It may get a little dicey here on the blog prior to Christmas. I’m pretty deep in my Christmas knitting, so I’m not going to have a ton of new stuff to show you yet, but I think I can skim around the edges and hopefully not bore you too much between now and January.

I’m working on something for one Christmas gift that I’m pretty happy with and I’ve just turned the 50% corner. I tried to zoom the camera in really close and get a sneak peak for you, but it was worthless, so, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it is pretty cool and a lovely pic or two will be up in January.

What I can show you is how when I was trying it on, I managed to break my first skinny wooden needle! This was completely due to user error as I usually try on this item on four needles and somehow took leave of my senses and tried it on while the stitches were on three. This one needle could not bend quite far enough!

Hunter Hammersen called for more test knitters and I jumped at the chance. This time, she needed a sock knit. The one I was assigned required thicker yarn, so I started with some 100% wool Hacho (Mirasol) that I bought a couple of years ago at Hill Country Weaver’s annual yard sale. Meghan expressed some doubts that the pattern would look good in this yarn, but I’ve been trying really hard to knit from my stash lately, so Friday night while TH was bowling, I gave it a whirl.

I honestly cannot decide if I like this or not, but I wasn’t in the mood to do mediocre knitting, so I headed off to Gauge in search of the PERFECT yarn.

While at Gauge, I found some lovely green malibrigo and MadelineTosh DK Silver Fox that would work. Green or gray? hmmm.

• These socks are for a guy, so I asked the random husband that happened to be in Gauge which he preferred (the gray) and had a quick conversation with his wife about how great knittinghelp.com is.
• I have some green malibrigo fingering weight in my stash and I’ve been wanting to try some Madeline Tosh.
• After seeing the gray/blue sock on Hunter’s blog, I’d already named this pattern Earl Grey Socks in my head.

Only problem was that they only had one hank. Carli was nice enough to let me know she actually had some leftover from one of her projects in the back that she could part with if I ended up needing more…the universe votes grey!

I will need 20g more and Monday, she made me a deal on 30g…. Thanks, Carli!!!

Ps. More on this pattern later, but I really enjoyed it!

I bought two pumpkins to carve. Turned out the first took a little more blood, sweat and time than I was planning, so I decided to paint the second one. There were grand plans for stencilling green shimmery leaves all over this pumpkin and how it was going to look magical. Lisa said, “I don’t have good luck painting stencils on round surfaces; you should pencil in all the leaves and go back and paint.” I scoffed at that, mostly because there was no way I was contributing that much time to my second pumpkin project this fall.
So, early Saturday morning, I got up and began to paint the first leaf with the stencil. Saying it looked a hot mess would be putting it mildly. It was unrecognizable as a leaf. Super. The nice thing about being wrong more than I care to admit….oh wait, I blog about it a lot…..is that I’m really good at recovery and coming up with a plan b. I had a pumpkin and some shimmery green paint…..hmmm.
I decided to stripe it. Overall, the number of sections worked out perfectly. I only had to do two coats and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. When asked for comment, TH said, “It looks like a gourd.” with a shrug. Behold – my second decorated pumpkin!

Ps. I enjoyed the most recent Harold and Kumar movie and I catnapped during the Rum Diary. If Johnny Depp can’t keep me awake, I cannot think I missed much.