10 posts tagged “christmas”

Even though it's the end of January, it's never too late to write up my knitting recap from the holidays, right? :)

For Christmas, I planned a variety of knitting projects to go with my gifts.  Since this was something I was going to enjoy, not feel pressure with, I kept thinking of other ideas along the way of things I could gift instead of my knitting if I didn't get it done.  But actually, I ended up making additional knitted gifts because I got done *faster* with most things that I thought.

Happy Clapotis Scarf.  For a gift for my mother-in-law, I wanted something fairly light because she's in CA, and so a regular warm scarf was not going to be great.  I didn't think I had the time to do a full clapotis wrap, but I found a scarf sized version that looked more usable.  And then for the yarn, I did some research (Knitty Boards, membership required to view) because I wasn't as excited about the chunky look from the scarf pattern, and the Lion and Lamb that the wrap had was nice but not from a yarn store I normally shop at.  I found that Knit Picks had some great colors of their Shimmer, and I was sold, it had beautiful color options and was baby alpaca and silk which seemed like it would be light.  Then I found someone on Ravelry (CaseyK's clapotis) who had used the same yarn and colorway triple stranded, and that looked like a really nice weight, so I went with that.

Actually knitting this was a joy.  I had so much fun figuring out the stitches and anticipating when the next drop happened.  It curled up a bit while knitting, but then blocking it made all the difference in the world, the drop ladders turned out all straight and perfect and much more beautiful than I thought.  I would seriously consider making myself a full Clapotis wrap if I could think of somewhere to wear it.

Stripey Anastasia Socks.  For my mom.  I thought she might be the only person who would appreciate socks, and plus with our drawing names, I wasn't sure who I would get to have enough time for this project.  I knew that she had slightly smaller feet than me (and in hind sight, I probably still should have made them a little less long), and so that helped for knowing what measurement to use.

I found the yarn before picking a pattern.  When I saw the Felici yarn from Knit Picks when they introduce it, I knew the Firefighter colorway was totally her.  So then I just had to find a pattern that would work okay with this yarn and be a little more interesting than just straight stockingette.  The Anastasia pattern had a spiral that was reversed on the 2nd sock, and that looked like fun to knit (it was). 

I started these when I first got the yarn, but then did them slowly alongside all the other gifts, so it was the last thing finished of my gifts.  They blocked up really nicely, although my k2tog/yo and ssk/yo aren't exactly the same size, so the holes on the 2nd sock are slightly bigger, and that was a little sad.  It's certainly not as noticeable when the socks are on.

Chocolatty Armwarmers and Scarf.  For Lisa, who works in the family business in an office/warehouse that is cold.  I figured she could use these armwarmers when driving and typing in the cold.  I saw someone on Ravelry (lixolux) a while back that had armwarmers with plaits (braids) instead of the fancy flowery cable from the pattern, and I really liked that.  My Stitchionary comes in handy for that, and I'd used the plaited cable on an afghan square already, so I knew I could do it. And I was more comfortable this time around with doing cabling without a cable needle, which came in handy!

And then instead of looking for the suggested Noro online, I found some people making things out of the new Debbie Mumm yarn, which I could get at Jo-Ann's w/o stressing about finding a real yarn store.  This yarn was not great to knit with, but the finished product was pretty good.  The repeats in colors weren't the same anywhere in the 2nd skein so I had to do a lot of work to make them look the same. 

These were such a fast knit that as I got to the end of my holiday knitting, I decided to make a really skinny scarf to go with them.  I did it in the same rib as the armwarmers, and every once in a while, I put the plait cable in.  I made it nice and long and I enjoyed trying it on for photos :)

Pink stretchy Ballet Slippers and Legwarmers.  For my niece, Leah, along with other ballet themed presents.  My original plan for knitting for her was to make mittens.  But then once I got further in my shopping, it seemed like it would be more fun to give her something more ballet-ish.  So I tried to use my purchased skein of Swish Superwash to make ballet slippers (Twinkle Toes from Knitty), but I ran out of yarn too fast after the first one.  I didn't want to wait to get more, so I did some searching and found people making them with Cascade Fixation, which I knew I could get at Craft Warehouse, and in pink was going to be more happy anyhow.

I love the construction of these.  I've finally gotten very comfortable with short rows, and so this was easy.  I made the ties a little longer, but I still wish I'd gone further, they didn't wrap around twice like ballet slippers very easily.  The stretchy yarn was fun to work with, and they really did strech well.  Of course, this made them look little in the package!  I think I could have made them a little bigger and had them work for longer, but I made the kids size already, so I was scared I was overthinking it.

