party girl

Yesterday's Christmas party was a blast! We sat around in N's sunroom and it was perfect weather because the sun was actually shining. The food was great and I was sooooo stuffed. I wasn't hungry for supper but had some soup and crackers at 8:30pm otherwise, I'd wake up hungry in the middle of the night.

I got Christmas prezzies - mostly the edible kind. Yum! And our group presented A with the quilt that we've all been secretly working on (please click to embiggen).


A's going away for about 6 months and we wanted to give her something that would remind her of us.

This was the quilt that I was basting on the weekend. The block is called Double Maple Leaf and the pattern can be found here. Can you tell which blocks are mine? Instead of piecing the stem of the leaf, I dug out some cotton yarn and couched it onto the background fabric.

I am working furiously on Anna's xxx. My goal for today is 18 rows of charted knitting. Every other row is a plain row but it starts out at 296 sts and goes up to 368. It's a lot of knitting and I want to get it done today. I have about 5 knitting hours left (in between laundry and eating) before I have to go out this evening. I have set myself a goal for finishing this thing - Dec 12th and then it gets washed and blocked and dried. Hopefully, it'll be wrapped and ready for wear waaaay before Christmas day. If I get it done on time, I'm going to treat myself to the yarn for the Imogen pattern that I just bought. If I don't get it done, I'll have to use stash yarn. So cheer me on because I'm going to need it.

ETA: I'm going to bed now. Just finished row 8. Row 7 is a killer - in a 18 stitch repeat, there are 3 plain stitches and 4 cables to work. Ugh! 2512 stitches done and 3152 to go. I didn't even get halfway - sniff sniff.