merry christmas, mom!

how sad is it that i'm just now getting around to finishing up the last of my christmas knitting?! i guess the important thing is that it finally is really and truly done.

this is the montego bay scarf, from the the summer 2007 interweave knits. i used a skein of handmaiden sea silk, in a pretty ivory (with overtones of gold here and there), that i picked up at last year's madrona fiber festival. i wanted to use it for something special, and finally decided that my mom was a worthy recipient. i thought this pattern made for a simple but sophisticated scarf that would really suit my mom. so i cast on in OCTOBER (!) and still...i wasn't done by christmas. crazy, i know, but this scarf and i just never did get along. first off, i had a hard time with the slickness of the silk. that, paired with the mind-numbing boredom i experienced whenever i worked on the project, meant that i never worked on it for more than a few rows at a time. once i was done with the knitting, i still had to do the fringe! i actually enjoyed this part better, but it was still tedious: cutting over 200 pieces of the yarn, slipping the strands through the loops of the cast on and bind off edges, and then braiding each and every piece. i spent, in total, probably ten hours on the fringe alone over the course of january. that just seems insane! but now it really is done, and i feel such relief, as well as pride for the fact that it turned out great. and my mom loves it! still...i think next year, less christmas knitting for me.

speaking of madrona, i went this saturday with jenna and karma, and i had a great time. we all fell hard in the fleece artist/handmaiden section of the village yarn and tea booth. much damage was done to our wallets, but we all picked up something pretty. i got a kit for lu, which seems to have gotten me out of my knitting funk that i've been in for the past month. it's knitting up very fast, so pictures of a soon-to-be-done lu coming up!