Ahh December

December is, hands down, the most stressful month of the year for myself and my team at the office. We've got other pressure points, but this always seems to be the worst. I think it is because of all the extra end-of-year administrative stuff (eg performance reviews), the fact there are fewer days (ie stat holidays are great, except when you've got deadlines...) and all the added family-and-social pressures from the holidays (lunches, decorating contests, shopping etc). At any rate, we get through it with a lot of coffee, chocolate and laughter.

This year, we were "gifted" with a holiday decorating contest on the actual worst day of the year for us. We could have bowed out, as a couple of other departments did, but no, we're a wee bit too competitive for that. So we built an igloo.  Around our desks. Crazy? Perhaps. Fun? Absolutely. It became our goal not to win but to make as many people laugh as we could. So we also gussied up the inside and outside of the igloo with Canadian winter stereotypes. The team dressed up in our finest hoser gear. And when it came time to "present" our concept we said "eh" a lot and offered the judges Timmy's and Blue.

Did we win? Another team brought in an entire traditional turkey dinner, and incorporated team members in Hyderabad, Dublin and Calgary via videoconference - holy crap! But from the outset they were the team to beat. Did we make people laugh? Oh yeah :) 

These pics do not give it justice, but might give you some idea...

Items of note: fake fire on the monitor (another one was showing Gretzky highlights, and Bob & Doug's version of the 12 Days of Christmas was playing on the iPod dock), armchairs in place of desk chairs, a Canadian flag tied to hockey stick, miscellaneous ski and hockey equipment and the most, um, interesting moose head wreath we've ever seen.

 

Items of note: sled, very small sheepskin jacket and boots, ice-fishing polar bear, polar bear with reindeer antlers and headphones (hooked up to a BlackBerry - we started with an iPod, but decided if we were going to stay on theme it really ought to be a RIM product!), large Timmy's cup and a heck of a nice fake fire (the split logs are real, but the flames are a length of red lame fabric and orange fun foam - that's classy!).



In the midst of that we actually got our work done. We had built in a cushion for our Friday deadline to allow for some carryover to Monday or Tuesday and ended up not needing it. What does that mean? A unexpected weekend of recovery for me, featuring rather a lot of knitting and crocheting and present wrapping for me!

I started a little froggy prince for Princess Leah, thought about working on the beer cozy for my brother (designed to look like his rec league hockey shirt) and bought yarn and settled on a pattern for a mug cozy for his new girlfriend. Not a lot of finishing there, but I did start and finish this ornament wrapper for our tree:

  

More productively, I wrapped a bunch of the presents to go under the tree. Leah and I decorated it together a couple of weeks ago - our first :)  It's about 2/3rds finished in this pic - a bunch more small balls still had to go on, and a few special handmade ornaments.

In all, I'm feeling pretty good!

I'm hoping the good luck at the office lasts just a little longer so I can get out to the weekly Toronto North Knitters meetup Monday night so I can work on the mug cozy with some company. That would be the icing on a very yummy cake :)

A little gift to myself

So I have a policy.  I do not work on my birthday.  This has become a really, really important policy the last few years as I tend to work insane hours at this time of year.  Forcing myself to take a me-day, with zero guilt, is possibly the only thing that prevents some sort of tragic event occurring before the end of the year (between my team and I, my daughter and I, just in my own head...).

This year I have a cold.  Which is actually better than last year when both my daughter and I were home with colds.  Not exactly the calm, me-first, relaxing day that was supposed to be :(  Also, the cold gives me permission to hibernate rather than feel obliged to go out and be social (sorry BridgetJ).

After spending the morning wandering about on Ravelry I am now actually going to do something even more fun:  <drum roll> I shall now organize my stash!

My kind aunt paid attention to my wish list and bought me hanging closet organizers from IKEA that, quite conveniently, fit the width of my tv room closet perfectly (doncha love it when that happens?).  The virgin closet looks like this:

I have also made the wonderful discovery that standard photo boxes fit perfectly into the compartments, which is lovely as I have been using them as project boxes.  This will be helpful when the bookshelf they are currently housed in gets reclaimed by my wasband.  Then again that may happen approximately at the 12th of never...

So off I go to photograph yarn and partially completed projects for uploading to Ravelry before fitting them into their lovely new home.  By the end of the day the stash may be the only organized thing in my life, but it's something!

PS same kind aunt spent rather a lot of time trying to hunt down a set of small 4" Hiya Hiya interchangeables at a bricks-and-mortar store for me from my grandmother, but had to settle for mail order.  Otherwise the stash organizing would probably be taking a back seat to me attempting to learn to magic loop :)

What are the odds this will stick?

So I'm feeling the need to share, more than just through Facebook status updates, and more solidly than with a Twitter feed.  Oh, and maybe with not quite so many "friends".  Since I've recently begun knitting and crocheting again and have consequently joined the Ravelry universe I am also feeling the need to journalize my yarn-based activities.  They're also nominally more interesting to others than my job (Manager, Fund Taxation - enough said) or the rest of my life (single mom) and, well, less likely to result in oversharing.

I'll probably work out how to add pictures pretty soon, and so as not to bore you all will see if I can work out how to separate the technical journal part from the somewhat more interesting commentary. [Oh who am I kidding - there are none of you, only me...does this qualify under the old "talking to yourself/answering yourself" crazy test?]

General journal:
I added a bunch of stash to Ravelry.  It is possible I will figure out how to use this to search the pattern database soon.  Can you even do that?  I find myself asking the question "I have this yarn, what can I make with it?" a lot these days.

I realized I really, really need to get out the camera.  My Projects and Stash sections look pretty weak with so few pictures.

Project journal:

"A Little Piece of Peace?"

I bought yarn last week to make baby blankets for a couple of co-workers who are expecting in the coming months.  The first one is going to one of our in-house lawyers, a young gentleman named Shalomi who is, or rather whose wife is, expecting his second child in December.  There is not a chance in hell I will have this project finished before the kid arrives, but maybe by the time it is big enough to notice textures...

I'm using a couple of Leisure Arts booklets I've had for 15+ years that between them have 126 crochet blocks, all 8" square.  I made a full-size (59"x75") afghan a looooong time ago for myself from one of these books and quite enjoyed it.  The blanket is still in use - tucked around my feet right now in fact - so it must be "enduring".

At any rate, I'm going to select blocks that fit my rough criteria - not too open, not too time-consuming - and make 16 to 25 of them depending on time.  That will give me a finished size of 35" to 43" square which should be sufficient.

I am using three colours of Loops & Threads Impeccable - Aqua, Rouge and Butterscotch - which are a riff on the primary colours.  I haven't decided what to use to pull them together (there is a common colour used to border each square, sew together and do the edging), but it will probably be the yellow.

So...tonight I started the first block using the red and a pattern called Exchange Stitch.  I had to move to a way smaller hook to get gauge (4.25mm vs 5mm recommended) and the resulting fabric is very stiff - no stretch in either direction - so I'm not off to a great start.  I was hoping to keep to softer, drapier feels.  Well, I'm too stubborn to abandon the block so I'll finish it, but maybe, yarn quantities permitting, I might make a few extra blocks and this one will end up in the reject pile.

I would like to point out, mostly to myself, that I could probably have finished a whole block if I hadn't spent the first two hours of couch time on Ravelry instead of with hook in hand...