What else has been going on

There have been a few things I worked on this fall/beginning of winter that weren't gifts for this Christmas, so I need to catch the blog up.

In November, I got tired of DD1's constant declarations of desire for an infinity scarf (cowl) and made her one.

The yarn is some Knit Picks Diadem that I picked up for an absolute song at a (Cyber Monday, I think) sale last year. It's a single ply yarn, which I'm not fond of knitting with, but with a 50% alpaca/50% silk blend and such fantastic colours, I didn't really care. :) This turquoise colourway was always intended to be for DD1, since it's her favourite colour. I originally had another cowl pattern in mind to use it with, but I went instead with Two Sides by Ariel Barton, from Knitty, which is an a-maz-ing reversible scarf pattern - that's right, reversible cables! I basically just knitted until almost all of the skein was gone, and then joined the ends together to make it into an infinity cowl. It's perfect and she looks terrific in it, IMNSHO.

There were two design projects that I completed, one for DD1's friend's birthday present, and the other just because the idea came to me and I had to do it. I'm very much hoping to get them accepted by some publications in the next while.

My older BIL's Christmas present was originally supposed to be a pair of Flying Geese socks, made out of sock yarn leftovers, but although the pattern is incredibly cool and I like it a lot, for some reason it took me a long time to make any headway on it. So I eventually abandoned it for a quicker pair. I expect I'll revisit the Flying Geese sometime this year for his 2016 Christmas present.

And then, the family friend I was making the Twinkle romper for had her baby, and for some reason, the thought of finishing up the romper was just not appealing anymore. (It was taking forever.) So I cast on with some super-cheerfully yellow cotton for a Summer Pelisse:

You can see it's mostly done (and has actually been partly sewn together since the picture was taken), I just have to finish it up. Fortunately, it's fairly sizable, so it'll still fit the baby by the time I finish. But first I have to do the January deadline knitting.

There's my grandmother's 100th birthday sweater, which tonight I picked up for the first time since I wrote about it in October. (It may end up being a vest.) And then there's DD1's boyfriend's bar mitzvah present. I'm going to make him a tallit - probably Annie Modesitt's Max's Tallit pattern, since I really don't have time at this point to go through the trial-and-error process of designing one myself. (Although I will probably replace the "Sh'ma Israel" text around the neck with the young man's Hebrew name, and duplicate-stitch it rather than knit it in.)

Both to be done by mid-January.

[manically nervous giggle]