Christmas!

Our home-cooked meal for the day was this lovely strata. Eric put it together on Christmas Eve using a recipe from Smitten Kitchen. It was delish!

But on to the handmade presents.

It has bothered me for a few years now that because I brought so many Christmas ornaments to this relationship, a vast percentage of them have my name on them. It was high time Eric had a personalized ornament or two. After considering different appropriate themes I decided to make a Stargate ornament out of polymer clay. It was not easy. But I finally came up with something decent. Notice the lack of any kind of personalization or anything festive. I was so proud it was recognizable I completely forgot my original intention.


It looks like a 6-year-old made it, but Eric seemed to like it so that's all I care about. (Also, I bought him a little snowman ornament with his name on it, so he still got a personalized ornament after all.)

I wanted to have his new and improved Dr. Who hat done for Christmas, and it IS done, but still has a pointier-than-desired top and rides up leaving his ears exposed. It is really rather confounding. But the new Knitty was published last week and included a lovely men's hat pattern so I decided to whip one up immediately.


It was difficult to photograph, but trust me - it's quite nice. And it fits properly! I just used Cascade 220, one of my go-to yarns, but somehow this skein felt extra wonderfully soft. I love the dark charcoal color, too.

I got an awesome hand crafted present as well.


Eric made me stitch markers out of plastic and an old board he found in the basement. Amazing. Ages ago I sent him a link to some clever stitch markers on Etsy that were made especially for sock knitting. They had SSK and K2TOG on them to help the knitter remember where you are supposed to do which type of decrease. I can never remember, so they looked super useful to me. These homemade ones look really fantastic. And the wooden ones are lovely too - just little smooth round discs, appropriate for any kind of project.

I also got yarn. My favorite sock yarn right now - Madelinetosh. Two skeins!


Aren't the colorways lovely? The top one is called Bearded Iris, which sounds vaguely obscene to me for some reason, and the bottom one is called Pheasant and I especially love that one. The colorways are a bit more wildly variegated than I usually buy, so I may consult the book Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn to get ideas about good patterns for them. I borrowed the book from the library once and it was extremely helpful and has some nice patterns, so I may actually purchase it.

Between the yarn and the stitch markers I felt inclined to start knitting socks immediately, but luckily Santa brought me Guitar Hero 5 so that distraction saved me from disastrously rushing into an ill-planned project.

Christmas may be over in a couple of hours, but this isn't the end of the Christmas crafts, no sirree! I'll be exchanging gifts with The Cable Girl on New Year's Eve and I've been working on some projects for her that I can't wait to show off. It's so nice when things turn out the way you plan.

Hope your Christmas (or just your Friday) was happy and fun and relaxing!