Knitting ahead, afoot and a happy birthday too

To start with the important stuff, today is my baby boy’s 1st birthday. This is him, firmly clinging to my pants as he tends to do these days with his ever-present trusty Bobbi-Bear near by.

We did all the fun things you usually do on birthdays.  He got a present and a big breakfast of freshly baked birthday rolls with butter and jam and warm cocoa with whipped cream.  

Given that we celebrated our daughter’s birthday in the hospital due to a serious lung infection, it was a new experience to be able to have this day without thinking about anything except for what a year it has been and how different everything is now that he is here.  It’s been a very, very good day.

And finally a knitting update: I have to say that after such a long period of not being particularly productive on the knitting front, I have sprung back into action with a vengeance.  I have recently finished two projects for winter and not a moment too soon.  Take a look out at my window:

It’s –10C right now and we have 25 cm of snow.  This is my garden next to Nature Reservation at sunrise.  Hard to believe that in that weather, you can still hear the birds in the morning:

So the two projects I finished was a hat and socks (get it – knitting ahead and afoot… I am really too clever… :-S  ).  My husband says this himself so I don’t think he minds me putting it on my blog for the world to see – he has a large time finding hats because he suffers from the Family Big Head Gene.  In high school, he almost had to buy a round of drinks for the whole class because according to Danish tradition, the student with the largest graduation cap must buy the rest of the class a round.  Anyway, having a slightly larger head makes it hard to find hats that fit. 

And now from the front:

This seemed to me the project that simply wouldn’t die.  I am very pleased with the end results and he seems happy not to have a cold head anymore but the pattern required that you knit a round of 172 stitches on 2.0 mm needles into a 22 cm long tube of 3 K x 2 P ribbing.  I was seriously tempted to eat my own head halfway through this project, but it was worth the work.

The “afoot” part of my bad attempt of humor is a pair of socks for my 6 year old daughter.  I’ve never actually finished a whole pair of socks.  I always start and then stop because I have never been good with douple point needles.  They get in the way, they don’t feel right in my hands… it’s just not good.  For some reason though I decided to try again and it worked brilliantly this time. 

So my daughter and I went to pick out yarn and much to my surprise, she picked out a red, green, black and white speckled sock yarn that I would have never have picked for her.  The end results were pretty good, but not really something you would assume a Disney princess watching, pink plastic buying, Build-a-bear bear wanting hip hop girl would want:

 

And a close up:

So what’s next?  Today was my last day of work before the Christmas holiday.  Having the foresight to plan ahead, I have ordered a HUGE box of yarn that I need to pick up from the post office tomorrow.  Garnstudio has just released a new yarn called Drops Delight which is so soft, superwash treated, beautiful and on sale at the moment, so it makes up the majority of my purchase. I think it with by a sock-y Christmas this year.