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A cool bumpy hat:

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A spiral-y baby hat:

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A very geometric hat:

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Some well-traveled knitting projects: a sweater vest with a bit of sand in it since it came with me to Zion State Park / beach up in northern Illinois, and a pair of socks that came up the Hancock tower with me for a drink:

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The Christmas knitting pile: vest & socks for mum-&dad-in law, hats for sister-&brother-in-law:

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And, last but not least…. a hastily-crocheted chicken!

I used Malabrigo Sock yarn – the unsung hero of lace knitting. First of all, you can knit really nice lace on size 6 needles rather than toiling for nine years on size 2′s. And, I’m loving the fact that it’s not a fuzzy angora-ish yarn, and makes the pattern seem much more crisp. It blocks well too, although I can never get it to hold a really pointy edge the way that lace yarn can.

More pictures:

Shawl shawl shawl:

This picture only includes the hats that haven’t reached their final destination yet. So a full metric hat-year would be something like 14 hats.

Now that I think about it, almost all of them were knit during 80 or 90 degree weather.

I love them so.

The swirly band around the bottom of the hat, was knit as a long strip and then grafted together. Oh the anguish! It took me 5 tries…

Why yes — that *is* some kind of Soviet-era spy technology, hanging out in my hotel room. It’s a bit hard to see in the photo, but it appears to have some kind of speaker system, a red button labeled “MESSAGE”, and two utterly inexplicable dials. It is definitely not a radio or alarm clock. Perhaps, sometime around 1964, it was connected to a phone or an intercom or, just maybe, hidden microphones somewhere else in the hotel. (I can dream.)

I don’t know what it is.

I don’t know what it does.

I don’t know why one of these was placed in my hotel room, but not in the hotel room of anyone else at the conference. Maybe I have been chosen to be the next James Bond.

Maybe I should have pushed the button.

This handsome hat is my Chanukkah present to my dad. Chanukkah 2010. You know, the holiday that occurred 6 months ago.

It gets better… this isn’t even the last of my holidays-2010 knitting – I still have one project left to go. But I do love this hat!

Warm wool hat, with a bamboo-blend lining for non-itchiness purposes.  A few more shots:

I don’t have much yarn…. well, the non-knitting member of this household would probably disagree. But in any case, it’s amazing how much of a mess it makes. It’s also amazing, how many months will go by before I’ll do anything about it.

I didn’t take any “before” pictures, it would have been far too shameful. But here’s an “after” picture — this is my reorganized stash of synthetics for making crochet toys:

Now I just need to think of an animal that is primarily blue, white, and yellow, with a dash of orangey-red thrown in, and I’ll be good to go.

Too much work:

Not enough sleep, either — good thing I’ve got Sheepdog to supervise the situation:

But now things are slowing down at work and I’m back to my woolly ways.

Here’s the newest member of our household. (Pattern coming soon — I have only the vaguest recollection of how I made this fellow so it’ll take some investigating)

We still need to name this fellow… please advise!

We tried to manufacture evidence & blame it on the dog but she wasn’t being very cooperative:

But I had to block the bumpy top of the hat — after much experimentation, I realized that the only object in the house which was usable for blocking the top of a hat, is MY OWN HEAD.

Thus began the dorkiest hour of my life:

I wandered around wearing a hat, with the top half of the hat dripping warm water, and a headband around the whole thing to keep it stretched.

Also, I couldn’t see a thing since the stretched hat came down to about 1/3 of the way down my nose… so I was also walking into things. So classy!