Endings......

Today is a day of endings.

The end of December.

The end of 2015.

The end of yet another round of yarn chicken!  The log cabin style blanket project has officially been determined to be a draw.  2 for the chicken and 2 for me!

It all started with a bag of assorted colors of Big Lots Acrylic.  I bought it on a day that I had a coupon for 20% off an entire purchase and the yarn was marked at a dollar a ball.  I bought all they had in a beige, cinnamon brown, burgundy and black and proceeded to knit a couple of little charity scarves out of some of it and then uncovered it again months later to start a tv watching blanket as the colors would look good with the sofa.

Now, being the organized knitter that I am (NOT!!!) I of course knew how much of each color I had (NOPE!) and just grabbed balls out of that big plastic bag as I needed them.....And along came the yarn chicken.

He tugged and pulled at ends until he won with the cinnamon brown.

He tugged and pulled at the ends until he won with the burgundy.

He pulled and tugged, but lost (by less than a yard) with the beige.

He pulled and tugged, and tugged some more until he lost with the black.

The finished blanket is just one or two people large...I didn't measure it yet, was too busy washing and clipping all those pesky little ends....and does go rather nicely with the sofa!

I learned a few things knitting this very plain and boring blanket.  (I suppose the first should be to check how much yarn you have before you start, but I doubt that will ever be my strong point!)  Having spent years knitting shawls and seamless items I haven't had to do a lot of picking up of stitches, other than sock gussets, and having them look messy was annoying me, so I worked at learning a few different techniques and the back side of my blanket looks like this :

Not too shabby if I do say so myself!

So there is one ending that turned out just right!

Of course, today is also the day of reflection on the past year.  What went well?  What didn't?  What do we plan for next year?

I am always happy to sweep the last dirt of the year out the back door, and open the front door to see what things the new year will hold.  2015 was kind of a mixed bag.  Some, few, high points, some, too many, low points.  But, as a wise person once said, without the hardships we would never enjoy the highlights.

Here is wishing all of us a year filled with highlights in 2016.

~M

It was Christmas Eve at the Workhouse

When I was a kid, I think it was my dad would wander around just quoting that first line from a poem.  I have actually looked the rest of it up, and I found it horribly depressing so that is all you get from it!

It is not much of a workhouse around here.  The official Christmas knitting is all complete, including three sets of ornaments for an Advent Tree. (We won't mention that I am two trees short of a set, now I have 11 months to get the trees done for next year!)

I am tempted to knit another star, so that one can be the topper and the other hang on the tree.  We'll see how lost I feel in the morning when I don't have another little ornament to knit!

I did get my ex-mil's Winter Wheat finished in time to get mailed off to the West Coast.  The designer asked if the "largest person in the house" could possibly model it for her.  The boys voted and as the kids' dad was already here for his Christmas visit he got handed the sweater!

 He was a very good sport about it.  The sweater is a little small for him and quite a bit too big for myself or TDQ.  Maybe I will get pictures of it on ex-mil so that we can see if it really fits her!

It is starting to sound like I have nothing on my needles, which isn't true!  I still am plugging away at my boring garter stitch log cabin blanket.  The yarn chicken won our game with the darker brown and burgundy.  I won with the beige and we are tugging back and forth with the black that will be the outer border.  TDQ asked if I was almost done, which depending on how you look at it I am.  there are only 2.5 more segments to go.....unfortunately for me, they are the largest segments.  But I am determined to get it finished this year, so maybe, during our movie marathon Christmas I will cast it off and get pictures!

I also have a cardigan for myself on the needles, none of the kids wanted or needed sweaters this year so they are getting their traditional socks and a hat each.  I figure TDQ has stolen enough cowls and fingerless mitts to keep her going for a few more years!
 
I am still working on the "great stash elimination/organization" project.  Three boxes of yarn need to find a home, not good yarn, just old acrylics and odd balls that won't ever get used here.  Even the boys have tastes that run to silk and cashmere so there is no sense in keeping (hoarding) yarn that won't get used.  I did discover that when you actually enter your stash in Ravelry, if you are looking at a pattern it will suggest yarns out of your stash to knit it with!  Great feature that I had never seen before, because my stash was just my stash!  I am all the way through the lace weights, mostly through the sock weight yarns (that was stashed in lots of different places and I am discovering more as I go!) and probably over half way through the worsted and aran weights.  I used up some bulky weights making really thick cowls for charity knits, and hated every minute of that knitting!  So the rest will be joining the acrylics in a box and the next charity that is picking up in my area will get them.  Of course I left the hardest area or last, my ColourMart Stash has it's own little area and apart from digging out some things for TFB to weave with I haven't even started on that!

