A bit of Christmas Cheer

Despite having Christmas songs in my head all the time, I wasn't feeling very Christmas-y this year. We didn't even pick out a tree until a week before the big day. Upside is that the tree still looks good. Hasn't lost a single needle.



We rented a van this year to drive out to Toby's parents. Well, we didn't want to rent a van, but that was sort of the only thing left in our price range. Wasn't a bad little van either.


That's Toby enjoying a little van driving through Peckham on Christmas day.

Lots of colorful, tasty food with nice people. Pretty good day.




Now I've got a tiny cold and lots of rainy, miserable weather. At least I have lots of things to snuggle up with.

2 good things

a couple of awesome things about cycling to work on the monday before christmas.

1. there is no traffic! i can actually hear my bicycle rather than all of the car noise out on the roads.

2. there are hardly any other bicycles! i swear i only passed a handful of people. and i was going slow, so it wasn't like i was zooming pass all of them.

tale of the swallowtail shawl

i had a great idea. this year was going to be the year that i finally knit something for my grandma. i've been wanting to for ages and never got around to it. how awful is that?

i wanted to find something pretty and simple. i also wanted to add some new skills to my knitting repertoire. i had a dink around ravelry and flickr and found many swallowtail shawl successes. with so many positive comments, i HAD to knit this shawl.

turns out i was going to be the one person with negative comments. typical.

it all started out okay until i started realizing that my buds weren't really looking like buds anymore. then i noticed that my stitch count was always one or two off.

i tore it apart a few times and then was happily on my way again, but it seemed like i was knitting 4 rows and then ripping out 3 and so forth. i tore this thing apart so many times my yarn BROKE!

clearly, i do not have concentration for such a project at the moment. instead, i've found an easy-peasy shawl to knit. it is still interesting, but requires far less attention than i'm willing to spend. and it doesn't matter too, too much if i'm off a stitch or too.

maybe someday i'll go back to that swallowtail, but at the moment, it's just bringing me down.