2010

The New Year brought a crowd of 17 to the Haus, food enough for twice that number (I think we'll be eating leftovers for another week), and games enough to keep everyone happily occupied. The crowd was all my family as we'd spent Christmas with DH's family. As big as the crowd was, not everyone from the immediate family was there!

All the nieces and nephews were a bit much for the cats, who sought shelter from the maddening crowd wherever they could find it.




As part of the anticlimactic end to it all, I've gotten the mother of all head colds.

And how were your holidays?

Christmas Eve ended at about 4 a.m. on December 25th. After we got home at 2 a.m. from the in-laws, I fortified myself with a little Christmas cheer,



got out my blocking tools - wires, pins, mats, -



and, yes, knee pads. They made the wood floor much more bearable.

Dane needed to be blocked as I was giving it to my MIL a few hours later.


The knitting gifts I received this year were from my swap partners from the Winter Solstice swap on Ravelry. What gifts they were!



The first package was from Kimberly and included 2 skeins of lovely purple Claudia's Handpainted Yarn, Debbie Bliss magazine, candies from her home state, a DVD with movies starring Barbara Stanwyck and Angela Lansbury, and a rooster charm.




The second package was from Sonia and included delicious hot chocolate (which I've been enjoying during today's snowstorm), three super soft skeins of British Breeds Blue Face Leicester DK (spun in Yorkshire), a skein of Wensleydale that she spun herself, 2 gorgeous buttons, a shawl pin, stitchmarkers, a coaster, and a cup cozy that she made. Can you believe she fit all this into a shoe box? I can't get it all back into the box!






Many thanks, Kimberly and Sonia, for making the holidays extra special!