A Flurry of FOs

Every morning heralds the approach of November with a grey, gloomy sky and a chill that keeps me huddled under the flannel sheets and extra quilt for as long as possible (not long with two small children clamoring for the day to start).

This is the weather to make things quickly.

Things like sheepy hats with high wool content and giant Baa-bles.

And wee baby mittens in delicious shades of autumn morning grey (though the pattern is called (delightfully) Bleak Midwinter).

And of course, little cowls that look like bandanas.  I used the same pattern and the same modifications as when I made this in red for Silas.

There have also been a couple of dishcloths.  With all this winter knitting I have made the executive decision to leap from the dishcloth bandwagon (unless Knit Picks puts out a pattern that I can't resist), so these may be the last couple this year.

Weeks Irrelevant

Pumpking Dishcloth by Teresa Gregorio
Knit Picks Cotlin DK, Clementine and Peapod

I'm a sucker for all things pumpkin. If it says pumpkin spice on it, you already have my money.

Campfire, by Marjorie Dussaud
Peaches & Creme, Rosemary

This was the first Dussaud dishcloth that I have enjoyed in a while. It was fast, fun, easy to memorize, and the drape is delicious.

I'd like to be the kind of person who makes my kids' Halloween costumes, but not yet.  I have always been the kind of person with really good luck at thrift stores, however.

Ezra is sporting a dragon coat and a sparkly jumpsuit found at the bargain shoppe.  Silas wore it for his two first Halloweens.

This year Silas is Thomas the Tank Engine, courtesy of Once Upon a Child.  This should fit him for many Halloweens if he's agreeable, because it's completely open-sided, which also means that he can wear it no matter the weather - even a bulky winter coat will fit under it without disrupting the effect of the costume.  This year wasn't too bad, he's just wearing his Thomas rain slicker (and his new rain boots, which he was one hundred times more excited about than the costume, and which he is still wearing).

Ryan reprised last year's cowboy costume.

Everything out of his own wardrobe, basically.  I'm a fan of men owning cowboy hats - it makes for very easy costumes for Pioneer Day when you're in school if you can just raid your dad's closet.

I should have gotten a picture of my entire outfit, but you'll get the gist.  I went for fall spirit/Mother Nature/wood Elf, etc.

Sparkly green dress courtesy of Goodwill, 2006.  Fall garland courtesy of Wal-Mart clearance sale, 2014.  I was going to wear this last year, but it turns out that dresses you could wear when you were 19 will not fit you when you are 9 months pregnant, no matter how forgiving you think that A-line is.

Here's a pic from 2013, the second time Silas wore the dragon costume, where you can see a bit more of the dress (generic princess that year):

Now just imagine it with 12 feet of fall foliage draped around it, and you'll get the idea.

X is for...

Christmas.

Do you know anyone who gets worked up about the abbreviation Xmas? Their fears are unfounded. Its use isn't an attempt to take Christ out of Christmas, it's more like when my mom writes bday on the calendar. In Greek, Jehovah starts with an I, and Christ starts with an X.

Χριστός

Personally, I'm not even a fan of bday, but sometimes needs must.

Xmas-y patterns I love:

Bitty Beady Christmas Tree
Holiday Mice (free!)
Good Grief! - an iconic little tree
Julevotter Adventscalendar - advent calendar of tiny numbered mittens (free!)
The Nativity Collection - no one does knit amigurumi like Alan Dart
Stjärna - star-shaped ornament with nifty construction (free!)
Praying Angel Ornaments - crochet (free!)

My Christmas board on Pinterest has a few yarn-unrelated ideas as well

L is for . . .

Lavender.

Besides being my BFF's favorite color, the first name of a character in Harry Potter, and in Anne of Avonlea, and a wonderful thing to do to Earl Grey tea, lavender has a reputation of repelling moths.

I may have a moth problem. I may have a carpet beetle problem. Whichever, I keep finding skeins of yarn in my stash with broken plies and strands, which is incredibly irritating and disheartening. So I am vacuuming out my closet, bagging all my yarn (hooray for Ziploc!), and booby-trapping the bins with lavender oil-infused soap until I can get some sachets made. I plan to use this pattern from Purl Soho.

