alisonknits

A Cup of Good Cheer

After all my belly-aching last week, I had just a lovely holiday.  Knowing that I would be at work for 13 hours on Sunday (that's what happens when you work at a church and Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday), we purposely planned a low-key Christmas Day.  We slept in, and my sister & her husband came over around 4pm, and up until then we kinda just chilled out.  Wrapped a few last gifts, baked a pie, did a little neatening of the house.  As Scott & I get closer to the idea of having kids sometime soon, I'm trying to savor relaxed Christmases.

I've said this before, but I can't say it enough: I feel so blessed to have a family that I actually like.  It's not everyone who can say that they would want to be friends with their sister and brother-in-law even if we weren't related.

Today we head off to New York for a couple days with my in-laws, and I have actually finished the two knitted gifts that I started very late.  And I had been prepared to knit on the ride down!  Here are some socks knit out of Cherry Tree Hill - lost the label, so I have no idea what color.

And here's my new favorite design of my own, mittens for Lindsay.  As I knit both these gifts from stash, I felt so virtuous that I allowed myself to purchase some Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk yesterday to knit a pair for myself.  I'm trying not to feel too guilty that the gift ones were knit out of Lamb's Pride - a wonderful yarn, but not nearly as luxurious as Alpaca Silk.

My New Year's Resolution will (unfortunately) be the same this year as last year: to get my website up to sell my patterns.  I have some extra incentive this time around: in my bio for the project I have in the Summer '07 issue of Interweave Knits, I listed my website.  So now I have to get it done before the issue comes out, or be publicly embarrassed!

Happy New Year!

Bah, humbug.

I should know by now that I find the holiday season incredibly trying.  It never fails.  Every year, I want to find that Christmas spirit; I love me some Christmas spirit, but instead I just feel like a lump of coal.

Nevertheless, I press on.  I search for the perfect gifts.  I do my best to stay within a budget (so far, I appear to be doing better than usual on that score this year - almost like a Chanukah miracle).  I decide to knit or otherwise hand-make some gifts at the very last minute.  I trim the tree.  I carol.  But it all feels a bit empty.

As I write this, I'm listening for the first time to Aimee Mann's new Christmas album, One More Drifter in the Snow, and have to recommend to you her rendition of "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch."  Even in my holiday funk (or perhaps especially so), I can't help but smile.  I may just put that one on repeat.

Anyway, enough of my whining.  What about the knitting?  Well, since I last posted I finished the yoga bags for IK's summer issue, wrote the pattern, sent them off, and for a brief moment my hands were my own again.  I started a tam for myself, adapted from a pattern from Anna Zilbourg's 45 Fine and Fanciful Hats to Knit, a perennial favorite.  I was using much thinner yarn than the pattern called for, so it required some adjustments, and I'm not entirely sure it was working out so well.

But before I could finish that and discover whether or not I'd created a wearable hat, the hubby and I discussed our Christmas list and I committed to knitting socks for one sister-in-law and mittens for another.  I cooked up a cute pattern for the mitts, making it up as I went along, but shortly into that project we thought of a less labor-intensive gift for that SIL, so I switched to the socks.  I'll get back to the mitts when I have time. 

So.  The knitting has been a bit ADD, a bit start-itis lately.  Oh, how I long to be in a committed relationship with a challenging sweater for me Me ME.  But for now, it's not to be.

Wish me luck in my quest for holiday cheer, and have yourself a merry little Chrismukkah.

Setting New Records in Not Blogging

Okay, I've been neglecting the blog even more than usual.  Basically, everything noteworthy that I've been involved in lately has been pretty unblogable, and much of life seems rather ho-hum these days.  But here are some random tidbits:

• Are you watching Hereos?  Scott and I downloaded 6 episodes from iTunes, and watched the last 3 or 4 on Tivo.  It's the best show ever!  It's like Buffy crossed with X-Men, with great production values.  If you haven't seen it yet, go catch up, then watch when it comes back Jan. 22.
• In knitting news, after a shipping snafu, I finally got the yarn for my first project published in Interweave.  Hooray!  I started last week and have already finished the yoga mat carrier, which I hope I'll get to keep after they photograph it.  I'm also making a smaller bag, of which I knit about 1/3 last night.  I'm no longer worried about meeting the Dec. 18 deadline, and am feeling very self-satisfied about my knitting speed.  Which probably means that something tragic will befall me to punish me for my hubris.
• At my main church job, we've been discussing what to do about Christmas Eve, which falls on a Sunday this year.  We always have three evening services by candlelight, but some of us felt strongly that we should also have a smaller service during our regular morning hour.  None of the ministers can prepare a sermon when there's so much to do for the evening services (which each draw about 2-3 times our normal crowd), so we decided to do a reading of The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry.  Do you remember this story?  If not, go read it.  I defy you not to well up with tears. 
• When I was kid, I had a Sesame Street Christmas record, with a version of this story starring Bert & Ernie.  Ernie sold his beloved rubber ducky to buy Bert a cigar box to hold his paper clip collection, and Bert sold his paper clip collection to buy Ernie a soap dish to hold his rubber ducky.  I think more children's programming should expose five-year-olds to tragic irony.

Happy December, everyone!