A pile of Christmas stockings waiting for Grandma and Grandpa to fill them and deliver on Friday.

Have you finished all your projects? Mine include two scarves, a hat, earwarmers, all waiting to be wrapped. Then there is that one Christmas stocking that I’m finishing for the new grandbaby. Heading around the heel so think all is good with time to spare. WHEW! I always leave things to the last minute!

Merry Christmas to all and may all your unfinished projects be as simple as my last one. And Click says, one of these is mine, right? She’s already gotten her present – balls with rattles inside that make wonderful (depending on your point of view) noise bouncing down the stairs.

PolarKnit Yarn

 This is just a simple rolled brim hat knitted in the PolarKnit yarn we just received. Soft with the promise of great warmth. It took just over 2 balls of the yarn and this fits an average size 21″ head. Try it out.

Almost finished and feeling pretty good about not wasting any of that yarn. Just missing the second thumb. Weather outside feels like I will appreciate them in the next day or two. I really like the longer cuff. There always seems to be a gap between coat sleeve and glove/mitten but not with these. And I see I still have some ends to run under. Even though I had loose ends with every color change you see, it wasn’t bad for most of the mittens because I used the technique we learned when doing mitered squares so no ends in the end.   And if you look closely you can see our kitty ready to leap into this photo.

After knitting 26 or more autumn leaves for the KnitXperience Retreat, I had a ton of odds and ends left over of the Silk Garden DK yarn because I wanted each one to be a different color so I pulled the balls all apart to get to the colors I wanted. Needless to say I had a mess (which our cat Click loves) and I really did want to do something with the remains. I needed a pair of fingerless mittens for myself and voila, got one done and on to the next one. (The drawback being the nasty number of ends I had to secure at the end.)

I used this pattern I found on the internet (scroll down on the right side of her blog), changed it a little because I didn’t want the flip top and wanted my thumb to have some air. Other than that, I knitted it the same. I tell you, this is the easiest pattern for mittens. Try it out. And if you’re striping in the ribbing, don’t forget the neat trick when you change colors, to knit that first row with the new color to avoid the color change bumps. Oh yes, the magic loops is grand for this!

What a cool spiral design and the yarn is terrific too. The design is the hurricane hat found on Ravelry and the yarn is an Araucania yarn called, Panguipulli, which comes in big 194 yard skeins and is very soft. The back of the hat is sorta slouched in the photo but only because of the way it is sitting, not it’s design. It is knit in the round. The Panguipulli is unimpressive in the photos of the yarn but it is truly a lovely yarn.

Calm Wool is the yarn

I saw this in Elsebeth Lavold’s book # 13 , Out of the Woods, and the fit over the shoulders really caught my eye. She knit it in her Baby Llama yarn and I chose to knit it in her Calm Wool yarn. I am half way, and when finished, it will extend from my elbows to neck and tie in the front. The colors repeat as it continues. What’s nice is that with every color change, there is a 15 stitch decrease so it goes a little faster each time. Am I impatient or what?