Silas is very in favor of this lavender business. He keeps following me into the closet and asking to smell the bars of soap. I oblige him, because it's cute and lavender is supposed to be soothing, and I am in favor of calming my energetic and occasionally high-strung toddler down from time to time.

 I also really like the idea of having lavender-scented yarn for soothing myself during stressful knitting sessions, either when I'm using knitting to try to de-stress or when the knitting is causing me stress.

Patterns I love that start with L:

Lace Leaf Pullover
Laura Star - beautiful vintage doily chart (free!)
Limberlost - fingerless mitts
Lingerie - lace-patterned socks (free!)
Little Spare Time - boys' sweater, definitely plan to make this for Silas soon
Luna Lovegood Scarf (free!)

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation, Pt 2.

This was a really cute way to display our Christmas cards.  It was also wildly impractical.  The cards are stuck to the door with loops of off-brand Scotch tape, which does not hold well to begin with, and certainly not when a two year old is practicing his door-closing skills.  Next year we'll try something a little sturdier . . .

The star is cut from felt.  I made a stencil using these directions for cutting a five-pointed star with one snip, attributed to Betsy Ross.  Sounds apocryphal to me, but whoever the inventor, it works like a charm.

I had a hard time parting with this last minute gift for my brother's girlfriend.  For that matter, I had a hard time parting with the C.S. Lewis anthology that I gave her, too.  Absolutely should have bought myself a copy, too.

The ornament is a dressed up yarn doll, a model that has been around for decades (I made my first one in fifth grade (almost two decades ago), out of directions from a book from the fifties, and I'm sure the idea is older than that).  There are quite a few variations online; my inspiration came from these directions for an Angel Ornament, with a few mods.  Everywhere she directs to use hot glue, I used needle and thread instead.  Hot glue is messy (and I would have had to dig the gun out from who knows where in the basement).  Instead of wrapping wire around bead garland I made my halo out of size 6 (E) seed beads on 24 gauge gold wire.  For the doll itself I used basic string from the hardware store - I liked the way it went with the plaid ribbon and overall I think it gave the angel a sweet and rustic look, well suited to the recipient's home on the ranch.

Silas likes the ranch

Ezra slept through the ranch

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

I didn't knit for anyone this Christmas except myself, and as none of that has pictures yet I won't bore you with it.  I did put a few more rows on Silas' Moderne, and toyed with the idea of picking out colors to make one for Ezra (grey, green, charcoal, and white?), but I don't expect either to come to fruition this year, or even next.

I did however make some gifts.  I made a whole bunch of ornaments, a few of which you can see here:

The snowmen come from this recipe for a cornstarch/baking soda dough.  It makes for a lovely, smooth, very white ornament (provided you don't over-toast them . . . ) that almost feels like porcelain.  The black details are Sharpie, and the scarves are glitter glue.  Thank goodness for glitter glue.  Remember the dark ages of drawing your designs with white glue, and then shaking loose glitter over it, oh so delicately pressing the glitter into the glue, shaking the excess off, getting glitter everywhere except where you really wanted it?  Don't get me wrong, that still sounds like fun.

I used the same cornstarch dough to make two of these;

Terribly rough, but the grandparents were enchanted.  I wish I had made impressions of Silas' newborn sized feet, but I remember at the time being way too exhausted to attempt any such thing.  Having done it with Ezra, I can attest that it's almost not worth it, trying to wrestle a newborn into making a good impression.

I tried using salt dough and mitten templates to make ornaments of Silas' handprints this year, but it was a lost cause - it is perhaps unsurprisingly more difficult to get a squirmy two-year-old to make a good handprint than trying to get those feetprints from the infant.