But that is a project to get back to next week, for now my garter stitch log cabin blanket and I are going to go watch movies with the kids!

Merry Christmas!  May your stockings be filled with all you could ever want and may the true spirit of the season live in your heart all year long!

~M

The Internet Ate My Blog Post!

Monday evening, I was so excited.

I had the blog post all ready to go....

A pattern ready to be uploaded...

And the internet ate them!

On Ravelry, I kept seeing these (albeit cute) pictures of Bob (That's Bob in the left hand corner) telling me that things were a bit shaky so..well here I hit publish and nothing happened.

It was late, I was tired, once Bob stopped licking my screen, I uploaded the pattern and went to bed. Which means I promptly forgot to tell you that my shawl pattern for my contest entry to the Fall 2005 ColourMart Lovers Knitting Contest is live and ready to buy!

It is a rather pretty shawl, if I do say so myself!  Which, of course, I do!  TDQ says it makes her think about Downton Abbey, although that was not my intent when I was designing it.  I just wanted something a little cozier than a lace weight shawl, to wrap up in while I knit. A little cashmere, a little merino, in a fingering weight without a lot of chart symbols to remember.

It has a few left leaning and a few right leaning decreases, but mostly centered double vertical decreases throughout the two very different lace stitch patterns.  With each pattern having it's own color, never any guessing as to which lace to be knitting.


Here's the blurb from the pattern page:

During the fall when everyone else is thinking of pumpkin spice lattes, all I can dream of is apple pie with cinnamon and caramel. Crisp fall apples with spices and sweetness all it needs is a little whipped cream and I am in my own personal heaven! This shawl evokes the comfort of warm apple pie. Knit in a light fingering or heavy lace weight yarn, the knitting goes quickly.
This is a modular, top down, lace shawl, knit using two colors of yarn. You can extend the width and length by adding repeats of selected charts, or by using a heavier yarn and larger needle.
Pattern assumes a working knowledge of charts, provisional cast on, left, right and centered decreases, along with yarn overs and twisted stitches.
Originally knit and designed for ColourMart Cashmere/Merino 2/15 4 ply during the Fall 2015 as a design entry in the ColourMart Lovers Group Contest, it could easily be knit with other yarns.

And some pictures for you!

TOB's fingerless mitts also make an appearance in my pattern store. 

Of course I had to knit them up just to make sure that the instructions I wrote out for him worked in his chosen yarn.  His will not have embroidery on them.  They are a pretty quick knit.  Not a "no time to knit something" but a "little time to knit something" gift maybe.

You still have a couple of weeks to get that Christmas Knitting done.

I am still a pattern repeat, killer bind off and two sleeves away from finishing up my ex-MIL Christmas sweater.  Even with that deadline looming over my head I have stayed current on the Advent Tree knitting...more about that later.

I have some knitting to do...how's about you?

~M

Not everyone has

I have mentioned before that TOB (The Other Brother) has become quite the knitter.  This evening he realized he does not have a project to work on during lunch and the ride time to and from school each day and decided that he needed to cast on a pair of fingerless mittens as a Christmas Present.

TOB : Is there a pattern you can give me?

Me - I can write you up one very quickly.

TOB: Ok, I want them to be red, and soft. Not too long in the cuff and no fancy lacy stuff.

Me - TOB, you are a very lucky boy.  Not everyone in the world can decide at 8:30 on a Sunday night that they want to knit a project in a certain color and yarn, have a pattern custom written for them and just go to the yarn store in the basement! 

Fifteen minutes later, yarn has been picked, pattern written up, he has cast on his project and has it in his project bag to take with him in the morning.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why having an extensive stash is a good thing!

~M

It's beginning...

So here we are, a few days into December and I have to ask...where do you stand with your holiday knitting?

I have one sweater on the needles, playing a serious, no holds barred, game of yarn chicken with it, for my ex-mil and need to figure out something for The Monster Man but other than that most of my knitting lately has either been testing for myself,

(That is Winter Wheat for those that are interested.  I changed the sleeves and knit it to my measurements, so it really doesn't fit TDQ in the sleeves!)

or testing for other people. 

