Happy New Year, 2009

I took a semi-unintentional break from blogging this holiday season because I took a very intentional break from my computer. There were several days over the course of two weeks that I didn't even give it a passing glimpse. It felt good to get away without going anywhere. But now I'm back and I hope to bring you blogs from the nonstop excitement I call my life. Ha!

Here's a start. I got the most amazing hot pink Christmas tree this year, and when I say amazing I mean don't stare at it directly because it will eat your soul.

We had a light Christmas as far as gifts go. I got a book and some new, very needed graters for the kitchen. And a fabulous new pillow that says, "Pink isn't just a color, it's an ATTITUDE." It fit perfectly under my tree.

Then the Sunday after the Christmas we declared would be "light" we bought a new washing machine on a whim. I never thought I would reach the point in my life where a new washer would make me giddy. My old washer was a scary, faux wood grain clad 1970s pumper. Have you ever seen one of those? It doesn't swish your clothes gently back and forth it jams them up and down with the fierce vigor. Great for clothing longevity. So now our clothing gets delicately coddled to cleanliness and I've washed every thing in this house save Thomas and the dogs.

Christmas cheer

I got a pink tree! Hooray!

Things change for a reason

I always said I would never have an artificial tree in my home but I just got the Christmas tree of my dreams. I set it all up and arranged the branches. Photos tomorrow! Be excited. Very excited.

My pad

Knit Off: I'm behind already

I leapt into this challenge feet first and had been happily knitting along on my sweater making great progress. I had knit about 12" of the back and was ready to start the armhole shaping. I was acting rather smug about it too, flashing it to Marsha, showing off how much I had knit, until I reread Marsha's blog post about our Knit Off yesterday.

Heather has her sweater well under way. She has altered her pattern and the changes over the pattern may slow her down. That girl wants to win.

I did make a change to my pattern, I cut four inches out of it. The pattern book said the smallest size would be 40" around when finished. I wanted a less bulky, more form-fitting sweater and I worked out that if I removed one pattern repeat it would decrease the size by 4" making the sweater 36, my size.

Had I used my BRAIN when calculating this major pattern alteration, I may have realized that by removing one pattern repeat removed 4" from one half of the sweater. It would have required me to also remove 4" from the other half of the sweater, thus making my pattern 8" smaller and a size 32. This alteration would have most definitely been form-fitting but it would not have been attractive.

I started over.