For the cinnamon ornaments, I combined a few different recipes and came up with:

1/2 c. ground cinnamon
1/2 c. applesauce
2 Tbsp. white glue
2 Tbsp. loose glitter
1 Tbsp. cloves
1 tsp. mace (because I couldn't find nutmeg - if you use nutmeg, use a tablespoon)

Mix it all together, wrap it in plastic wrap and allow to sit for an hour on the countertop, knead it a few times on a cinnamon dusted surface, roll it out under a sheet of waxed paper to 1/4", and go crazy with the cookie cutters.  I misjudged my thickness and many of the ornaments were only 1/8" thick; much curling and fragility were the result.  Make holes in the tops with toothpicks or a drinking straw, and bake on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet in a preheated oven at 200 degrees for 2 hours or until dry, flipping the ornaments halfway through.  Transfer to a I used a silver Sharpie decorate the gingerbread men, and more glitter glue on the one little round ornament.  I was tempted to decorate the rest as well, but I really liked the way they looked plain, so I held back.  Next year I may make more, and then the glue may run a little more freely (especially if Silas helps).

I hope you all had very merry holidays!

Catching up on the FOs Friday

Here's to mad one-handed typing skills, brought to you by one of my most recent and highly anticipated FOs:

Ezra Lee, born November 26th, a couple days late as far as the due date and a couple weeks later than everyone expected based on my rate of dilation, but this child won't be rushed on anything.  He was 8 lbs, 10 oz, 21 and 3/4" long, perfectly healthy other than a mild case of jaundice (nothing that a little sunbathing at home in the warm sunny windows won't take care of, I have been reassured), and to my own particular glee, he has my hair:

It may well lighten up as he gets older, but I hope not.  

Of course, he needed a stocking.

I used the same Mason-Dixon Knitting: Outside the Lines pattern that I used for Silas' stocking, and just reversed the red and green .  My fair-isle was much looser this time, making those portions ever so slightly larger than the plain stockinette, which is annoying, but not so much so as to tempt me towards trying to steam-block RHSS.

I also made a couple of headband style earwarmers.

Both are made using the Morning Walk Headband Earwarmer pattern with a few mods.  For the fuchsia band I used bulky weight yarn (Malabrigo Chunky in Fucsia - absolutely delicious) instead of the super bulky that the pattern calls for, which turned out fine as far as gauge went, but I forgot to allow for my gigantic noggin and blithely made it to the length in the pattern.  So now my mom has a spiffy new headband earwarmer.  What is family for but to provide us with a variety of body types and sizes so that when things don't fit us they don't go to waste?  The other mod in Fuchsia's case is that I swapped out the flower in the pattern for the more striking Crochet Picot Flower.  I like picots.

The festive headband is made in Wool-Ease Thick and Quick (color Oatmeal), which while not as buttery soft and dreamy to work with as the Malabrigo, is cozy and warm, and this time I added an inch and half to the length of the piece so it actually stays over my ears.  I was tickled by the idea of a very Christmas-y earwarmer, so I subbed in some holly for this one, using the Holly Bookmark pattern, obviously omitting the bookmark chain and replacing the thread called for with a double strand of RHSS.

Finally (and it only took two years), I finished this little elf ornament from Knit Picks.

The red and white are Sockenwolle, the face and hands are a double strand of Alpaca with a Twist Fino, and the body and feet are Lane Cervinia Forever Jacquard.  I went with jingle bells instead of pompoms, because teensy pompoms were more than I could manage.

I also made a couple of Dorset buttons for a swap, based on directions from Jane Austen Knits Fall 2013, this tutorial, and a little improvisation.  And beads.  If there's an option to add beads, I will always opt for that.  The swap was a simple ornament swap (my partner went a leeeetle overboard and sent me not only an ornament, but also cookies, tea, cocoa, coloring books . . .) with a Jane Austen theme.  Dorset is where Delaford is located in "Sense and Sensibility," so the button idea seemed appropriate.  Finding a ring big enough for the ornament I had in mind was trickier than I expected, though I have since discovered that there are places online that supply exactly what I was looking for, and I ended up using a 2" welded ring that I finally located at the local hardware store.  You can't beat the hardware store for those odd items that you only need one or two of without having to buy a whole package of whatever.  Just need four drywall screws?  You buy just four, and they put them in a cute little brown paper sack that makes you feel like you just left Olsen's Store in Plum Creek.  If only they carried stick candy (which can be had around here at the local apple orchard, which is awesome and made Silas the happiest two year old in September, I can tell you).  The yarn is the same Sockenwolle that I used for the elf ornament, and the beads are size 6/0 (E) glass seed beads, also from my stash.  The button sized button was made from a Boye stitch marker and size 10 crochet thread.  The trickiest thing about making the buttons is figuring out how to hide the ends.

