Un-resolutions

Happy New Year!

It's been a little while (ok, a long while) since I've blogged here and I really meant to kick off the new year with a post outlining my goals and resolutions for the new year. I still intend to do that, just not today. Life happened and somehow my goal from last weekend of "finally come up with actual goals for 2013 and blog about them to hold yourself accountable" stretched to be this weekend's goal and then morphed into "write a blog post because you've been meaning to do that for a month."

Blog post it is.

In honor of the season, here are the last FO of 2012 and the first FO of 2013:

(Yes, I did hand my daughter an iPhone to see if that would help her sit still long enough for me to snap a non-action shot. We haven't quite gotten the hang of modeling for the camera yet.)

The last FO from 2012 is Rossbeg from Carol Feller's book Contemporary Irish Knits. The pattern is clear and well written and, most importantly, the book is available as a Kindle edition! This is great for me since I rarely use paper patterns anymore but usually have a device with a Kindle app nearby.

I had some gauge issues but that's not the fault of the designer or the yarn (Malabrigo Twist - lovely, lovely stuff). I (cough, cough) didn't bother swatching (the pattern is quite forgiving and lets you get away with this as long as you are shooting for the general ballpark of small ambulatory person). But tadpole is much bigger than I think she is so what I thought would be an enormous tent of a sweater actually fit reasonably well - not too big. And it fits even better now since we're pretty sure she had another growth spurt over Christmas.

And the first FO from 2013 is Aviatrix v.4 (yarn, etc. details on my Rav page). I can't express how much I love this pattern. Quick and fun to knit, fits like a dream, and it stays on! Yes, she can pull it off by herself now but she has to work at it. A bit. But still, this was by far the best baby hat pattern I tried and I highly recommend it.

Short rows shape each of the hat sections for a fabulous fit.

And crayons keep my model occupied.

(Look, Daddy, a hat!)

Right now I'm trying to finish up a Tomten Jacket for tadpole. I'm especially excited about this project since it's going to involve my first zipper! I'm planning to hand sew it because, frankly, I'm a bit scared about using a sewing machine on knitted fabric. And, if we're being perfectly honest, hand sewing is my only option right now since my sewing machine broke this afternoon.

The sewing bug bit me over Christmas when I whipped up several project bags for my various knitting projects. Things were going swimmingly as I put the finishing touches on a couple of the bags until the needle clamp fell right off the machine. Google tells me this is a repair shop job and, much to my surprise, there doesn't appear to be a good repair shop option in the city. More googling later, I'm eyeing this. And wondering how easy it would be for me to make it to a 6-10pm sewing class a week from Wednesday. Not very, I'm guessing, but a girl can hope.