Quick to Knit

As I'm sitting here knitting away on the second-to-last Christmas gift (phew!) I'm thinking about all the great, fast knits there are out there for people like me who have very little time to knit but like to make handmade gifts. Here's a list of 10 things that are easy and fast to knit but covet-worthy.

1) Gaptastic Cowl
2)Super Cupcake Cowl (and hat)
3)Shawl Collared Cowl
4)Treads
5)Hand/Wrist Warmers
6)Chunky Toddler Mitts
7)Elefante
8)Fish Hat [Dead or Alive]
9)Turn a Square
10)Thorpe

I know that Christmas is this Sunday but if you're determined to knit at least one gift, or forgot to purchase a gift and are just now realizing that fact, then I think you could do any one of these patterns in the time allotted. I knit the toddler mitts in one evening out of 49 yards (!!!) of Chunky Mochi. The shawl collared cowl was about an evening or so and the gaptastic cowl took about two days of knitting in the evening and during my lunch breaks. Even if you're a fine-gauge knitter now is the time to bust out some of that chunky yarn and get cracking! Happy knitting!

Countdown

I've got one - ONE! - paper to write by Friday and then I'm done for the quarter. If I had been a smart girl I would have taken myself to a coffee shop on Sunday to get started on it but instead I ran many many errands and then promptly fell asleep for an hour in the afternoon. Now it's crunch time and I've got a timeline set up for myself in order to get my 5-7 pages written, edited, and edited again for Friday's deadline. Don't you wish there was some kind of app for ordering your thoughts into a cohesive paper outline? It would be fab. Oh, yeah, there is one! It's called my brain! Unfortunately it's on the fritz from staring at this damn computer screen for three hours. Time to call it a night.

Knitting coming soon! I've got to take pictures sometime before 4pm when it starts getting dark.

Finish Line

Just a quick note to say that I'm still here, still working like crazy, and trying to sneak in a little knitting time as I'm wrapping up the final few weeks of the quarter. I've got two papers and a final in the works with what feels like precious little time. Did that stop me from going out last weekend and last night? Um, no. Last weekend I hit Gainsbourg with a couple of knitting friends where we exchanged our Malabrigo hat swap items. Jen knit Ripley for me in some pretty Malabrigo Twist in the grapes color. Love it! I ate some yummy cheese and bread and ended up with poutine - it was an epic starch frenzy with the pleasant accompaniment of booze. Hooray! Last night I headed over to iknityouknot's place to eat more bread, cheese, nuts, and fruit and booze it up with some dark & dry cider while watching fairly crappy tv and knitting. It was exactly what I needed to blow off a little steam before hunkering down for paper writing. I've also been working on this pretty thing: 

It's Clockwork by Stephen West in tosh merino light Flash Dance and Steam Age. It's pretty perfect for knitting in class since the pattern is easily memorized and knit in plain old garter stitch with some slipped stitches for interest. I'm really looking forward to the finished piece which I plan to finish some time over the winter break.