   

Connections

This little guy is on the move.

As you can see, Autumn is here, the leaves are changing and blanketing our yards, and there's a chill in the air that has me bundling the baby up with extra care.

Those are hand-knitted fingerless gloves on that baby.  This is the first time he's worn them willingly, without fighting or pulling them off.  It's a nice feeling, clothing your child in something you've made.

Mmmm, wool.

They're the Sucky Thumb mitts pattern, done up using two strands of Berocco Sox held together.  It made for very nice little stripes.  It's not the softest yarn in the world, even after washing, but they're holding up well to several encounters with the concrete driveway.  Walking is hard.

I still have lots of the yarn left, so I'm using it to test-knit a hat for Cowtownknits on Ravelry.  Pictures to come later.  It's an in-between project, because mainly I'm still working on swap stuff.  That involves mohair and beads, and sometimes I need a break from that insanity.  Sometimes I just need a simple hat in simple wool, in a pattern that doesn't require six stitchmarkers and a row counter and four pages of instructions and a bag of beads and a crochet hook . . .

As the weather's been turning colder, I've been doing more cooking, which has also been easier on our bank accounts (for how little money we have, we have an absurd number of accounts to keep it in).  Soups, stews, and skillet meals are the order of the day.  Ryan brought home a bag of potatoes one day, a few weeks before the cold snap, actually.  I don't cook a lot with potatoes - too much prep/cooking time, as far as I'm concerned.  However, a bag of potatoes I had and since a few were rotten, I figured I'd better cook p as many as I could before the rest caught the bug.  On my next day off, I decided to make potato soup.  I budgeted my time with an eye towards Silas taking a nap before dinner.  The parents among my readership can well imagine how that went down.  Not only would he not take a nap, he would not self-entertain.  He wanted Mama.  Folks, there is no good way to hold a toddler and peel potatoes at the same time.  There isn't a good way to hold a toddler and wash potatoes at the same time.  I was at the end of my rope, and there was only one thing I could think of doing (well, two, but I couldn't wait for my mom to drive three hours to come babysit).

I took everything outside.

I filled an ice cream bucket with hot water, brought out my veggie wash spray, and sat on the bottom step of our front porch and scrubbed potatoes for all the neighbors to see.  After some trial and error, I discovered the only way to keep Silas out of the potato water bucket was to get him his own bucket, and he happily splashed in it next to me, gathering a thick coating of mud on his clothes and his rubber ducks.  I felt a nice connection to my ancestors, who quite likely also did a lot of prep work out of doors, to get out of smoky, dark kitchens and make the most of fresh air and light.

Now, our next-door neighbors have four children, and they were hosting some daycare children while the kids' normal provider was laid up with a broken hip, and it turns out that there is nothing more fascinating in the world to young children than someone doing something perfectly ordinary like washing and peeling potatoes in an un-ordinary setting like OUTSIDE.  Also, small children like babies.  So I quickly found myself faced with a semi-circle of children ranging in age from 3 to 9, all absolutely engrossed in what my son and I were doing.  Mr. Next-Door was pretty confused about the interest garnered by potatoes, but it's easy to forget that anything can be interesting if you've never seen it done a certain way before.  And EVERYTHING is more interesting if there's a baby involved.

This picture wouldn't be half so fun to look at if it were just my unraked yard, right?

Anyway, there's something about scrubbing and peeling potatoes that, even in the kitchen, makes me feel this close connection to all the women in my family, present and past.  How many generations of my family have made potato soup or latkes or stews with hearty chunks of potato?  I get the same feeling when I make bread from scratch, and of course when I'm knitting.  It's one of the things I love best about both activities - they're ancient, and they're ways to keep my family warm, either from the inside out with a good garlic potato soup, or from the outside in with a pair of fingerless gloves or a stocking cap.

