Lordy, but I was busy knitting up a storm right before Christmas. As proof, here's a photo of me frantically making a bucket hat two days before Christmas, while Mulder the Cat takes a nap with his head on my skein of yarn and Piper the Cat looks on.
My sister went wild over her bucket hat and her long furry scarf (made with Lion Brand Wool-Ease and LB Fun Fur). Isn't she pretty? She loved the hat, even with the mistakes, but I've promised to make her a better one now that Bonne Marie has posted the felting fix.
I also finished the red bucket hat for my brother's girlfriend, made using Brown Sheep Company's Country Classic yarn in Strawberry. This was also made pre-pattern fixes, so like the first one, the brim came out wavy. For both of them I ended up cutting out two pie-shaped sections of the brim on opposite sides of the hats, then stitching the edges together using embroidery floss. You couldn't tell it was done unless you looked closely, and even then it didn't look too bad.
For my toddler son, I knit a foursome of finger puppets using some odds and ends of yarn I had lying around. I used a hybrid of patterns from both here and here. I didn't want to knit something so tiny in the round, so I knit them flat and seamed them like the knitty pattern, but I liked some of the features, like the duck wings and beak and the pig snout, from the other pattern.
Remember how I bought all that Phildar yarn and had all those groovy projects to work on? I was going to start them post-Christmas as a reward for working so hard on holiday gifts. And then I found out that I'm pregnant, expecting a baby in early September! So no cool sweaters for me this year---I’m hesitant to knit them even for post-baby because I don’t know how my bust size is going to change. I’d hate to use all my yarn and time making a sweater that ended up a size too big or too small in the end.
So I'm going to be knitting baby things instead, whee! When I was pregnant with Spencer all I knit was blankets; with more experience, this time I can do sweaters and booties and all sorts of tiny fluffy things. If anyone has any patterns or yarns or neat-o ideas for baby items, let me know!