nine

The weeks seem to be getting shorter.

This week has been quite busy. Not in a bad way, though. I was mailing Christmas presents, making marshmallows, enjoying two different holiday lunches at my office, finishing up the Christmas shopping, and of course there was some knitting and a Christmas movie or three.

First of all, let me take a moment to address the marshmallows. I've been making homemade marshmallows for years, usually sometime in December (when the Hot Chocolate really hits the spot), and they always get great reviews. However, I'm not a confectioner in any sense of the word. Anyone can make these. All I have is an excellent recipe from Ina Garten (or the Barefoot Contessa) in which my stand mixer does most of the work. Honestly, they are quite easy, albeit a little fiddly at the end. Patience required. If you thought you liked marshmallows before, well, just wait until you try these! In the picture below, there's a few pale pink marshmallows on the left, those are the peppermint... Thanks for the inspiration, Williams-Sonoma. The others are vanilla, and just as soft and pillowy.

I've also started a rather daring knitting project. Well, maybe not as daring as one I've done in the past, but certainly ambitious for me. I'm knitting a set of two hats. The Norwegian Snowflake Hat pattern is free on Ravelry and was designed by Tim Doran. I'm using the last three hanks of yarn from the 2012 Pittsburgh Knit & Crochet Festival that I mentioned here. I'll be knitting two hats, one blue with white snowflakes, the other red with white snowflakes. Here's my public project page for the first hat. I've started with the red hat, and here's my progress so far...

As if knitting two stranded hats one after the other isn't ambitious enough, I've just added another stranded hat to the mix. This week, Knitty released their Winter 2012 Issue. For those that don't know, Knitty is a completely free online knitting magazine. 2012 marked the 10-year anniversary of this publication, and it's a resource I've always loved. Anyway, anyway, back to the hat. The new issue had two stranded hats, and the one that caught my eye is Fitful Head by Aileen Ryder. It just so happens (cough) that I already have seven different balls of fingering weight yarn in my stash, all in different shades of green. Between the available stash, the pattern requirements, and the fact that I'm trying to stash-down, this was a coincidence I couldn't ignore. In any event, I think I may end up spending the remainder of 2012 knitting stranded hats.

I hope I'm not as crazy as I sound...