Happy New Year!

It's been a pretty big year for me. I moved cross country, started school, and subsequently lost any glimmer of my former care-free nature. All in all, it's been a good year. Our power went out last night so we spent the night huddled under seven blankets, praying that we would have all of our toes in the morning. Thankfully our heat came back on about 20 minutes ago and we can take our parkas off.
I was going through my yearly New Year's knitting roll call of FOs and realized that the list is pretty short. I've been knitting constantly, and yet my stack of woolen goods is light. I planned on knitting four sweaters this year. How many sweaters did I start? Three. How many finished sweaters do I have? Zero. Not a damn one. Eek. That's okay. I managed to finish some other stuff.

This is what my mom's cowl ended up looking like:



She really liked it, so I guess that's a success. Oh and by the way, LMKG times this one at 6-8 hours. It took me about twelve. Go fig.

Andrew had the flu on Christmas eve so I stayed home with him while my family was busy merry-making. I used the extra hour or so to finish my dad's scarf. Here's my dad. He likes it.



I spent Suday night knitting the Army Earflap cap for my friend Atom:



Due to the lack of heat and the densly knit bulky wool, this fucker has had a hell of a time drying. I don't have to give it to Atom until Saturday, so hopefully it will dry by then.

One last thing I knitted way back in February for our first trip to Chicago:



Blurry mittens! Actually, these are about 30% less blurry in person. They're knit out of Plymouth Galway with D.B. Cashmerino stripes. The left mitten is about 1/2 an inch longer than the right. Would you believe that I have a grotesquely misproportate left flipper? I don't, but it's awful to admit that I can't hold an unfinished mitten to it's partner and think "Hey, one of these is not like the other!" Alas.

I started something for Andrew last night before the power went out. Let me preface this by saying he picked out the colors.



Andrew has a unique sense of color that clicks about 70% of the time. I have knit him some truely horrendous creations over the years from yarn he picked out. I'm trying to both forget everything I know about color theory as well as save this hat from being able to be used as a method of torture akin to water boarding. Wish me luck.

Have a fantastic 2008, my friends.