Wow, is it 2005 already? Time has been flying, and don't think that I haven't been getting any knitting done on my extended holiday. Quite the opposite actually! Remember me telling you about some marathon knitting I did Christmas day to finish up my sister's mittens before I saw her again? Well here they are.

This picture was actually taken in the car, on the way down to Maryland. I needed a good background so I just used my pillow. I thought the pillow case made an excellent backdrop! You may notice a slight difference on these mittens. I'll give you a hint, it has to do with the cuff. When I was finishing up I was running awfully low on green, so low in fact, that I was becoming more than a little nervous about whether I'd actually have enough to finish. Let me tell you, that's a nervewracking thing when you're so close to finishing a present that you have to give on Christmas, knowing full well that there isn't a single yarn shop open if disaster struck. So I did what anyone in my position would do. I switched up the colors a bit! My sister sure didn't seem to mind when I gave them to her. In fact, I don't even think she noticed!

When we were out at the LYS buying yarn for my sister's mittens, my mom also bought some yarn so I could make her a scarf. She's perfectly capable of making herself a scarf, but since I had knit her a very lovely cabled scarf a few years ago, she thought I would be very kind of me to make her another one. The first one (which was made out of some extremely nice cashmere) was stolen when we went out to a restaurant...well I don't know if stolen is the right word. We were waiting to be seated and my mom had taken it off and somehow left it in the seating area. When she realized she didn't have it at the table she went looking for it only to find it missing. So out of the goodness of my heart I agreed to make her a new one under one condition... she's not allowed to take it with her into restaurants!

This is about half of the new scarf. She bought herself some Debbie Bliss Cashmerino to make it out of. Yummy! I actually used up all that she bought. It turns out two skeins is just not enough to finished a scarf.

But never fear, I had plenty more projects to work on. On the last night that my nephews were here my oldest nephew asked me to make him a pair of fingerless gloves because a friend of his from school had a pair that his mother made him. Again, being the big softy that I am, I gave in and started a pair on the way down to MD.

I'll be finished with those pretty soon. I actually did a lot of this knitting before all my relatives showed up. We had such a great time hanging out, playing cards, exchanging presents. We even took a trip down to the Corning Museum of Glass. If I wasn't so cranky from the car ride it might actually have been a lot of fun. But seeing how I was squished in the back seat of a minivan for two hours between my two cousins who were both football players at one time, I was just not entirely in the museum mood! Plus the fact that I couldn't move my elbows more than a centimeter from my body, there was no knitting to be done on this particular trip

Our ladies day out was very nice. I've never been so pampered in my life. However there was one hitch in the day.... the fact that I had to be up and ready to go by 8am. This was my first day to sleep in and I was up by 7am. It's alright though, the manicure and massage well made up for it. In fact, I was dosing during the massage!

I love it when all of us get together, we all just have such a good time. It's always so sad when everyone leaves. But it's nice to know I'll see them again in the summer! It's also nice that I get my bed back and don't have to sleep on the couch anymore!