 
The kids are all good for sweaters and just requested socks (all knit, thank you for asking) but you know me..can't have a holiday season without throwing a wrench into the works!

This year, Frankie Brown is publishing advent patterns for a cute little "Needle Advent Tree".  The pattern for the tree was released in November and involves sacrificing a knitting needle for the trunk.  No worries for me there, unless they are double points I have given up on using straight needles.
I knit mine with some seriously bright green yarn, couldn't find the pot I wanted to put it in permanently and forgot about it until December.

Each day there is a pattern for a little ornament to go on it.

 December 1st



December 2nd

 
The Third
 
and finally, this mornings offering.

Each day, TDQ tells me I am a dork for downloading the pattern in the morning, then squeals about how cute the ornament is in the evening when I finish sewing it up.

For someone who doesn't like to knit, she certainly finds people in her life who are knitworthy, and then comissions me to do the actual knitting!

That is for her bestest friend.

I have been, slowly and day by day, organizing the stash.  I am up to 150 entries in my stash pages on Ravelry and as I am cataloging and putting everything away after it's photo shoot, I am being ruthless with getting rid of the yarns I will never use!  In some cases I have "odd" balls of sock yarn that I know I have mates for, just need to sort through some more to find them.

In other news, TDQ had her wisdom teeth out.  We did discover that she has a moderate allergy to pain meds and like TFB does not react well to the anesthetics used in dental work.  Bad timing on our part, she had a class to go to the next day that she couldn't miss, but she got through it like the trooper that all of my kids have turned into.

Speaking of TFB, college tours have started for him.  Straight A's are easy for him, the soft skills needed to actually interact with the general population, not so much, so I did more of the talking and asking of questions than he did!  I think on this recent tour the person taking us around thought I was interested in the program and even mentioned that he is seeing more females in the program than ever before.

My shawl pattern is being tech-edited and should be ready to purchase sooner rather than later...if I can get my act together there might even be some Quick Knits for the Holidays files in my Ravelry Store soon too!

A Day to be Thankful

For those in America, today is Thanksgiving.  So, let's get that out of the way first, Happy Thanksgiving!

There is so much in life to be grateful for, that it seems pretty sad that we only really devote one day to it, and even that somehow has turned into another holiday that has been high-jacked with in-store and on-lines sales perpetuating the myth that you need more and more things or "stuff" to be happy.

This year was the year of "stash downing", well until a week or so ago, but I will get to that!  The boys helped, TFB by weaving, which he is getting pretty good at.  And TOB with knitting.  It is funny, two boys following in their mother's steps with an appreciation for good yarn and a girl who turns her nose up at the thoughts of using fiber and prefers to play with rocks! (She makes jewelry, a lot of jewelry!)    I am thankful for the boys helping me use up some of my stash of yarn, because this year was the year that I was going to organize it properly!  Yeah, right, here it is November and today I finally started loading some of it into the Ravelry DataBase.  29 entries down, who knows how many more to go!  (That was only one drawer of sock yarn, and no I am not telling you how many more there are, and some acrylic that I got to make blankets during what proved to be the "stash downing, crash landing".)

I was doing so well, face it having one boy taking entire cones of yarn at a time, to warp a loom really does eat up stash, until Knit Picks had their CyberMonday Sale.  I always thought that CyberMonday was the Monday after Thanksgiving, but they ran theirs from the 16th to the 23rd, starting "promptly" at 9:00 am local time.  As luck would have it, I was home to be able to take a peek.

Dollar deals?  Sock yarn for a dollar? Aran weight Wool for one dollar?  I fell for the deals and I fell off the stash downing wagon hard!

Enough sock yarn for 5 pairs of socks, enough wool for a cabled sweater for me, some yarn for throw blankets for the kids and some lace weight alpaca for my next shawl (or the one after that!)  I think that every single yard of yarn I stashed down just got added back in.

And then there were the up to 80% off deals.

Hmm, I swear I am going back on the Yarn Diet!

Starting to Stash Down all over again!

Just to get it started off right, we have Winter Wheat, almost done.  I have slightly over half a sleeve and two cuffs to go and she will be ready for blocking and wearing!  (Excuse the messy desk, I had several other things going on at the same time!)
 
We also have the starts of a Chevron Cardigan. 

So,you  see I am already starting to stash down the new stash!

I have a lot to be Thankful for.  Yarn to knit with is certainly one of those things!