Yeah, I occasionally knit for this guy, too.  

Cakes

I like to bake.  My birthday was yesterday, but I had to work, so cake today!

Today's cake I made from a Cook's Illustrated recipe - "Emergency Chocolate Cake."  It's adapted from a wartime rationing cake that uses mayonnaise instead of butter and eggs, which is great, because we have neither eggs nor butter.  I had to replace the bittersweet chocolate it called for with regular unsweetened Baker's chocolate, and the adapted recipe also called for one egg, so I fudged it with ground flax seed.  The box claims that if you add water and let it sit to gel up, flax meal can replace an egg.  We'll see.  It was supposed to be made in a square 8" pan, which I don't own, so I used two 8" round pans for a layer cake.  The frosting is a recipe I found online that calls for 1/4 c. of sour cream, 1 c. chocolate chips, 2 c. powdered sugar, and 1 tsp. vanilla.  I used Baker's again, mixed with more powdered sugar and a little milk, and I added 1/2 c. or so of coffee to try to get a really rich dark chocolate flavor.  Nailed it!  Lovely rich stuff, should have put more between the layers, but I'll think of something to do with the leftovers.

Speaking of leftovers, the green icing is leftovers from Silas' first birthday.

This was stolen from Pinterest.  The original pinner used mini cupcakes and a large can, I just went full-sized on the cupcakes and used an 8" cake.  I used boxed cake mix for the cake and the cupcakes, and the green frosting is canned frosting with food coloring added, the yellow icing is Cake Mate from a tube.  The nose, antennae, and feet are piped melted chocolate chips, and the red and green on the head are 'modeling chocolate,' except that I used generic white chips instead of white chocolate, because it was so much cheaper.  Now I have an absurd amount of modeling mostly-wax leftover that I'm not sure what to do with.  I had a lot of fun scribbling on the parchment paper to draw all the different foods with caterpillar holes in them, though magic markers + parchment paper doesn't work especially well.  Silas didn't mind one way or the other.

Putter Putter

I cooked up some laundry detergent (using Redshirt Knitting's "Bucket of White Slime" directions), and afterwards discovered that I had added about a half-gallon or so more water than I should have, so we'll find out tomorrow if it's too diluted to be any good.  On the bright side, even if it is I'm only out about 97 cents, plus small amounts of borax and washing soda.  If all of my cooking mishaps were this cheap I wouldn't lament them so much (the several pounds of stew meat that I've mangled trying to freeze and thaw come to mind . . .).

In the process I learned:

1) Grating soap is much less difficult than I thought it would be.  Much like grating cheese.  Somewhat relaxing.

2) Soap takes a long time to melt, or I have a really short attention span.  Probably the latter.

The really big news of the day is that I found my iPod!  It's only been missing for two years now!  It was in one of my knitting bags.  I was cleaning the living room (stop laughing), and I was about to put a half-finished afghan into the bag when I looked down and saw the little plastic pouch.

My heart skipped a beat.  I picked it up with shaking hands.  I looked at Silas, and asked him in a voice tense with emotion, "Do you know what this is?"  He looked at me, decided I wasn't going to give him anything to chew on, and went back to playing with a toy golf ball.  I leaped up and grabbed my phone, and texted Ryan, who shared in my enthusiasm a little more.  My iPod!  My music!  No more jumping from radio station to radio station searching for something palatable!  No more aggravated attempts to tune out the shouting of my coworkers in the lounge!  It's a tiny room, people!  Your audience can hear you without having to bellow!













I am so happy right now.

The background is the somewhat-less-than-successful attempt at a log cabin Moderne Baby Blanket (from the pattern book in the previous picture (Mason-Dixon Knitting by Kay Gardiner and Ann Shay)).  As it turns out, individual colors of RHSS work up at different gauges.  It also turns out that I really hate log cabin afghans.  Mindless knitting isn't really mindless if you have to keep checking the pattern to see if you can FINALLY change colors.

It's UFO Thursday, so I picked out a few more stitches on this infernal thing.

