All Wrapped Up

Well, I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas! Ours was fun but a bit chaotic. The last of our guests left this morning leaving the house full of mess, quiet, and the echo of warm memories. Part of me wants to start the process of tidying up and the other part wants to ignore it all and relax for one more day.
It feels good to be done with the Christmas knitting obligations. My brother-in-law, Blake liked his alpaca scarf...
As did my sister-in-law, Heather and hers made with the super-soft Sensual yarn.

I gave the Esther hat to my mum-in-law, Brenda and the Haydon went to Heather's husband, Dallas. It was unfortunate that I didn't have any knitted presents for my own family, but I plan to knit for their birthdays instead.

I got some great gifts this year, including my Ashford wheel which is finally put together! Here's a pic of Blake getting a spinning lesson on Christmas Eve...

When I first saw it come out of the box I was a bit disappointed regarding the wood finish. I had expected "lacquered" to mean that it would be a bit darker. However, I quickly got over it when I experience how smoothly it spins. I also got a swift - which has not yet been put together, but will be in-use as soon as it is. We got a very nice new coffee-maker from my parents (we really needed a better one and in comparison this one's amazing... it's programmable and the coffee pot acts as a thermos!) and Blake provided the Starbucks coffee (he's working as a barista while he's in graduate school...) Needless to say, the kids made out like bandits with lots more toys and candy. Fortunately there were a few learning games thrown in as well - as a teacher, I was way more excited about these than my boys were...

I've already started a list of projects that I want to knit. One of my New Year's resolutions (aside from working out, eating better, losing weight, getting pregnant again, etc...) is to knit more for myself. The list includes the Vogue Cable Cardigan, which I've seen on my friend Laura and already have the yarn for, and those arm-warmers in S&B Nation made with Noro. I also need to start the Harry Potter sweater for Nathan before he gets bigger - otherwise I'll need to buy more yarn for a size larger!

Hope you all have a fun New Year's celebration, and get a good start on some new projects!