Lots and Lots of Christmas Knitting

I have actually been knitting up a storm over here during the past week. Most of the knitting has been done on one project: a sparkly scarf for my mom. My mom has arthritis in her hands and it has been acting up recently because she has been knitting steadily on her Christmas stocking for this year. This has been preventing her from knitting the sparkly yarn she bought at our somewhat-local yarn store. She asked me if I would knit the scarf for her and if I could get it done in time for her work's holiday party. Of course I said I would!

I have a few more repeats to go until it is done. I can't really get a good picture of it yet because it is a bit of lace and whenever you try to get a picture of unblocked lace it just looks terrible.

I have also been working on a few hats for the survivors of Hurricane Sandy. As I was making them I discovered the pleasure of working with big needles and bulky yarn. It is like instant gratification! They were so quick to make. The only downside is that I couldn't knit on them for a long period of time because big needle knitting is really hard on my hands.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see that the hats show no sign of pooling even though I used a variegated yarn. I discovered a trick to preventing it. The yarn I used was a worsted-weight yarn, so I ended up triple stranding it. The colors landed wherever they wanted to, but it looks exactly like it does in the skein. I don't mind pooling, but I thought that this was a pretty awesome way to prevent it. Might not be the most practical way to prevent it, but I love the way it looks and people look good in bulky hats.

It has finally reached the end of the year and I have a feeling that this December is going to be slightly crazy around my house. It will be my first real Christmas season at home for four years and my brother will be coming back home from college to get his very own job. Hopefully the job searching will pay off and I will be able to start my own career soon.

The only tree up around our house so far is my little miniature tree that my mom got for me when I was in college. I decided to do things a little bit different and set my blind bag ponies up in the tree. I am pretty sure that my cat approves even though I had to discourage her from stealing one of the ponies.