I am getting no pleasure out of this project.  A coworker gave me the yarn (Red Heart Sashay) a few weeks before it exploded in popularity, and as I'm not a scarf-wearing type of person for the most part, and I remain generally uninspired by the legions of ruffled scarves being paraded past my desk, I decided to try something a little more offbeat and make a circular shawl.  It's taken many, many attempts to get it to work, and it's only my commitment to the finished object and baffling my coworker with its awesomeness that keeps me going.

No, I don't know why it really matters, but I've never let that stop me in the past.

Getting Back to Normal (or something like it)

I checked my email today, and discovered that there were a couple comments on my xanga.  "Really?" I thought.  "Someone still reads that?"

They turned out to be vague and spammish, but I took the opportunity to read over some of my old entries, and then I clicked over to Ravelry and it felt strangely empty.  Somehow a life full of knitting doesn't quite compare to how a life full of writing used to feel.  I'm not sure what I want to do in the face of that realization.

I was sick yesterday.  I was amused to note that part of it was really nice (the part where I got to stay in bed and read knitting magazines while sipping Sprite while in the distance I could hear my husband vacuuming and playing patty-cake with Silas), the rest was about what you'd expect - writhing in agony on the bathroom floor in between bouts of dry heaving and the horrible-yet-glorious-relief of actually throwing up.

Today I feel much better, and I am looking forward with great anticipation to eating something other than soda crackers and chicken broth.

I finally, finally, finally finished my Belle Ruffle fingerless gloves last month.

I wore them out on Saturday with my new purple coat and the paisley scarf Amber gave me eons ago and I felt very colorful and uniquely styled.  Indeed, while I was standing in line at the cafe in BAM! I looked around and thought, "For once in my life, I think I might fit in to a scene."  Of course, then I took my iced chai and my copy of VogueKnitting, stripped off my coat and gloves, and used the scarf as a nursing cover up, got lots of funny looks from the college crowd, and the feeling kind of dissipated.  A few minutes later Ryan got out of Best Buy and tapped on the window, and Silas's face lit up and they waved and cooed at each other while I improvised the scarf into a kind of sling so that I could carry the heaviest baby in the world on my hip without collapsing from the effort (he's getting so big!), and I mused that being a creative Mom with a happy baby and a great husband was an even better feeling.

As we were checking out at the bookstore the cashier gushed over how pretty and cool the gloves were, too, so my day was officially made.

On the needles right now I have a baby dress that I was mostly making for the sheer joy of making a tiny dress, and tentatively it was going to be for one friend's new baby girl if I could complete it before she'd outgrow it, but then I found out that my friend Angel is having a baby girl in a few months, which gives me time not only to finish this dress (optimistically), but also hopefully to make some accessories to go with it, because I've had my eye on a couple baby patterns from Jane Austen Knits, Fall 2012 . . .

I made Silas a pair of fingerless gloves because his hands are often freezing, and because the whimsy of making teeny tiny fingerless gloves is not lost on me, but thus far he refuses to wear them.  He cries when I try to put them on him, and he'll pull them off with his teeth as soon as he gets the chance.  I'm debating whether it's worth weaving in the ends and blocking them.  They are very darn cute.

I made a little progress on my snowflake afghan, and then ran out of yarn, so that's back on the back burner for now.  I spent way too much at the LYS a few days ago; there will be no more yarn for a good long time. My stash is looking pretty comfortable right now compared with my queue, and I'm thinking if I can get my sewing machine back from storage that I might delve into some non-yarn related projects for a change of pace.  I've been in the kitchen more lately and I could really use a couple of aprons.

Falalalalala

Merry Christmas!  If you're Catholic, anyway!  Merry belated-Christmas to everyone else!


Lip service to Chanukah, which was way at the beginning of December this year!  I made a valiant attempt at latkes that was MUCH more successful than last year's, and even more so when I made them again a few days later (grating the onions instead of chopping them helped immensely, as did upping the salt, but I should have listened to my mother and used one egg instead of two; it's always one egg).

