21 Days

{Yarning Along with Ginny today. Will you join us?}

Maybe you didn't need a reminder, but there are 21 days until Christmas.

I'm ready with everything but handmades. I didn't promise the boys sweaters for Christmas (even though I did plan for them to be Christmas gifts), but I did promise them in time to actually wear through this winter. Ender's sweater is taking shape- 2 long black sleeves and about 4 inches of body. Ezra's has yet to be cast on. Maybe they will be finished by mid-January while we have plenty of cold days left in the season?

I had to put them aside temporarily in favor of Christmas knits. I'm aiming for a knit hat for each kid, and a new sewn stocking for each of us. There are also Ezra's mittens on the needles, and Ender asked for another pair as well out of the fiber he picked out that I finished over this past weekend. Right now it is Ezra's hat on the needles: Wurm by Katharina Nopp. I've seen this hat just about everywhere amongst knitters online and it is such an Ezra hat. I hope he likes it as much as I think he will.


I'm using magic loop for this hat. I haven't been a fan of this particular technique in the past, but it's growing on me for hat knitting. We'll see if I like it as much by the end of the project. I cast on on Sunday so it's going fast enough with as little knitting time as I've had in the past 48 hours, but it does continue to grow and hopefully I'll be one hat down by the end of the week, 2 more to go.

Now to decide on a hat pattern for the baby and another for the big brother. Suggestions welcome.

Ann Voskamp's The Greatest Gift has been such a lovely addition to my advent preparations. In the past I've focused so much on Advent readings and activities for the kids that I haven't had something to read myself and this has been great. Fairly short readings that fit in even on the busiest days and, of course, Ann Voskamp's inspiring writing. The boys and I are also reading Jotham's Journey by Arnold Ytreeide this Advent season.

Spin It Up

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday if you were in the States for Thanksgiving last week. It was nice to see family and catch up with friends.


I totally thought I'd get a knitting post in before the holiday last week, at least in time for the weekly Yarn Along, but it just didn't happen between work and holiday prep. To be honest, I haven't been knitting more than a little bit at the end of the evening. It's Lola's fault really. All my dedicated creative time has been going to her, and now I have a little bit of yarn to show for it:

The blue is a mystery wool that I received in class 2 weeks ago when I first got my wheel. It was good practice and while it's not as even as I'd like, I definitely got better as I went. I ended up with about 150 yards of this one in a mostly fingering weight 2-ply. No knitting plans for it yet, but I'm happy with how it turned out for my first yarn that wasn't just trying to figure out how the wheel worked.


The fire-y colored fiber is 4 oz. of Polwarth from Nerd Girl Yarns, colorway: Firebender. Ender picked it out at Maker's Faire back in June and requested mittens, which I think I can manage after spinning this up. It was really easy to spin. The blue wasn't difficult by any means, but this Polwarth seemed to just *want* to be more even, and it was a lot easier to make it so. This yarn is also a 2-ply and I got about 170 yards. This one was also interesting to spin due to how the colors worked together. I wasn't sure if I was going to get longer stretches of color some of the time or if the plying would blend the colors so much that there would be no discernible change. I'm excited to see how it knits up.