A Happy New Year!

Well now, as ever I am all up to date and starting with Christmas! I hope I am back in the bloggy swing of things, I have visited all my usual haunts this morning and made my apologies for being so lax of late. In my defence, I was proper poorly for a while, and things are still a bit of an effort. But I am almost better, my wrist is all mended, all I need to do now is shift this cough and I'll be grand.

So many lovely things happened before Christmas that I can't not include them in my blog! I really cannot recommend both The First Emperor and the The Tutankhamun exhibitions, currently in London, highly enough. Do catch them if you can, I feel so privileged to have seen them both in the run up to Christmas.

We like our swaps on Crafty Threads'n'Yarns and the recent Christmas Decoration swap was great fun. Isn't this lovely!

As you can see, it had pride of place on the tree. Thank you Linz

And now to knitterly things. I have decided I don't like WIPS. Well, not more than one at a time anyway ;-) so I have resolved to finish my WIPS before I start the year afresh. So I started by tackling Shony with gusto. I had started this way back, around July I think, and had got as far as the back and the left front.

Suffice to say I have pooling issues with Shony ( scroll down ) the back and sleeves are fine, but not the fronts. Irl there are real blocks of colour change.

Now, if I were to just wear this at home in artificial light, I might JUST live with it. But it is to be frogged, washed and reskeined, I shall take it to Egypt with me next month as my holiday knitting, and I will blend the yarn carefully. To be fair, I have no pooling of colour on either the back or the sleeves, two skeins of this Giotto were distinctly different to the other six! But we live and learn!

On a happier note, Kolsva is coming long beautifully, I have two sleeves of this finished too. I am finding Kochoran a lovely yarn to knit with, it undergoes total transformation from skein to needle!

And finally Vanessa (scroll down ) all ready to be assembled. I haven't made a wrap / crossover style knit before, I just hope it doesn't look silly on me!

I do like the shaping of this knit!

I also have FCS otn, it was intended as a Christmas present but I didn't finish it due to my wrist. It will be my first Christmas knit of 2008!

I can't go without showing you all these beautiful stitchmarkers. The first ones are from Jacquie and were part of my Autumn Secret Santa Swap present - aren't they just beautiful!

Next, these arrived completely unexpectedly, a lovely present from Holly Burnham and made by Holly herself. Holly sent them to me after my fall in November, and I was thrilled to receive them. Holly, you hide your talents away under a bushel, and thank you again.

These beautiful Christmassy markers were from Mogiebear, sadly blogless, but were part of another swap and they arrived with a beautiful homemade card.

And finally, from the lovely Franney again with beautiful card, these lovely stitchmarkers.

I feel truly blessed to be part of such a wonderful on-line community! Thank you everyone. I wish you all a happy, peaceful, productive and frogless New Year with lots of mojo!

We are having computer issues Chez Aknita btw. Last weekend it went off for an MOT and had a new CD drive or writer or something done, anyway we've had it back a couple of days and it's not working, go to make a CD and the PC shuts itself down. So I'm losing the PC again at the weekend. I shall have limited access at work, but have decided we are going wireless (again ) and I am going to have a laptop of my very own!

If I'm not back before next week, well I have an exciting time coming up! I am off to see The Spice Girls next Wednesday and instead of catching the train straight home on Thursday morning I am staying in London for a matinee performance of Hairspray! Lots to tell you next week then!