New Year's Eve 2011

This has been a year of significant change in my life and I have had to figure out how to navigate a number of new realities.  Some things have stayed the same -- I read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and completed some needlework projects.  I watched a lot of high school lacrosse and basketball and went to 5 karate tournaments.  I traveled, I took pictures and I explored the forest preserves.  I got brave and started walking both of my dogs at the same time -- they are large, strong and easily distracted so this took a lot of courage.

I have posted pictures of some of my finishes for 2011, but I finished some needlepoint projects that I started many years ago and some projects that I started this year.  I did some of my own finishing.  I have some new works in progress and some new class pieces.  I had fun with the 15 starts in 15 days challenge and have worked on some pieces that I would have left untouched otherwise.  I have also taken an active role in some face to face and on line needlework groups.  Overall, a good year.

New Year's Eve

One year ends and the new one begins.  

This year ended with one transition -- my mother died at the end of November.  She suffered from Alzheimer's disease and has not known who I was in at least a decade.  I really lost my mother long ago but her death is still very final.  

The new year will bring other transitions, my son is a senior in high school.  He plans to go to away to college in the fall.  My daughter will be sixteen in the fall and able to drive herself places.  My carpool and taxi service days will be over.    

Snow, snow and more snow

We are very behind on all things holiday this year but it smells like Christmas at my house now. I took advantage of my snow day to check out the favorite cookies through the decades on Gourmet's website. I made three: thin chocolates, molasses oatmeal, and brown sugar ginger thins.

The winter storm is mostly gone but it left behind plenty of fluffy snow that should last until Christmas. You can get an idea how much by looking at our evergreen. The first year after we lived in this house we bought a real tree for Christmas. It worked out great because Matt and the dogs could not reach over the top of the root ball to take any ornaments off. It has been thirteen years and the tree has grown a lot.

A New Year, Knitting and Take it Further Challenge

I spent some time wandering around the Internet this evening. On Elaine Lipson's Blog Red Thread Studio she talks about picking a word for the year rather than writing traditional New Year's resolutions. Her word is magic. I thought about what my word would be and I think that it would be abundance. I really have everything that could possibly need but I often find that I need to be reminded to see things that way. Instead of resolutions which I think of as what not to do, I mad a list of goals for this year -- one of them is to stitch, sew and knit from my stash and to try and reduce both my stash and my collection of UFOs.

To that end, I finished the second side of a knitted pillow for my daughter yesterday. This side is worked in a purple fleece yarn with beads on it. The other side is knitted in an eyelash yarn that is purple, pink and electric blue. It will be perfect in her room once she gets her father to paint the walls purple for her.

Since I am done with the pillow cover, I am moving on to some more knitting for myself and am starting Sally Melville's asymmetrical vest from The Knitting Experience Book 1: The Knitting Stitch in a bulky wool, cotton and silk Noro yarn. I started rolling the skeins into balls and making a gauge swatch this morning. I love the subtle and bright variations in color in Noro's yarns. I think that I bought this yarn, now discontinued, 4 years ago.

I have also done some work on my Take it Further challenge piece for January. I made copies of some of the pictures and put them together in a 4" x 6" postcard size. This was my favorite combination.

Then I traced the bear and drew in some of the flow lines on tracing paper. I am going to start to put this on fabric this week.

I have a white silk dupioni remnant and some Impressions in a color called Adobe to play with. I bought the December 2007/January 2008 copy of Stitch magazine at the fabric store today to drool over the stumpwork and goldwork flower on the cover and instead saw the drawn thread and needlewoven panels on the inside of the magazine. I am envisioning a drawn thread bear -- I will have to experiment with taking apart my silk and see what I am able to do with it.