~M

I suppose I should find it funny

So, let's get the knitting content out of the way first, shall we?

Did you know that the wonderous Andrea Jurgrau, first known to me just as Bad Cat Designs has a new pattern out?  No plain shawls this time around, it is a center back out cardigan, and let me tell you it is fabulous.  If only I had time this week to work on it!

Of course, I had to cast on right away and got through the first couple of charts before other things had to take the front burner and leave the poor thing whimpering in my knitting bag. I have promised her that on Monday she will get some of my attention!

 I don't think I mentioned that I wrote up and published another knitting pattern.  Maybe I did and forgot about it.

Shield Socks.

You can buy the pattern on Ravelry, no account needed!


But on to what I found funny this week.

In case you didn't know, I have been around the block a few times.  Maybe even a few times too many, and although my children as still (barely in one case) teenagers, I am much older now than my mother was when she became a grandmother, so no spring chickens here.

For years I have known that somewhere in my learning to sew I learned to cross stitch and needle point backwards.  As in the threads that I work with,  cross the opposite direction to the way they are supposed to when I am finished.  And I know, that if I concentrate really hard on it I can turn it around, but as soon as my mind wanders and I set my fingers to automatic sewing back I go to the backwards sewing.

For years I have known that I work the purl stitch differently than the people who taught me, and the way most American knitting patterns are written - what you call a slip-slip-knit (ssk) I perform as a knit two together (k2tog) and I adapt everything I do so that my backwards shaping doesn't ruin the line of a raglan sleeve or have lace leaning in the wrong directions.  (The beauty of charted knitting, just follow the lean of the symbols and it all works out no matter if we call it a k2tog or an ssk.)

But today, today I learned of yet another thing I do backwards.

Apparently, I even tie slip knots backwards!

I suppose I should find it funny.  Maybe everything I thought I know how to do, I do backwards.  It would explain an awful lot of crazy things!

~M

Why Do We Do That? or What I think, for what it is worth.

It is officially Socktober, which means that, for those of us that subscribe to the belief that somewhere in late December all our loved ones should be getting gifts and eating too much, the panic of post American Thanksgiving knitting is soon to be upon us.  No, this isn't going to be a post about why you should (or shouldn't) subscribe to the late November, early December knitting panic, it is more basic than that.

A friend and I were talking about, of all things, knitting today.  Specifically the things we don't find fun to knit, the miles of endless stocking stitch or ribbing, that make up plain knits.  Honestly, if I want a ribbed cardigan I do what any sensible knitter would do, I run to the store and buy one because I know myself well enough to know that before you can say "new patterns were released today somewhere in the world" that ribbed cardigan will be glaring at me from the work-in-process basket and never see the light of day again.

I honestly believe that it takes the best, most experienced, knitters to take a very plain garment and make it look good.  Slight variations in gauge, even putting down your knitting to answer the phone and not being really careful when you pick it back up, show in a big way.  It is hard to hide a badly formed increase or decrease in a plain sweater, and if you happen to twist a stitch it stands out like a sore thumb.

So why, I ask you, when someone comes to those experienced knitters, who obviously through trial and error and endless hours of practice have figured all this out, and asks us to teach them to knit do we hand them some size 8 needles and a ball of cheap acrylic yarn and tell them to go knit a garter stitch scarf?

I see a couple of problems with this ideology...the first being, size 8 needles, although common and easy to come by, are not the right size for garter stitch in worsted weight yarn!  The second, as one of those experienced knitters I can tell you, that even as quickly as I knit, I run out of steam with the garter stitch long before I have a scarf size object.  The third (yes my couple has three items) is that cheap acrylic yarn has no forgiveness in it.  No bounce to the stitches and every little flaw just grows.
We are also, unknowingly I think, teaching them to be afraid of the purl stitch.  I have heard from several knitters that they hate to purl or that they learned to knit "in the round" so they wouldn't have to purl as often.

Now unless you believe that there is a yarn shortage and by teaching newbie knitters to actually enjoy this craft is going to cut into your ability to obtain your drug of choice, I don't understand the logic behind setting them up to fail this way!

Newbie knitters need to see something being accomplished.  Small projects, with nice yarn and needles sized to make a nice fabric, maybe that is the size 8's, but maybe it isn't.  Teaching them to understand gauge (tension) and right side from wrong side right from the get go sounds like it would be much more beneficial to me. As does teaching them to read a pattern and I don't think that "here I will cast on for you" followed by "now you just knit to the end, turn, knit to the end, when you are nearly out of yarn come back and I will cast it off for you" really teaches a newbie knitter anything they will need to know to become a knitter.

