Done with Christmas

I did not fall off the face of the earth, unlike it might have appeared. Sorry about that. I’m taking part in Holidailies over at A Cat By Any Other Name, which is my regular, non-knitting journal, and between that and the frantic pre-Christmas knitting – made infinitely worse by all those damn scarves I had to do for the food fight – and also coming down with the death virus of ’05 (ear infection and sinus infection because just one wouldn’t have been nearly ‘fun’ enough!), I just ran out of any time or energy to update here.

So, speaking of all those food fight scarves. The 18th marked the last day of the church food drive. It was the last morning to collect food, and I am so very, very glad that we do not have to make more scarves for the final pile of donations because my team donated so much I think I would have had to make possibly up to ten more scarves and I think that would break me. I am so amazingly sick of making scarves.

My knitting mom and I passed out all of the scarves we had so far, which ‘equalled’ the 2700 pounds of food donated, and got 27 people to come up to the front as a visible indication of just how much the church had accomplished. Even though I would probably cry from having to make the scarves to match it, it would have been even more fun to bring up a crowd of 40 people, since final totals stand at just a bit over 4000 pounds. But considering the aforementioned scarf-knitting-overload issue, I can live with this teeny little disappointment.

Once the scarf knitting was finally done, one might have thought it would have been smooth sailing til Christmas. But that was before the cold from hell attacked me. Plus there was the matter of not having the right size needles and also having a pattern that turned out to be wrong no matter what I or anyone else tried to do to figure it out, and the most complicated project I needed to do did not even get started until Thursday. Ha ha ha! Fun times!

But I actually did get it all finished, and even though I was up at 1:30 am on Christmas morning pinning out the doily for blocking, and even though I was sewing eyes onto five snowmen in the dark on the road up to Napa at 6 in the morning in order to get them done to hand out to little kids, and even though I was webbing the feet on the platypus and adding the eyes on Christmas afternoon, after I’d already gifted him, it still counts as done by Christmas.

Now I am heaving huge sighs of relief, especially since a wonderful doctor gave me magic pills (zithromax) to make the death virus go away and allow me to not only hear with both ears, but to breathe through my own nose again. The only project still on the plate is the secret one, but I have until New Year’s Eve to finish that one and there is so little left to do that it wil require no late nights at all. And I am in such a happy place, having finished all my Christmas knitting on time, that I even gleefully encouraged my little sister to pick out some gorgeous fluffy Lion Brand Homespun to whip up a scarf (yes, another scarf!) and a hat for her before she heads back to Seattle. I have all week off from work! I have nothing but time!

So in the meantime, here are pictures.

The platypus, made from random worsted weight acrylic. Pattern is from World of Knitted Toys. Eyes are buttons from my mom’s magical can of buttons that has been passed down through generations, and which I will get if I am very lucky some day.

Yes, more snowmen! Are you as sick of snowmen as I am? Ha ha! There are only three here because this picture was taken after I handed them all out and I really did not want to go searching through my older sister’s house to try to find the other two. There is one more with sparkly hat and scarf set (those three were for the little kids, naturally) and one more with a red hat and a green and white striped scarf. The non-sparkly ones were for my two sisters. And with that, we are done with the snowmen! Done!

And this – oh, I am pretty damn proud of this. Size 0 needles. #30 crochet cotton. Pattern is here. I liked it so much I am strangely tempted to make more doilies, even though I have no clue what the heck I would do with them. Quick, someone wave sock yarn under my nose until the feeling passes!