Then when I was shopping for the Cascade Fixation, I thought I'd also get some yarn and make some stretchy legwarmers to go with.  I used the Fixation held with a variety of other worsted weight yarn (Wool-Ease, the Swish Superwash, and some Knit Picks Twist I picked up on clearance).  They didn't quite come out as strechy as I'd hoped, and it took me a little longer due to wanting to weave in ends as I went but not detatch yarn.  I should have done them on dpns, but I was trying to get a feel for using circular needles on small diameters, so this also took me a lot more adjusting than I wanted.  Overall, I wish I'd made them a little bigger and even maybe just with the fixation instead of stripes.

Baby slip-stitch mittens.  For my nephew, Leonard.  I wanted to make him something to keep him warm, but thought he might just pull a hat off and a scarf would be hard to keep on too.  I found several patterns for mittens that were thumbless, for babies, and that seemed like a nice idea.  But the more I looked, the less happy I was with any one pattern.  I ended up combining details of multiple patterns and going ahead with thumbs.

Also, I found patterns with some sort of neat stitch patterns on them, and I liked those, but I was worried about getting his little fingers caught.  So I came up with a slip stitch pattern that looked like it was fair isle instead.  This made for a nice warm and pretty mitten.  I had a hard time with getting the placement of the thumb right and the length of the mitten to actually look like the length of his hand.  It took quite a few tries to get it right, but I really like how it turned out in the end.  The thumb was stripey to keep the bulk of the fabric down, and that looked super cute.

The thing I was most disappointed with was my i-cord.  I still don't feel like my i-cords are very even, and I tried to jazz this one up with alternating the colors, which made for ends to weave in and potentially look funny after some wears.

But the best thing was Leonard wearing the gloves around his neck from the i-cord on Christmas Eve.  Even if he doesn't wear them much, that picture in my head was worth it!

Eric's birthday is tomorrow, but we are celebrating with the family today with a big birthday party!  I told him Friday was the beginning of his birthday celebration and he keeps laughing at me.  We went out and watched the Golden Compass on friday and had Old Spaghetti Factory for lunch, and it was a really nice date.

E's mom is actually coming, because she flew up for a funeral in Walla Walla yesterday.  We're sad for the reason, but it will be great to see her, since we aren't flying down this holiday season ourselves.  Of course, as we get closer to the event, people are dropping off of the list, which does tend to happen because E's bday is so close to Christmas and people having other responsiblities.  But it will still be great, we'll have somewhere between 9-14 people I think!

I've been doing a bunch of cleaning throughout the week and yesterday, we finished up most everything.  How does dust and dirt get on ever surface of the house?!  It's sure shiny now at least.  A few weeks back, we rearranged the couches, and even though the couch sitting area is a smaller area now, I think I'm going to leave it this way even with company and hope that nobody feels like there's nowhere to sit. (we are only one chair short because it was Megan's and she needed it).

For dinner, we are going to have fabulous food.  I created this recipe for Pasta Bake (theredkitchen) a few months back when I didn't have any lasagna noodles, and have perfected it and then added a vegetarian version.  I've never made it on a bigger scale than single-service+leftover, though, so this ought to be exciting.  We'll also be having yummy dinner rolls (theredkitchen), which I love to make because they are all yeasty and fresh tasting.  And then broccoli with butter and mizithra cheese (like Spaghetti factory) and Apricot Glazed Carrots (allrecipes) or something like that - I didn't get an orange to zest. 

Yesterday's cooking prep included a new recipe for snacking on, Peppermint Cookie Brittle (bettycrocker).  This looked like an easier version of peppermint bark that I made last year because the base is cookies instead of chocolate.  We still need to break it up into little pieces, but it's done.  E picked a cake out of the Cake Mix Doctor, and Almond Chocolate cake that smelled SO good last night and I can't wait to eat it! :)

So today will involve a bunch of cooking to try and be done and ready to bake it before people start coming early to gather and play.  I'd rather not be stressing about finishing anything but the vegetables once people get her, truthfully, because that's a little more anxiety-inducing!

Along with the birthday party planning, I finished Christmas decorations, and started wrapping Christmas presents (E's mom may be able to stick a few in her suitcase, otherwise we'll bring them to the mail on Monday).  This coming week will be mostly relaxing because gifts are almost all done and just waiting to be wrapped.  And Christmas cookie baking will happen towards the end of the week to bring them for Christmas Eve with the family.  We'll go to church on Sunday with Leonard and Sarah, which really gets me in a good mindset for Christmas (speaking of which, I dreamt last night that I found an adventist church I actually wanted to attend and didn't have people who I'd rather not see at it.  I wish that was true!)

Ohhh, and E found a cable for the entertainment center downstairs to plug my iPod into.  Now we can listen to the 8 hours of Christmas music on my iPod instead of having to use the CD rotator and be limited to 5 CDs and listen to the ugly noises it makes when switching between ;)  I ripped his Mannheim Steamroller to alternate with my regular Christmas Music.  I can't help but sing along, even if my voice leans towards singing the harmony too often!

