattern. It's not a great pattern, but it was one I could complete in the day and a half my mother was out of town. It's made of a mohair/wool/acrylic blend that has been sitting in my house for much longer than I've been knitting. I was pretty pleased to be able to use it on something for my mother.

Also, small project: stocking ornament number 16. Nice, quick, and easy. But I definitely found it a bit repetetive after stocking 10... I think I have three more to make, too, by the end of the year.

Merry Christmas!

And a happy new year. In honor of receiving lovely gifts today, I want to make it part of my New Year's resolution to always have something for someone else on the needles. By that, I mean a specific object for a specific person. I have a habit of making things and thinking "oh, I'm sure I can give this to someone" and then liking them and keeping them. The thing is I really don't need any more hats, scarves, gloves, or knitted items in general, and I love knitting for other people. This way, I will spend time thinking about all the people I care about as I make the item for them. So I will come up with some vague ideas that I can elaborate on later.

• Baby items for all the wonderful babies I know
• Graduation gifts for many of my classmates - dishcloths, pillows, blankets?
• Lacy items for my mother
• Dishrags for my grandmother -- for some reason, this is the only knitted item she is interested in receiving.
  
• Scarf for my teacher who wanted to steal the one I've been wearing this winter
• Socks forfriend who said he's always wanted a pair of hand-knit socks
• Eye-masks for people I'll be travelling with this summer (always great for plane trips)
• Leggings for friend who has been requesting them for ages. I have yet to find the correct pattern to use.
  

Any other ideas?

Holiday Headbands

Well, I've covered a significant portion of my holiday knitting, and I'm relatively sure that I'll actually get everything completed and delivered in a timely manner! This is all thanks to the fact that I've decided to give all my female friends the same easy-to-make thing.

I designed this pattern to be simple enough to make in a couple hours. If I worked steadily, it took roughly 2 hours per headband, counting sewing it up. Another advantage of doing something small like this is that I was able to work completely out of yarn from my stash, so it certainly didn't cost me much. It was really fun to see how different yarns worked in this pattern. My favorites were made of dark, solid colors in 100% wool. They showed the cable well (which this cream doesn't) and had the necessary elasticity.

I've produced 22 of these. I gave about eight away today, and they were well-received. Of course, everyone had seen me knitting them for the past few weeks -- I'm not sneaky with my gift-giving -- so there was no element of surprise, but everyone was still pleased. I'm looking forward to sending the next batch into the world tomorrow!

Well, here I am.

As I sit here with my new knitting blog, I ask myself, do I really need to start another journal that I'll struggle to keep up-to-date? That I'll use to ramble and create pointless posts that the reader would have to be out of their mind to complete?

Absolutely!