A Very Penguin-y Christmas To You!

Happy Christmas my dears!  I do hope that you all had a lovely celebration of your choice, or at the very least enjoyed a few restful days off work.

I confess, Christmas isn't really my thing.  In all honesty, I find it a time of obligations, responsibilities, and expectations, most of which I don't have the money or energy to live up to.  However, a lot of people who I love very much do celebrate Christmas, so I do my best to do the same.

This Christmas I did very little, Kelly and his mum did the vast majority of the planning, cooking, and cleaning associated with "Making Christmas Perfect".  So everybody please give three cheers to Kelly and Lynne!

The rest of my successful Christmas was down to Kellys family filling the house with cheer, and the sound of sugared up kids having a great time, amazing friends who understood and tolerated my curmudgeonly spirit, and even managed to convince me to actually go out a couple of times to see people, and the sight of my niece dancing with a plushy polar bear that was nearly the same size as she is :)

Thank you everyone!

The Knitting Bit

You may recall that I started my Christmas knitting woefully late.  Due to that bout of flu lasting over 3 weeks, being followed up by a chest infection, sinusitis, and shortly after that an ear infection too, I got very little in the way of knitting done.  In fact, I think if Stephen hadn't dislocated his knee, resulting in my spending a reasonable amount of the one week I wasn't ill sat in the Minor Injuries department of our local hospital waiting for him to be checked out, and offering prime knitting time, then I might not have done as well as I have at getting things finished.

So firstly, there was that offensively pink and sparkly yarn, clearly that was for my favourite little princess, my niece.  I even made an effort at crochet to decorate the cute little hat and scarf set that I made for her:

Then there was the dark purple aran, and my grey handspun.  I was actually pretty nervous about how this would turn out, given I had to make the pattern up off the top off my head (I could only find one similar pattern, and it wasn't suitable for the sheer amount of technology that Kelly wields), and given that I had no idea what the handspun would knit up like.  But I'm actually pretty pleased with how it worked out in the end.  The only thing that disappoints me is that the weight of all the remote controls stretches the fabric more than I anticipated, so the xbox controller ends up sat on the floor.  At least it's held in place there, and can't get kicked under the sofa and lost now I suppose!

I named it a "Technology Tidy", but he decided that it should be called a "Sofa Command Centre".

I still haven't finished Stephens socks, and I haven't yet cast on the other 2 gift projects that I want to work on, but I am going to be visiting the folks up north 3 times in January, so I'm sure I can get those finished at some point in the next month.

I did receive a couple of knitting related presents.  No Monty and Mabel knitting set, but that's ok, I think what I got was even better!

One gift was cunningly disguised as being far less valuable.  I'll be honest, I would have been happy to receive the joke present on its own, but I was ecstatic when I realised that wrapped around the ball bands of two of these balls of sparkly were Countess Ablaze gift vouchers!  

/happy dance

I can't spend them just yet because I opened this gift at my friends Christmas party on the 28th, and the Countess had a sale on Boxing Day, so her shelves are all but bare now.  However, I did manage to secure a skein of laceweight from the final installment of the Twelve Caesars Collection before the yarn-crazed-hoards strip-mined the entire shop, and I'm very much looking forward to the new collection theme for next year...

Then, to link knitting and penguins, I received these:

Penguin stitch markers!  Aren't they adorable?  And some free Christmas themed stitch markers too.

No such thing as too many penguins

I may have received a few penguin related gifts too:

There was another box of penguin chocolates, but I'm afraid they didn't survive much past boxing day.  There's also a big snuggly penguin hoodie, but I've already worn it so much that it needs a wash.  I've got a photo I took of everything I opened on Christmas day somewhere, I think you can see both the hoodie and the other chocolates on that...

Finally, I promised to show you my new Christmas Penguins that I'd bought for myself before my last update, so here they are too:

Penguin fairy lights!!!  These now decorate the penguin shrine, and I think they deserve to be there all year.  A penguin is for life, not just for Christmas!

Sweet dreams my dears, see you all in the new year!

Keeping it secret

So it turns out that it's really really difficult to write a blog post about your knitting in the run up to Christmas.

The problem is, I like the idea of people reading my blog, so obviously I don't want to be hiding it away and telling people not to read it.  That would just be foolish!  On the other hand, I don't want the people I'm knitting for to see what I'm making for them, or in fact to even have the clue that I am knitting for them at all.

So, what can I post here?

I've decided that I can probably get away with posting this:

This is the yarn that I'm using for the first couple of things I'm knitting this Christmas.  There is more, but the rest of the gifts aren't likely to be delivered until after Christmas day, so I figure I've got a little bit longer before I need to cast those on.

I suspect that anyone who sees the pink yarn is going to work out pretty quickly who that is for, but I've got some hope that the secret of the purpose of the rest might be kept.

It's a little bit exciting actually, because the grey yarn is my very own handspun, and it's the first of my handspun that is being used for an actual proper purpose.

However, it's also scary, because that photo was only taken today.  Yes, today.  I have 3 weeks to get my knitting done, and I've only just got around to balling up the yarn.

Still not finished

The Christmas knitting isn't it either.  Remember the socks that I was knitting to be a birthday present on the 29th November?

You'll notice that it's a sock.  Singular.  The second sock is still on the needles.

Basically, I've had flu for the last 2 weeks, so I've not had the energy or co-ordination to do very much at all.  It's supremely frustrating.

Maybe I'll get these finished in time for Christmas too...

I do have some new penguins too.  No photos for you though.  Partly that's because one of the new penguin things is being saved for my actual Christmas update.  Partly it's because I've left my camera at work, and there's a limit to how much I can steal my boyfriends phone to take photos.  So you'll have to wait to see my new penguins next time.

TTFN my dears.