Jananas

I needed to come up with a last minute gift for someone, with a day’s notice and no hints at all about what they might like. So I baked. I made vegan chocolate peanut butter fudge and vegan chocolate chip cookies. There is also some vegan shortbread in the oven as I type. Hopefully these go over well, once I package them up.

I’ve also been a knitting machine, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising. I’ve finished five small projects this week, but I also haven’t been doing much other than knitting and watching seasons of The Office. Otherwise known as the best way to de-stress post exams. I’ll take pictures once I have someone else to model them.

My mister is a big fan of Linux and has been for a long time. I was trying to think of fun (and awesome) Christmas presents, with the criteria that at least one of the items had to be knitted. I came across this pattern on Ravelry. The scarf is knit with a cool technique called “shadow knitting”. If you look at the scarf directly, you just see the alternating rows of colour.

However, when you look at the scarf at almost any other angle, a pattern appears. In this case a penguin and the word Linux. The pattern is based on alternating knit and purls stitches between the main and contrasting colours, creating a shadow that can be seen.

This took quite some time to knit, if only because each row of the pattern corresponds to four rows of actual knitting. Its made for one long scarf, but it should help the mister stay warm this winter in our cold Canadian weather. Overall, I’m really pleased with how this turned out and am anxiously counting down the days until I can give it to him.

I had a rather miserable dentist visit last week. Don’t get me wrong, I like my dentist. I just hate going. To make myself feel better I stopped off at a local knitting store. They had some lovely handspun yarn made by a local couple. I felt sorry for a single colourway that was sitting there all by itself. It was enough to make something small with and was a gorgeous colour called “raking leaves”. Since winter is just really starting to settle in, I wanted something to remind me that it wasn’t always this gray and dreary out.

I found this Twisted Rib pattern on Ravelry (as if there is anywhere else). I started knitting these Friday night and finished them up Saturday afternoon, mostly because I had a full morning of presentations in my Saturday class. They were a quick knit once I got used to how the rib twists. I added an extra two twists into the pattern before the thumb hole because I like my wrist warmers to be a little longer than most patterns allow for.

My roommate Caroline and I have both been grumpy and stressed out and angry at the world this week. She came into possession of a small Christmas tree and brought it home last night. Since I have my big artificial tree to still put up, we decided that this tree should be a throw back to our childhoods. So we cleared off the coffee table and go out the craft supplies. We made construction paper chains and candy cane reindeers and styrofoam ball snowmen and pipecleaner candy canes. I think its fair and accurate to say that the end result is adorable and absolutely perfect. And frankly, it was just what we needed.