Here’s the first of four posts on all of the holiday gifts I’ve made over the past month and a half. I’ve been a crazy gift-making machine lately, due to a mix of mall-hating, handmade-wanting, and uncertainty of what to gift to Rob’s family. The contents of the last two posts aren’t finished yet, my fingers are crossed that I’ll have them done in time!

Pattern: Top-down stockinette over 58 stitches with a short row heel and your standard toe (closeup here)
Yarn: Lonesome Stone Mountain Feat in Cran Brulee

Boring old stockinette socks for my mother-in-law. She loved! adored! raved! about the socks I made her last year, so she guaranteed herself a handknit gift this year.

I swatched this yarn with a few different patterns - I wanted something with textural interest, but the yarn was giving me fits:

I’m not buying variegated yarns any more. No, really, I mean it this time.

I bought the yarn during our trip last month in Boulder, at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins. It’s produced in CO - the perfect souvenir yarn! The yarn was a bit thick-and-thin in nature, and it’s definitely the beefiest yarn I’ve ever knit socks with. I’m pleased with the final result, they’ll keep Rob’s mom’s toes toasty.

SS and S was a great yarn shop, huge and inviting with tons of yarn. I did have one issue with it - I was thisclose to buying some Koigu there, but they were selling it for $14 a skein! It’s usually $12, and the highest I’d previously seen it was $13.50 at Purl. I was priced out of my dear Koigu, so sad.

Pattern: Utopia Hat
Yarn: Malabrigo in Forest

A warm, cozy hat for my brother, who lives in the cold, cold land of Buffalo. I found the pattern via Ravelry - this will become a theme this year. I do wish that the pattern listed the hat’s finished size - I had to do some swatching and ripping and reknitting to get this to work. I knit the Malabrigo very tightly on size 4 or 5 needles, and added two pattern repeats (48 stitches) to the pattern. My brother has a monstrous head, and I’m not entirely sure that this will fit him. It will likely be too short, so I didn’t weave in the top end in anticipation of some holiday frogging.

The yarn was lovely to work with, as always. I have some Manos in the stash, but I think it’s a wee bit scratchy for a gift hat.

Next up: a bevy of scarves.

Center square is complete!

Sorry about the surly photo - it’s tough photographing your own head! Also, the colors are wonky here - the photo below is much more true to color.

Pattern: Center Square, from Knitty
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk DK (teal) and Plymouth Indiecita Alpaca (blue)

This is a great beginner fair-isle pattern. My hat is a bit different from the pattern - my yarns were lighter-weight (both dk-weight-ish), so I cast on 4 additional pattern repeats to make a 20″ hat. The pattern’s final measurements are a 15.5″ hat, and the hat is streeetched out to fit.

The hat isn’t blocked, nor have I woven in the ends. I doubt that I’ll do either - this was more of a fair isle practice project than something that I made to wear. The top is a bit poofy where the corners of the decreases are (you can see a better photo of the top here), I’m not sure if that’s an issue of my gauge or larger stitch count or if will go away if I block the hat.

I think that I’ve got a grasp of two-handed fair-isle now. However, knitting continental is definitely pretty slow for me, and my gauge in continental is still a bit looser than knitting english. I really love how knitting two-handed keeps your yarns neatly separated and non-tangly. I hate tangly balls of yarn! Am I ready for the Anemoi Mittens? Maybe.

It is very difficult to photograph a black hat.

Pattern: Sherwood, from Knitty, in hat form
Yarn: Plymouth Galway, knit tightly on size 4 needles.

I really like the Sherwood pattern. Really, really like it. But you should check out the charts - that’s crazy talk! The whole sweater is charted out in one massive chart! There has to be a better way of representing what is essentially a repeating stitch pattern.

In any case, I turned the cute sweater into a hat. I cast on 14 pattern repeats, staggered the cable action and voila! A hat! A fairly large hat, suitable for my brother’s big head. I knit this super-tightly so that it will be nice and cushy - his last hat was knit from Lamb’s Pride Bulky, so it was super warm for those Buffalo winters.

Is that photo above too dark? How about this one:

Not much better. Silver digs the hat, though!

I made my first ever knitted object out of Galway - a 2×2 ribbed scarf for Rob. It turned out a bit too short (the cheapo me didn’t want to splurge for another ball of yarn) and I mistakenly purled the stitches through the back loop. I had bought this ball of Galway for a pair of gloves, which I never got around to knitting. It’s wooly and tweedy and lovely and I would definitely use it again.

This is the last of the holiday gifts - I previously knit two pairs of socks for Rob’s parents and a lacy scarf for my mother. I don’t know how people can blow through a pair of socks in 5, 6, 7 days. I just don’t get it. It seems like they take me forever. Never again! But I’m now done, so yeah! No last minute gift knitting this year!

The Asymmetrical Cardigan grows. Slowly. I’m a touch over halfway done with it. Will it be complete by christmas? No way. By New Year’s? Probably not. It’s going so slowly and has become so massive that I may not even bring it up north for the holidays with me.

I’m a bit (read: extremely!) concerned about running out of yarn. I weighed everything last night, and I’ll have right around one skein (200ish yards) to knit the collar, buttonband, and sleeve cuffs. The sleeve cuffs are pretty long, and things are going to be tight. I received the extra skein of Malabrigo that I ordered from ebay, and it’s also a wonky color - it contains much more forest green than what I’m using. But I may have to use it for the cuffs in a pinch.

But the thing that really concerns me? That the right front is two different shades of green. I can barely look at that photo because it pains me so. There’s no way in hell I’m ripping it, though.

So, I’m looking to the future. I joined the Stranded Colorwork knitalong, and it’s all I can do to not cast on for the Anemoi Mittens. My darling Webs had a closeout on Rowan Cashsoft 4 ply recently, and I happened to have a gift certificate for the amount of 4 balls plus shipping, so the deal was sealed. It’s soft and squishy and yummy! I was originally planning on a more tonal color scheme in Koigu, but you can’t beat the price of FREE!

However, I’ve never done fair isle before. I’m thinking that I should start out with something a bit simpler and larger gauge for my first project. Enter Center Square. Remember how I was so not dying to knit anything from the most recent Knitty? All lies. I went through my stash of oddball worsted weights to see what I could use, and came up with this:

Wow, that’s a lot of red, blue, and black. You can click the photo to get all the details. I settled on two colors of (mostly) alpaca - yarn I’d probably never use up otherwise (because, hello, Houston was 79 degrees this past Sunday!). We have some teal Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk and blue Plymouth Indiecita Alpaca. Both are actually DK weight, which means I’ll have to futz with the pattern and swatch. I think that I’ll be able to get away with adding 4 extra circles around, and I’ll wind up with a hat that doesn’t streeeeetch so much around your head.

Coming up next - how hard is it to photograph a black hat? Very!