I feel I accomplished 98% of my holiday knitting goals.
And I’m really really happy with that.

Specially my Lady Gray. A gift for the young lady my brother should marry.

This was my first attempt at entrelac knitting, and I really bit off a mouth full. I added a lot of beads, and then spent a lot of time taking half of them off, and would have waisted more time until my very wise friend told me to stop and just leave it alone. The beads would be lovely, and they are. But after putting hundreds of the things on yarn that was a little too thick I kind of wished I hadn’t done any. Because my fingers hurt horribly by the end.
So in a last mad push to finish it I spent 3 days at the end of November ignoring my family and everything else I had to do and finished it. I even properly blocked it and everything.
And it really deserves some better photos than the tiny shot I managed with my phone.

I also produced lots and lots of hats. Even this hilarious thing.

And I was so busy patting myself on the back for all my hard work, I got no pictures of half of them and poor ones of the rest. So it isn’t really going to help promote my work now is it?

I’ve also been practicing my spinning and my plying, and I think I’ve been getting better.

I’m really enjoying it, even though I’ve had to hand card the alpaca I bought from Shepherd’s harvest last summer. Even trying some basic dyeing, just with kool-aid and food coloring but it’s been turning out great. Maybe some more of this in another post.

But the best part of my holiday is I didn’t feel anywhere near as stressed as I did last year. Maybe it was because wasn’t working a part time or full time job on top of trying to get everything else done. I still did 90% percent of the grocery shopping, and produced 90% of the gifts, and did a lot of cleaning, even put plastic on the windows! But it wasn’t so bad because I was pulled in one less direction. And it really made a lot of difference. I even produced a couple of cowls for a commissioned Hanukkah gift. Of course no pictures…
But I think it also had a lot to do with just being honest about how much last year drained me.

So as I close out 2014 in a week late blog post,

I hope everyone had a slightly better than last holiday as well.