More knitted Christmas gifts

Usually for Christmas I suspend work on my own knitting projects to knit one simple knitted item for each of my sons, like a hat or scarf. Except the year I worked on a complicated cabled sweater from a Rowan pattern for my older son, but that's another story.

Anyway, this year I barely squeaked out the knitted gifts in time. I made one son a scarf and the other a hat (photo coming soon). I also knitted a cardigan for my mom and then forgot to take some decent photos. Here's the only one I could find:

The backstory behind this was that when I first started knitting, I visited a yarn shop in Bozeman, Montana (we didn't have one in our town at the time). Before that I had only purchased them online. We were in a hurry and I had to quickly make my purchase. I loved the variagated colors in this and thought it would make a cute sweater. So I paid for it and we left. Later I found a simple cardigan pattern in a Family Circle Knitting magazine and started in. Whoops! I didn't really know how to knit well enough at the time, and so there were quite a few mistakes and dropped stitiches. I also realized that I didn't have enough yarn to actually complete that sweater. So, I put it all back in the bag and pushed it to the back of the closet. Yeah, you knitters will know what I mean.

Fast forward to 2008. One day last year when I was going through my studio closet looking for some quilting fabric, I spotted a bag in the corner and I pulled it out to see what was in it. There I saw this long-forgotten yarn and remembered this project. So I got it out and frogged the pieces, figured out how much I actually needed to make that sweater and started in again in a smaller size - thinking that my mom would like the colors. I finished the pieces (simple stockinette) in a couple of months. Blocked it and then forced myself to complete the dreaded seaming in early December. I took this one photo and then wrapped it up to give my mom for Christmas. I also felt pretty good about actually USING and finishing a project with yarn (a pretty expensive one too) that I had purchased years before. Brownie points for that!

Yarn: Tahki Bunny Print - in variagated green, purple, pink, rusty brown. 100% Merino Wool
         Takhi Bunny - in solid purple for the ribbing on bottom, cuffs, and collar.
Heavy worsted weight
Size 9 needles
Pattern: Simple cardigan from Family Circle Easy Knitting magazine - winter 2005

The other project I made which I actually finished AFTER  Christmas was a hat for my younger son.

This is the yarn that I chose for it. Cascade Pastaza which is a heavy worsted and is 50% wool and 50% llama. It super soft and squishy, and last year I made him a hat with it which he really liked. These colors are kind of dorky but that's what the snowboarders like.

I chose a simple pattern for a Spiral Hat for guys that was featured on the Purl Bee website. Purl Soho is a tiny but adorable yarn shop in Greenwich Village that I've been to on a trip to New York. I love their little website with knitting and quilting project ideas. So I made some changes in the pattern which I will show later. Anyway, I finished the cardigan, I finished my older son's scarf and then I had a housefull of holiday guests and things got crazy. We were running here and there and cooking and cleaning up. No knitting took place. So on Christmas Day this is all that I had done on the hat:

But the good news is that I could check with Chase, who is quite picky when it comes to fashion preferences, and ask his opinion on the colors, the striping, the size, etc. So he gave my pattern plan his thumbs up and a week later, when things slowed down on the homefront I did finish the hat just in time for him to wear it up to the mountain for snowboarding. Mission accomplished! I'll upload a finished photo later.