 I've also discovered that using enough oil to fry them in is essential.  Try as I might, a tablespoon or two just isn't enough.  There has to be some depth.  Anyway, we make latkes BECAUSE they're fried in oil (and apparently also to honor Judith, who has nothing to do with Chanukah, but latkes used to be made with cream cheese, and Judith tricked the enemy leader into getting drunk by feeding him lots of salty cheese and offering wine to wash it down, and then she beheaded him - it's in the Catholic Bible, apocrypha ahoy!)

I'm a little hyped up on a espresso.

We didn't do much for Chanukah besides eating latkes and doughnuts and lighting the candles, mainly because by 'we' I mean Silas and I, since Ryan was working most nights, and eight-month-olds, while appreciative of spinning tops, don't really play a  mean game of dreidel.  I did tell him the Chanukah story, but again, eight-month-old (incidently, you can also find  the events leading up to the Chanukah story in, drumroll, please, the Catholic Bible; Protestants, we are missing out).  Ryan had me watch the Rugrats Chanukah special, which was very cute, though I'm not a fan at all of the cartoon.  The voices, the animation, the character design, the music . . . it all gives me a feeling of repulsion, though I do find some of the jokes pretty clever.

As deeply as we value our Hebrew roots (well, mine anyhow), Christmas will pretty much always take top billing around here.  For one thing, there just isn't much call for Chanukah ornaments.  I'm told the Chanukah bush is a real thing in a lot of families, but not ours.  My mom barely tolerated the Christmas tree's tenuous tradition, given that Jesus probably never even saw a pine tree in all His days on Earth (we should have argued that He created them), but we put our tree up almost every year, and there's certainly no point to a Chanukah bush when you've got the real deal.  A few years ago, I decided I wanted to make at least one new ornament each Christmas, and I usually end up making several.

This year, I tried Romanian Point Lace.

Fascinating, fussy technique.  The end result is undeniably beautiful and very impressive, but it's going to be a while before I try it again.  That being said, I've already queued up this year's RPL ornament, because I enjoy subjecting myself challenges.

I also made a wee knit mousie.

 I can't begin to tell you how greatly he tickles my fancy, with his wee pink nose, beady eyes, little red hood with a green bauble, tiny bobble paws . . .

There is something deliciously satisfying about making ornaments from thread and/or fingering weight yarns.  The end result is so much more 'finished.'  I joined an ornament swap on Ravelry just to draw the feeling out, and while I was originally going to send the RPL holly, when I realized how much labor was going into it, I was unwilling to part with it.  In a fit of insanity, I made a Feegle instead.

He's made from the brilliant Beth Ann Webber's Mini Free Spirit pattern, on a much smaller scale - I used crochet thread instead of worsted yarn, because my partner was allergic to wool and acrylic.  Can we say pain in the neck?  Crocheting this with thread, not my partner's allergies!  But he turned out so feisty!  The hair was a pain, too - if I make another one down the road I'll probably give in and do a wig cap instead of latch-hooking all those little threads directly into his scalp.  I call him Wee-er-than-Wee-Jock-Jock.  I had grand plans to make him a genuine great kilt on tiny scale, but the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and I found it couldn't be done on the minute amount of patience I had left after making the doll, so he has a wee little skirt and a wee little sash, and the ittiest-bittiest little sporran, and looks for all the world like a dangerously mischievous blue girl scout with a beard.  My partner knew just what he was supposed to be, though, and was very pleased with him.  I drew up a little Christmas card that showed (roughly) a tree full of Feegles, stealing the ornaments and the gifts, and brawling with the angel. I thought it was pretty darn funny.  You can see her photo of it here; it also shows the teensy bit of holly I crocheted to ornament Jock's hanger, to make it more Christmas-y, modeled here on Silas's knee.  The berries are beads.

I received in turn an adorable little crocheted Christmas tree from Finland.  I love it!  It's made from some kind of popcorn stitch, I think, and it has a lovely heft to it.  I think the garland looks like icing, and the bitty star on top is too adorable.  I couldn't stop smiling when I opened the package.

A little research reveals that she used this pattern from Planet June.  Very pretty.  I love the idea of a seed bead garland, and I'm really curious about the bobbley stitch the tree is made of.

I also started an elf and an angel, but in the flurry of gift-knitting (and crocheting, of course), they were sadly set aside to be finished later for 2013's tree