Merry midwinter feast of your choice

My midwinter feast of choice is Christmas, and I started decorating yesterday — I have almost completely dropped the ball and haven’t bought a present or written a card, though I did go grocery shopping, so it’s not a complete wash.

I did however pull out the Christmas decorations and decorate a house plant for a tree (it’s my new Norfolk pine):

There was a  bit of a snow storm yesterday:

Yes, that is snow almost halfway up my window — it’s quite charming today, but I am a little concerned that it will stay there all winter.  We are on the second floor, so surely it will blow off or fall off on someone’s head in a big clump.  If having a bird leave, um — droppings — shall we say, on your shoulder is lucky, them a big pile of snow on your head must be too.

And please remember, when you bite into that gingerbread cookie, that symbolic human sacrifice is an important part of the tradition.

Have a wonderful celebration of light coming back into the world.

Merry Christmas!

On procrastinating and witching it up

I have been procrastinating on washing this sweater, and now it is June and it still hasn’t been worn. I have been working on it since last August — you would think that was enough time to get the only handmade Christmas present I made last year finished in time, but alas no.

I was enjoying how the sweater looked in the water and thinking about potions and other elixirs whipped up in the kitchen. Perhaps I should start dyeing?

It is no longer really getting later, as it is now too warm to wear it.

On the 132nd day of Christmas

Okay, so I was a little disheartened about the whole Christmas present sweater fiasco. I was so demoralized about having to undo the stitching and unraveling the sleeve caps (again) that I kept procrastinating on fixing the problem. Then my mother came to visit, and she suggested just pinning the extra fabric, stitching it, the trimming it, and finishing the edges.

Now I have read about this kind of thing, and I know you can cut your knitting in this way, but I was never sufficiently frustrated to try it before (you see, I am used to my projects turning out).

The whole exercise has been a success and here is a little tutorial in case it ever happens to you:

Here is what the shoulders looked like before:

They were in fact worse than they appear in the photo if you can credit it.

The next step was putting the sweater on inside out and pinning it where the seam should be:

After this I basted the shoulder where it seemed like it should be, I did a few iterations of trying on and fixing the seam:

After I was happy with the seam placement, I sewed another line of stitching about three quarters of a centimetre from the first one and trimmed it:

Eek, my knitting is cut. This is something I never wanted to happen:

But in the end it was all worth it, as now it is actually wearable:

So that is the last of my Christmas presents for 2007, yeah!