Holiday Haze

Painting Jeans - one of the most requested colourways from our latest Etsy Update. We only had one batch of this colourway in Purple Label Cashmere Sock yarn available and it went quickly, I've added it to the list of colourways to try and reproduce in other bases for the next update! Thanks so much to everyone who stole a moment from their holidays to pop by the shop and grab some goodies! We are working furiously this week to get all your orders shipped. I am completely humbled and overwhelmed by your continued support of our dyeing experiments. Chris and I feel so incredibly lucky to have such wonderful customers who get as excited about our dyeing experiments as we do!

Our holidays were fantastic and went by in a blur as usual. We spent every day with family and just soaked in festive cheer. The holidays were made extra fun by the presence of two adorable babes, Rowan and his cousin Annika. The kids certainly add to the whole magical family holiday experience. Contrary to my usual style, I actually took a whole bunch of photos this past week. Too many to sort through this morning, but here is one that I think really captures our holiday experience. I call this shot: "Babies in brand new Christmas Eve pj's smiling and laughing with Aunt Lilia and Uncle Vince!" 

Knitted Gifts

Plenty of knits were gifted for Christmas this year. Clearly I took the accessory approach and knit a bunch of small, manageable projects. Chris got in on the Christmas knitting action too and helped me to knit 3 hats for the men in his family. Some of these knits have yet to be blogged about since they were gifts and I didn't want to spoil the surprise. Today was our last day of Christmas gift exchanging, so all the details will be coming soon!

Link's to Ravelry project pages:

Left column: 

Socks for Luke

Annika 2012 ornament

Socks for Dad

Smooth Sailing Baby Blanket

Center column:

Thorpes for mom and baby

End of November Mitts for Lilia

Abby's Heart Hat

Right Column:

Man Hat for Richie

Man Hat for Milo

Jake's Hat

Elliot's Crazy Hat

Christmas adventures begin!

I had decided that I wasn't going to send out a custom printed Christmas card this year. I figure that next year we'll have an adorable little baby to dress up as an elf and photograph to our hearts content, so this year we could take a break from super cute Christmas cards. But then I started getting cards in the mail, and every single one makes my day. I changed my mind and convinced Chris that we should do a quick photo shoot with our reindeer Stella and print up something quickly to send out to our friends and family for the holidays. 

Epic fail.

These are a few of the highlights from yesterday's Christmas photo shoot attempt. Not exactly inspiring! I have to point out Chris' expression in the photo of him with Stella (top right). He hated the antler hat on her. He was convinced that she was totally humiliated and insisted we take it off. Then there's that super weird one of me and Stella kneeling and gazing into each other's eyes like we're in love (we are in love!) Oh well, we tried. 

I wrapped my first Christmas present of the season with lots of love and attention. That awesome little knit print gift tag is a free download here. I printed a sheet on cardstock and then cut the tags out with craft scissors. The bow I made myself out of a sheet torn from a magazine, the tutorial can be found here. It uses a ton of tape and takes a couple of minutes to make, but I think that it's pretty cool! 

Knitted Ornaments

Every year I get swept up in the excitement of Christmas crafting. I make gifts, I bake, I do a little bit of decorating around the house and I usually get inspired to make some sort of ornament for our Christmas tree (my last big ornament kick was these sparkly stars from 2 years ago, which I still stand by as being one of the best things about our tree!). I'm a very big fan of trees that are decorated with personal touches. Our tree is decorated with a combination of purchased ornaments, hand made ornaments and ornaments that were handed down from our parents. They come together to make one very special Christmas moment. 

We're having people over for an early Christmas dinner party tomorrow night so it seemed like the perfect excuse to put the tree up and get things feeling a little more festive around here! I spent the majority of last night with the tv off, the fireplace on and my sights set on trimming the tree. 

This year I made a few knitted ornaments that I totally love. I used the Balls Up! pattern, an 8cm styrofoam ball and leftover sock yarn. They are perfectly round, crisp and clean, they make my day. I think that they are the only bit of wool or knitting on my tree at the moment, clearly I needed them. 

Another new ornament to the tree this year is this little photo ball I picked up for a few bucks at the grocery store. I put a picture of Chris and I from our first Christmas together in our first apartment with our first tiny little charlie brown Christmas tree back in 2006. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but man has a lot changed since then. It's so fun to have these little mementos to be reminded of special times from the past.