As usual, my January knitting looks very much like my Christmas knitting!  Sarah and I realized (a couple of days ago) that we were not going to finish Geoff’s and Sasha’s blankets before they drive back to Eastern Washington on Thursday.  Not unless we drove ourselves like maniacs – and while I might be able to work up that kind of mania in December, it is not going to happen in January.

And we decided it would be better to spend the time with them – family time playing games and going to movies, going on walks, etc. – than to root ourselves to chairs and knit constantly.  Sometimes, we get reasonable about these things!

We are still working on them diligently, of course (we have Sonja’s and Jordan’s to finish too!), but I have taken some time to work of some other projects a teeny bit too – for variety’s sake.  I started the little knit fleur-de-lis pincushion from Interweave Knits Holiday Gifts.  I plan to fill it with barley so I use it for tapestry needles.

I picked up my mohair tam (the Christmas Candy one) again, too.  Had a crisis last night when I found I was off in the count (it is a lace pattern) and started tinking back (once I finally found where the error was! soooo hard to see with mohair all bunched up on double-pointed needles!) – only to find the stitches were leaping off the points of the needles like lemmings!  Grabbed up five or so in one spot with a steel crochet hook and another 5 or so with a tapestry needle immediately.  For about 15 seconds, I actually thought of giving up on the whole thing.  It looked that bad.  But I just sat there hunched up (trying not to move too much!)  and dealt with one stitch at a time until I rescued them all, tinked back and fixed the ssk error, knit my way back through the round again.  So, it seems to be all right now.

And then I went back to the nice sturdy alpaca blanket!