Have a beautiful day, friends!

I love December.  Christmas decorations and lights and snowflakes to hang, planning Christmas presents and getting ready to wrap, making Christmas cookies and other treats, wearing cozy sweaters and pretty red and green things with sparkley eyes, readying the house for E's birthday party, celebrating God's gifts, and most importantly, a lot of great family time throughout.

But along with all of that, December is stressful.  I love it, but I can see that my headaches come easier and I put a lot of expectations on myself to DO all of those things above and do them the best I can.  This year, I've cut back on a few things that I did last year (traveling to CA for a holiday, making a tray of goodies for each of my siblings), and I got my shopping done much earlier, but I'm still feeling frazzled here and there.

But I can't help it, I still love December and look forward to it all. :)

We went to the christmas Festival of Trees in Vancouver at the Hilton last weekend.  It was a beautiful display!

Wishing Voxes all over a very Merry Christmas from our home to yours :)

We celebrated some of our Christmas last night, and went to church for singing and inspiration, and now plan to do our Christmas this morning, and then head over for breakfast and parent-presents with my siblings this morning.  It's not a white christmas, but still a very happy day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go see if Santa properly stuffed a stocking for E or if I need to give him a little help ;)

See the first part: I painted plates for my family members for this Christmas, and then made a variety of baked goods to go along with them.  

It wasn't hard to decide what baked goods to put on the plates.  A nice mix of the family favorites, and my favorite things to bake were important. But I did want it to be a balanced plate (which usually to my silly brain means and odd (instead of even) number of options) and be very pretty.

Earlier this summer, I found silver balls (dragees) that I was eyeing for a long time and found that even though some stores don't sell them anymore for health concerns, you'd have to eat like a whole container of this brand to be harmful!  So I knew I wanted to do some sugar cookies with those.  I love decorating sugar cookies anyhow, so that was a must-have.  I was in the middle of baking sugar cookies when the power went out, so that batch ended up not turning out well, so I did start again the next day with a different recipe (but chilled to be able to be cut out cookies) and that was much better.

Russian Teaballs was a must because that's an old family favorite.  We wanted Fudge, but E wasn't as happy with last year's marshmellow creme kind, so we found this recipe, and that was a good one, although I'd probably use the microwave to melt together the chips and milk next time.  Peppermint bark is such a fun idea, and I'd made it last year, so I was excited to try it again, this year using candy melts instead of white chocolate chips.  And finally, pumpkin bread is my favorite kind of special bread, and it's an easy recipe so I knew that should be part of it.

I mapped out my weekends in advance to make these just at the right time to have them all perfect in time.  The pumpkin bread freezes well so that could be done a little bit early, and fudge/peppermint bark could be done at least a few days in advance without a problem. Sugar cookies and Russian teaballs were done towards the end.

And then my favorite part of the plan was to get to go to each person's house and deliver them.  We weren't quite sure how well that would work, but we wanted to try... if nothing else, it was a good chance to try and see each person's Christmas tree. :)

So I baked and planned and ended up with a bunch of pretty things:

And then they all got put together on plates:
My creativity woke me up one morning with an idea for a tag to put on the plate, and so I sat down with illutrator and some ideas and made something that could be printed out and mounted on card stock.  We also had gotten red plastic wrap to put on them because we figured that when we delivered them, we didn't necessarily want people to figure out that the plate was special until they ate down and realized it was for them handmade. ;) sneaky, aren't we?

And voila!  the cookie plates were ready to be delivered.

We made it to see Matthew and mom right before she left for work last Saturday, and then saturday night we stopped to see Megan and Andrew.  Sarah and their family picked theirs up from Eric's birthday party the next day, and Matthew brought Lisa and Jon theirs that same day because they were at home sick.  So everything did make it to their homes, with the exception of the plate for my inlaws, which is coming with us on a trip this coming week.  They won't have the same assortment because it was going to be hard to make them and take them all with us.

I'm really happy with how these plates and their baked goods turned out.  I felt all Christmassy delivering them and it really was a fun experience for me.  Hope you enjoyed the story!

Back quite a while before Christmas, I decided that I wanted to give out plates of treats to give out to my siblings and their families.  I decided that the way to really make them special, for even the people who didn't eat treats, was to learn to hand-paint plates to put the treats on.

I started looking into what would need to be done to paint on plates, and started the many trips to JoAnn's. We found nice heavy glass platters to paint on, and I started sketching out designs.  I read a lot of books (books tagged as "painting") and even found a video at the library with the techniques I wanted to do.  I learned that the best way to paint on glass was to use a reverse painting technique, to keep the food away from the paint (interesting fact - the paint itself isn't a problem, it's the thought that bacteria could get UNDER the paint).  That meant starting with the smallest details and working my way upwards.  The most information I could found on this technique was from Donna Dewberry's One Stroke painting and the assocated Plaid paints, so I went with that.

