Happy New Year!

Happy 2007 to everyone!

Thanks to all for the kind comments on my blog. I am just learning how to do this so I suspect it will be awhile until I have it working the way I want it.

This is my last day of vacation - sigh. I have been at Qwest for 29 years and they give me 35 days of vacation per year. We have a "use it or lose it" policy - no carry-overs - so I usually have a lot of days to use up in December. This year I have been off since Dec 15th. So nice.

I hate to admit it - but I usually end up spending part of that time "finishing" up (seams, weaving) my not quite FO's during that vacation.

I dug out my old digital camera which will work on AA batteries and took photos of the items I finished over my vacation.

Here is the current state of my Rosarie vest - colors are a little darker than in person (which is why I bought a new camera) . Note that I knit 9 steek stitches and not 10 as the pattern called for because I plan to do crocheted steeks per Meg Swanson's books. I'm hoping the edges are neater doing it this way. 6 more rows and I'm ready to do the neck steeks. I'm a bit afraid its going to be too big even tho I made the gauge. I decided to do a size small after seeing Jade's photo with the pattern since she does not have hips. Guess I should have made XS.

Edited (I took a better photo which is closer to actual colors and bit further along):





Here are the other items I finished this week:

A grey wool turtleneck that was on the cover of VK years ago - I made this before I started having hot flashes (that's a story for a future post) - so I'm not sure if I can tolerate it anymore - which was my excuse for not finishing it earlier.





This is a tennis sweater (Debbie Bliss cotton cashmere) that was in Spring 2005 VK for which I finally seamed and wove in the ends. I think I will be able to tolerate this one:





This is the Misty Garden scarf from Scarf Style which I made last month. I'm not planning to block it since I love the puffy look of the mohair.





This is a shawl I made a year ago called SeaFoam using Lalana silk yarn. I love the pattern but the colors are a bit muted for me. I finally blocked it last week:





And this is the Xmas gift I bought for myself this year.. Decided it was time to give my arms a rest:



And now - its confession time.. Here are the two halves of my stash. You can see why I have to join Wendy's KAL since I will never use up all this yarn. But I intend to try. Hopefully - since I plan to retire in 9 yrs I will eventually get to all of it! This will make everyone else feel a lot less guilty.

Part 1:





Part 2:





Hope everyone has a great day! Mine will be a lot better if the garbage man picks up our garbage. Last time they came was Dec 15th before our first blizzard.

Jesse and Belle are asking for ice free sidewalks so we can take a long walk again. That may be awhile!

Ricki