Monday, January 6, 2014

Little Christmas 2014

All the Christmas decorations are put away in bins in the basement.  The house looks bare, bare, bare. Today the trees come down.  We usually wait for the 6th of January to do this, the last day of Christmas. (if the trees hold out).
They still look pretty good.  Here you can see some of the smocked ornaments I made, quite a few years ago.  Every year I make plans to add a few more, but never seem to get the time or the inclination to work on Christmas ornaments once Christmas is over.  Maybe this year?  I always say that every years' tree is the best one ever, but this year the size and fullness of the tree was just right to show off all the ornaments to their best advantage.

In between taking down decorations, we watched a lot of football this weekend and the games were very exciting.  We also have been watching a BBC series "Orphan Black" which is very good.  We watched all the episodes in the past two weeks and have the series finale to watch tonight.  

I discovered last year, that I am really a process knitter, enjoying the process of knitting, not counting the numbers, not bothered by unknitting or items gone wrong or the number of unfinished objects I have.

However, there has been a perfect storm of happenings that is encouraging me to think differently for January and February.  

The Olympics are in February and talk on the podcasts I listen to and the Ravelry groups I am on, has been about the Ravelenic games, starting a project at the opening ceremonies and having it finished by the closing ceremonies. I have been toying with the idea of making the Must Have aran sweater that I have had in my queue forever, during the games.  
I also cleaned out my knitting room and went through all my yarn, divested myself of more old yarn I have been hanging on to for 35 years.  If I haven't started anything with it yet, I never will.  So now all old useless yarn is gone, gone, gone.  Whew, what a relief.  But I collected all the bits of yarn that I was saving from recent projects and realized I have quite a number of them.

I lost my favorite hat.  The one I knit from Boku that goes with the scarf and every one of my coats.  So now with the wind chill in the negative range, I had no hat that fit me just right.

I got two requests for special projects.  One from Hubby, who wants Valentine socks and one from the eldest granddaughter who wants fingerless mitts that go up to her elbow for her birthday January 24th.

Therefore I am going to try an experiment and see how many of the small items that  I have yarn for, I can get done in January and the beginning of February.  That means finishing up some that are started and starting some I have had forever.  I am not going to push myself, but I am going to concentrate on the small stuff.
Here is a pile of some of the little projects I have selected for this.

I have already finished two items- a cowl to go with the Koolhaas hat I made to replace the Boku hat and the Homework socks that have been on my needles since September.  I have one of the fingerless mitt almost done.  I actually had to re-knit this and add 8 stitches as the mitts were very tight as originally written. I'll make note of the changes on my project page.  I'll keep track of my progress on the blog on Mondays. Should be interesting.

Keep warm and safe in this nasty weather.  I am thinking no school tomorrow with the dangerous wind chills being predicted and maybe Wednesday as well. More knitting time for me!

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