Do you, as a knitter remember your first project* with fondness or frustration?  Were you wondering if it would ever end, or what could you make next?

For what it is worth, here is what I think.

I think we should start new knitters off with manageable size projects.  Maybe that is a dishcloth or a "spa cloth" in a really nice cotton, but maybe it is something else that they like the looks of and only requires one be knit. (I didn't start my kids knitting with socks because the missing second sock is a well known malady in the knitting world, as is the missing second mitten!)

Show them how to cast on, then pull your cast on out and have them do it!  Pull it out as many times as it takes to get it right, it is only knitting but it is all in the details, starting off right goes a long way to ending it right! 

Leave long tails for weaving in and teach them the importance of making sure that is done right!**

But most of all, remember there are no knitting police.  I worked at a yarn store, many years ago, where one of the other employees knit by bracing her left needle between her knees and holding her right needle so that the two formed a cross in the middle of her lap.  Her stitches were perfectly executed, even though she had to let go of her "working needle" to pick up the yarn she had sitting next to her and place around the needle to form her stitches.  But it worked for her and when her projects were cast off there was no telling how she held the needles and yarn.  Let your newbie knitter explore many different ways of holding their needles and yarn, one of them will feel comfortable for them and before you know it you will have another knitter in your midst!

~M

*mine was a dishcloth for my Grandmother.  Garter stitch and apparently every few times I put it down I was confused when I picked it back up which direction I was working in because it was not square when it was done. (I was very young and mostly I remember it because I overheard my mother making fun of the shape and short rows which made me mad as I felt I had worked hard on it!)

**More to come on the details at another date!

It's been HOW long?

What can I say, this summer kicked my butt in more way than one.  I have come to the conclusion that I do not get along with odd number years (and sometimes not even the even numbered ones!)

Lots of changes for us over the past couple of months, and although I know that someday I will look back and say that everything worked out the way it should, living through some of them is not at all what I would call fun.

But in every thunderstorm there are flashes of light.  Some of ours have been :

The Drama Queen bugging me about setting up her company to sell her beading until I did it - which if I had done it right would have been wonderful, somehow I managed to set myself up as her company!  (All comes from knowing my social security number better than hers and doing things too quickly.)  We will leave it the way it is for now and then I will "sell" her the company name once she has actually made some money and all will be right. As soon as college started back up she lost a lot of her creative time so it is left to me to be in charge anyway,  I might sneak a few of my things into her craft fair displays and etsy store!

The First Brother decided what he wants to do for a living, did his own research and is now attending a technical type school so that he can get a good chunk of the training he will need out of the way on the school districts dime. (Well, mine really, most of my property taxes are school levies but I was going to pay them anyway.)

The Other Brother is still trying to figure out how to make playing computer games, listening to pod casts and surfing the internet into a career.  As this is a knitting blog I should mention that he is taking after me (to an extent) and has mastered knitting in the round, making hats to go with scarves and suffers from end of project let down!

But the biggest flash of light to be seen, right this minute, is that I am officially a designer of knit goods!  I finally got up off my rear end, wrote down some patterns, had a couple of people look at them and give me some input. I then re-wrote and charted, test knitted and published!

Knitted Flowers Large and Small

Twisted Woolens - Easy Cable

Twisted Mitts with Large Flower

The Red Cap - Cabled Hat

Twisted Mitts - Easy Ribbing

Upcoming we have socks, hopefully ready for Socktober and a deceptively simple lace shawl.

~M

I said I would post before the end of June

As I sort of promised that I would show you some more of the 2014 Christmas knits before we got to the end of June 2015, I suppose I had better hurry up and post some pictures and stats before the entire month gets away from me!

Here we have TFB's (what is becoming traditional) Striped Christmas Hoodie. 

He wore holes in the last one and tried patching the holes himself with iron-on patches that I had stuffed in a drawer to repair the holes in knees of jeans for TOB.  The plan didn't work so well, for a number of reasons.

The first reason being that the patch, as it was made for denim jeans, didn't match the knitted red and grey fabric of his hoodie at all.

The second being he hadn't actually ever been taught the finer points of using an iron!  I will forever have an iron pattern in my dining room table!

