Hey all! Hope everyone has been enjoying the holiday season! It's just been way too busy to blog lately...I have made a lot of knitting progress though. I finished the lumpy bumpy hat but unfortunately did not get a photo of it before giving it to my mom :( Hopefully I will get a photo at some point in the future but rest assured that it came out nicely and looks really cute on her!

I had a nice visit with my family and got an awesome birthday surprise that my sister brought from Germany...eight balls of a beautiful cream Anny Blatt yarn and a skein of Opal Rainforest sock yarn in color "Veronica die Wilde," which is a very cool combination of lime and dark greens. I was trying to figure out what "Veroncia die Wilde" is--apparently some sort of butterfly, according to the label--but it just seems like a funny name and literally translates to "Veronica the wild" according to Google translator. Very interesting!

Another nice surprise at home was four boxes of yarn that someone my mom knows gave to me. Apparently this person's mother used to knit all the time but no longer does (gasp!), and wanted to give her yarn away. There were all kinds of interesting novelty yarns in there, amongst other things, but really nice ones, not tacky. I decided to leave most of it there since I don't have room right now, but I did take four balls of Tiber Rayon de Soleil, a black sparkly yarn, in hopes of making a pretty scarf with it. (photos of all yarn are also on my Ravelry stash page).

The most exciting thing was that I GOT TO CUT MY KNITTING THIS WEEKEND. Yes, the long awaited moment for steeking had finally arrived! I started by sewing the steeks, and was horribly upset when this happened:You've heard of yarn barf, well here is thread barf. I was totally worried that the knitting had somehow gotten caught by the feed dogs of the sewing machine. Finally I realized that I had just mis-threaded the machine--oops!

Luckily I was able to extricate my knitting without any damage. I finished the sewing, making two lines on each side of the cutting stitches:Can you tell why I stick to knitting and not sewing? Despite my extremely crooked lines, I forged on to:Eeks!
But...It works! It works!
I stayed up really late trying to finish it Saturday night, since I would be seeing my friend who it's for on Sunday, but only managed to get the thing sewn together and one side of the button band done. It's amazing how time consuming the finishing of these things are! But, it is looking really great and I'm going to try to finish it today for my final FO of 2007!

Happy New Year all, and don't make too many resolutions ;)