Is Christmas knitting ever NOT under pressure? I mean really? I could have my knitting list ready to go in March and probably still not start knitting for it until October. Though, in my defense, I have been doing a lot of birthday knitting for the past couple of years and this year there is a whole lot of Christmas baking – that is a whole other delicious post though, for now I’m staying on topic!

I posted about my first completed Christmas gift of year last month, and I love how they turned out. I casted on immediately for the next project in line (Shifting Sands scarf) but I started it an an awful, awful peachy pink colour. I was proud of myself for going through my yarn stash and making use of it. It’s a gift for one of the teachers I never even see (really, I don’t see anyone thanks to this whole ‘kids take the school bus because we live in the woods’ thing) so the colour didn’t really matter to me.

However, when knitting on it during my birthday weekend, everyone protested that it was ugly. Gill said she wouldn’t bother knitting something that wasn’t pretty, Talea said it was mean to give an ugly colour scarf to anyone and my sister said that the yarn I was using wrecked the pattern. They were all right. Behold – a lovely version of the same scarf. This scarf is being gifted to the kids’ principal. 🙂 So that’s two down, eleventy billion to go!

It’s a nice pattern to knit up, and would look nice with a yarn that has a little colour variation to it. The pattern in a four row repeat, and every other row is just purling anyway, so it’s a pretty quick knit – depending on how quickly you can cable! I have only used a cable needle a few times, I usually just use a short wooden DPN (wooden because it’s least likely to slip out).

These socks I adore. Love, love, love them! Talea made these last summer and I fell in love with them. I queued them right away, but didn’t actually start on them till now. Then, throwing caution to the wind, as I pretty much always do with socks, I casted on with my facourite DPNs and they were amazingly small. Normally this would be cause for alarm and I’d rip it back and start over on larger needles, you know like a sane person would. However, I do not have time for sanity. 😛

Luckily, my children appreciate hand knits and one of them has a size 3 foot and loves green! They’re growing up watching me knit daily and witnessing my friends knit every time they come over. Especially wee one #1, he’s the most thankful for pretty much anything that someone has taken the time to make, I’d imagine mostly because he’s pretty crafty himself.

These socks will be his, when I was unpacking my Knit Picks order he mentioned that he really liked the colour and he thought it was neat that he loves edamame so much and that’s the name of the colour!

Once these are done (halfway done the leg on the second sock right now), I’ll do some face cloths for one of my husband’s aunts. After a two week scarf and two pairs of socks, I need something a little faster to keep my knitting mojo happening!

This year’s cookie exchange was full of Christmas cheer and a decent mix of ethnic, traditional and weird cookies – it also came with a head over heels surprise. First, the cookies! I made melomakaronia, a traditional Greek Christmas cookie, the usual sugar cookies and what Good Housekeeping refers to as ‘window pane cookies’. The melomakaronia wasn’t half as difficult as it usually is for me, every time I’ve tried to make them in the past they are hard as hockey pucks – one year we frosted them with black icing and gave them away as coal. This year, however, I learned the trick to them – a trick you’d think my very Greek mother or aunts would have let me in on by now.

My Melomakaronia

The trick is to soak the baked cookies in a mix of boiled honey and water before you sprinkle with ground almonds! Next time I’ll use brown sugar instead of refined sugar and molasses instead of honey, that should make them richer and thicker and you know, Greeker. The window pane cookies were essentially just the usual sugar cookies cut into circles with a smaller design cut out of half of them, jam spread on the solid half and then topped with the other half. They look nice and complicated but they’re super easy.