A little bit of lace, and little bit of stripes

Well what do you know, I made it back before the end of the month!  I don't really do yearly resolutions, a year sounds like a terribly long time to me, so I work more on monthly habits...so far so good on this one, the blog more often one!

My house seems so much bigger without all the Christmas Trees and decorations in it.  All our gifts have found new homes to live in, although I do have to keep telling TOB that the dirty laundry basket is not a place to keep new clothes!

I have been very busy at work, new goals were handed out for the year and I really had to work on my own attitude before rolling them out to my team.  The biggest problem is easy year we do better than the year before and I was pretty darn impressed with some of the numbers we have been able to hit in the past, but goals never get smaller and the stretch to hit them is always a little harder, and my team always rises to the occasion but when you look at the annual goal in the middle of a branch that has no customers in it and the snow falling all around you it seems a bit overwhelming.

But even with the extra calculating I was doing at home I did get a little knitting accomplished!

I finished a baby blanket for an English Teacher.  I again turned to the Summer Squares project from Bad Cat Designs for my inspiration.  This one has violin as the center square with the border and edging from The Blue Quartet to round out (well square out really) the blanket.  It took me far too long to knit it, mostly because it rode around in my car not being worked on for several weeks.

Cheap acrylic yarn as I have no idea if the teacher is up for hand washing a baby blanket or not and very soon, probably as soon as I finish typing here, it will be steam killed to hold its shape and blocking.  (I have already straightened those wonky edges!)

In other knitting I have been playing around with the yarn that my MIL sent.  Berroco Cirrus  and think that I might turn it into some kind of wrap, a convertible one with buttons that can be moved to turn it into a scarf, shrug, oversized cowl.

We'll see how that turns out, right now I am still playing with lace patterns but this will end up as a finished item, she sent enough yarn to make three!

And of course it wouldn't be the start of the new year without the start of some new socks.

I am letting the yarn do the work on these and they will be my in the dark, or tv watching, knitting until I finish the second one!  These will be for TDQ as she has a birthday coming up and doesn't care that a colorway named Candy Cane sounds like more of a Christmas sock than a birthday sock to me.

So what is on your needles?  I don't think that the socks will hold me for long and I might be in the market for a new project!

~M