On the home stretch

The end of my holiday knitting is in sight! I've got one last project to finish up and then I'm done. So what snuck into my knitting queue at the end of last month? Another Peak's Island, this time in the to-die-for (or rather, tweak-the-rules-on-the-stash-diet) Malabrigo Rios.

I knit the seed stitch portion above the shell pattern while we watched the new Denzel Washington movie over Thanksgiving weekend - this is a good pattern for dark movie theaters.

But what about the stash diet? Yes, yes, I know, the stash diet is a bit of a sore subject around here and this project fell into one of the few exceptions I had left in the rules: gifts for which I had no appropriate stash yarn.

My mom and sister came out to visit for Thanksgiving weekend and we got to show them just how cold and windy it can get here in Chicago. Of course, this also meant that I got to show off what a great winter accessory Peaks Island is (paired with a hat, of course). So it was only natural that my mom and I decided that a Peaks Island Hood would be the perfect gift for her. I knew I didn't have anything appropriate in the stash (shocking, really, given the shear size of the stash at this point), my mom fell in love with Rios when we went to my LYS (who wouldn't?), and the shop had a 20% off sale. What else was I supposed to do? Besides, it's a quick project and I'll be back to stash busting soon enough.

Seriously, how can you resist this yarn?

Alright, time for me to get back to work. I hope to have this project finished in the next day or two. Don't worry, I'm much farther along than the first picture would suggest. It's completely doable . . . I think.