But, back to the Hoodie.  It is a standard top-down-raglan cardigan with a zipper, two pockets and a hood.  He wore it most days until the temperatures starting rising to our Mid-West Summer normals, and even this past week when we had more Pacific Northwest temperatures and rain it got pulled out of the drawer and worn for parts of the day.

I know it sounds strange to the non-knitters in the world, but you know, it sort of warms the heart when socks and sweaters get worn so much they develop holes and thin spots.  Shows me that all the hours and effort I put in to making them were appreciated!

~M

Back Log

As I have mentioned before,  my knitting time is down to next to nothing these days, but luckily so was my blogging time so I actually have a back log of knits to tell you about.

Here we have TOB's (The Other Brother's) Christmas Sweater.
 
 It is really hard to tell in the picture but it is a dark green Henley-ish sort of thing with non-matching buttons (because he is not matchy matchy in anything!) and sleeves that "stay up past my wrists" (his request) so that he can wash his hands a million times a day!


I started by following a pattern for this, then gave up as the proportions didn't really fit the nearly 16 year old body they were going to be placed on.  the beauty of a top down raglan style sweater is you can try it on as you go and just divide for sleeves when it feels right and stop when it is long enough!

TDQ just looked over my shoulder and informed me that you all think that I am dead or a zombie because I haven't blogged in so long!

Changing jobs was probably the worst thing I ever did for what I consider my real life...you know the one that involves spending time with my family and friends, or knitting!  Many days I get to see the kids for less than 30 minutes before it is time for us to head off to bed or out the door in the morning.  I keep saying that things will normalize, but I am at the point where I am wondering if this is the new normal!

If I get the chance I will show you TFB's Christmas sweater sometime before the end of June!

~M

Quiet on the MidWest Front

Did you think I had fallen off the face of the planet?

That I had given up knitting needles and taken up some other form of addiction?

Or something more sinister? Or depressing?

I know I worried my friends, my email box was filled with notes, some of which went along the lines of "you don't even have to type anything, just hit reply so I know you are still alive, if not ok".

It has been a rough 6 months.  And, really, that is all you get to hear about it.

If it wasn't for the fact that it has been 6 months I wouldn't even have any knitting to show you!  I wish I could say it was because I have been working on test knits for books (I have but nothing that extensive) or secret knitting rather than some weeks it being an accomplishment for me to knit one row on a sock!

Luckily, there is a little bit of a back log of knits now, after all Christmas knitting did get done although not as much as in prior years and there is a new pattern from Andrea to talk about!

But when last we spoke I was working on my "Copy Cat Kelpie" which involved a yarn in a colorway called Vincent and the Doctor.

The pattern was another one of Andrea's, a Moebious that we had knit as part of a group project.  Another knitter had used this yarn and I instantly fell in love and needed one for myself!  As yarn wasn't in my budget for that right then, I bemoaned my lot and suddenly it arrived in my mailbox courtesy of a friend.  I have to keep stealing the finished scarf from TDQ, she loves it as much as I do, so I have taken to hiding it...but I won't say where, I think she stalks the blog when I am not looking!

But, I mentioned there was a new pattern to talk about!  One I haven't actually finished knitting, but that is more about my reluctance to be as free spirited as I should and just run with some randomness!

Andrea has a pattern in the next Knitting Traditions magazine, Margarita's Coverlet.  As with all test knits, a select group of us got to try out the charts and read through the pattern long before it will hit the stands and we started making hexegons.

The whole idea was to use up those ends of yarn from making socks, join them together and make a blanket.  Andrea has very clear instructions about making different sizes, from crib blanket to bed coverlet.  I dove right in and started knitting with the leftovers from Christmas socks past.

 And created the first "flower"

 But rather than continue adding hexes to the outside of the flower, my mind wandered to quilts.
 
Specifically a Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt (which truth be told is my second favorite quilt style, my favorite is the Double Wedding Ring, but I am not up to knitting one of those!)

I should have done some math first though, even if I make a smaller blanket, and not something big enough for my bed I will be knitting something on the order of 127 hexes before I am done!

The individual hexes go pretty quickly.  Cracker knitting really, you know, you can't just have one!  But they got put aside in favor of other Christmas knits and then.....Well, I still have a lot of knitting to do!  I lost a lot of knitting time the past few months, maybe by next year I will have the finished project to share. When I get there, Amanda has promised to sew in the last three yarn ends for me!  :)

~M