A belated Happy New Year!

Not much new to report here. The New Year came and went without much pomp and circumstance, but that was perfectly fine by me.

We spent New Year's with the in-laws, had the requisite pork and sauerkraut dinner that night since BIL and SIL were in town, and settled in to watch the ball drop. Surprisingly, a very tired Liam managed to stay awake and celebrated the New Year with a glass of sparkling grape juice (which he decided he was not terribly fond of...but I rather enjoyed!) with the rest of us. Shortly thereafter, we came home, where he promptly crashed. Surprisingly...he was actually the first one up the next morning!

I actually spent most of New Year's Eve knitting and relaxing. As a result, there is actually an FO to show!!

Remember this hat? Well...after photographing the progress I'd made, I realized there was a pretty big mistake in it and ended up frogging back to nearly the beginning. Then I knit back up to where I thought the decreases should start and had a dilemma. In the book, the hat doesn't have decreases at the crown, you pretty much knit the tube and bind off the stitches at the top. BIL wanted more of a fitted hat, so it needed to have decreases. So...how do you decrease on an asymmetric hat? The answer to my question came on Christmas Day, when SIL (wife of BIL whom I was knitting the hat for) received a lovely cabled hat...not asymmetric, but pretty close. The designer's solution was to just switch to stockinette and decrease on down from there. So that's what I did. This is the result:

side 1

flip side

handsome hubby modeling finished product

So I used the Asymmetric Cable Hat pattern from One Skein knit on 10 1/2 bamboo needles in Reynolds Lopi. I followed the pattern until I thought it was time to start decreasing, and then I switched to stockinette and used the decreases from the felted bowl pattern (same book...ssk, do a set # of stockinette, k2tog) until there were no stitches between the decreases. Then I cut my yarn and drew it back through the live stitches, pulling them tight together. Voila!! BIL seemed pretty pleased with the results, but I may have to snag it from him some time and line it with some microfleece or something since Lopi can be kinda scratchy. Should be plenty warm, though!

There has also been knitting on baby girl's blanket:

There are only a few more rows to go on the pink block, and then I'll cast off and start the next strip. This has been coming along so quickly that if she decides to hold out until the weekend or after to come, I may actually have this thing finished before she gets here. Progress was slowed yesterday when my self-wound skein of natural color got tangled and I ended up spending a few hours trying to undo the mess I'd created. If it had been cheap acrylic, I likely would have just said forget it and tossed the whole skein, that's how tangled it was. I'd likely do anything for this Malabrigo stuff, though...like crack it is.