I had never really done any painting before like this, I had done smaller things and a mailbox for my mom once, but most of my knowledge was in digital painting!  But I figured that worse come to worse, they turn out crappy and my siblings threw them away after getting the cookies, and it wouldn't be a big deal :)

Here's how I did it:

First you need to have a good newspapered workspace.  I did the card table and the floor too just to be safe because I'm such a clutz.

Then you need to completely clean a plate with rubbing alchohol.  The biggest problem was these terribly stuck on stickers that they had on the back - that took forever to scrape them off and then the cleaning wasn't hard.

I had a sketch for each plate idea before I went and bought paint.  I just made a rough estimation of flower shapes and where leaves and other elements would go, and then made a list of which colors would go into that.  I had purchased worksheets that had various ideas, like the one on the right that shows bees - that was actually a reverse painting worksheet so it showed how to do each portion of the bee in order so it shows up looking like a bee through the front of the plate.

Taking my sketch one step further, I actually drew on the fronts of the plates so I'd have an idea of where to paint once it was turned off.  One of the books had suggested this, saying to use a sharpie, but I was just too worried that may not come off.  So I dug in my craft closet to find old washable fine-tipped crayola markers.  These were actually ones I used in college, I could tell from the color set because my bible has matching highlights in various places :D

Again, this was a rough estimation, nothing overly specific.  The most helpful of this is not only the placement of the elements, but the lettering that had to be painted on backwards and it was easy for me to get a little confused in the middle of the word and want to write a "s" the correct way instead of backwards.

To begin painting, I started with the most intricate details first, like the centers of the flowers, and the letters that said "Merry Christmas", and the stripes of the bees (for this plate, each one was different).  This picture on the right is several layers into the process.  This was the first time I'd tried roses shapped like this, so it was a little more challenging, but they came out okay.  I did a few leaves at this point, but really added most of them later in the process so they were under the flowers.

With each layer, you had to let things dry quite a bit so as not to smear them, so it was a big process that way.  I worked on one plate at a time, rather than doing the same first steps on each, and that helped me stay focused on the one at hand, too.

As I got each plate done, I learned more about what types of motions would do what types of things, and that made them go more smoothly each time.  After finishing each, they went upside down (painted side up) on the floor in the corner to just continue drying.  When all 5 were done, I baked them in the offen to set the paint on (that's what the label on the paint suggested).

Here is how all 5 of them looked when I was done (in order of painting):

Cookie press cookies were on the agenda today :)

Recent rotation on iTunes for me is a nice selection of all of the Christmas music I own. :)

Some of the albums have been with me for a long time...

Others are ones I've purchased this year or last:

I've also got a few singles from Rebecca St. James (Sweet Little Jesus Boy) and Jars of Clay (Drummer Boy) and Jaci Velasquez (The Angel Song and O Come, O Come Emmanuel). It makes me happy to hear Christmas music, and this mix is certainly doing it for me!

This will be nice driving music for after Christmas for us too, because I don't seem to loose the holiday music need until at least a week after :)  I guess I'm not constantly listening to popular radio where they play certain songs to death - my 78 songs is 5.1 hours, so it's not like I hear the same song over and over, even though there are a few I would repeat more often happily!

I was sitting here last night, trying to add to my wishlist so that my mom and whoever got me in the Christmas drawing and my in-laws have ideas of things to get me.  And I was having a really hard time!

I guess I've had a pretty good year, where if there's something I *really* wanted, I got it.  Or in some cases like the last video games we bought, I waited and waited until they were a better deal and then got them (Rachet: Deadlocked and Sly 3, which we did buy 2, get 1 free at circuit city to get Shadow of the Colossus for E at the same time).

And then between the library and Netflix, I've been seeing a lot of books and movies that I wouldn't have normally been able to, and may have just put some of them on my wishlist before.  And iTunes, to buy just the tracks of an album I want has made my wishlist shorter because I used to want an album just because it was by a certain person and now I'm a little more choosy.  I'm still so new in the crafts I'm doing that I don't know what books I want to OWN yet to help me out.

Of course, I have found some cool things to add to my list.  The Craft magazine was at barnes and noble the other night, and that looked really cool.  Rina's been talking about Lush bath bombs and so I added one of those. (no, i didn't want to freak out my MIL by putting the Sex Bomb, so I went with one with a cherrier name :P)  I've added a few random things that other people on Vox talked about over the last few months.

I guess I just feel bad because usually I have a lot more ideas for people :)  This year, there are less people to need ideas for, so I'm sure it won't even be a big deal to anybody that my list doesn't include very new things :D