Christmas knitting update

So, how's the manic Christmas knitting going, I hear you ask?

Well here's progress on my Vine Lace socks to date. As you can see I'm halfway through turning the shortrow heel.


Sock progress

I can almost hear knitting brains around the world counting the number of days until Christmas and thinking, "Um, Atropos - I hope you hadn't planned to give too many people socks this year if that's how fast you're going." And that would be fair enough if that was still my first sock. But actually it's the second. Look!


Fooled you!

So, at current rates I will have finished this pair in around 11 days which is certainly a new record for me and holds out some hope of getting maybe 70% of my original over-ambitious plan done before the big day. That is of course if I can overcome 2 major hurdles:

- Kitchener stitch. For some reason I am having a Kitchener stitch blackout. It's not that I can't do it. It's just that for some reason I don't seem to want to. So at last count I had 4 completed socks that just need their toes grafting lurking in the bottom of my knitting bag. Someone please send me some finishing vibes - I am in dire need of them.

- Ponchos. I have 2 ten-year-old girls on my Christmas present list who I had not originally included in my knitting plans. But I woke up in the middle of the night sometime last week with the word "poncho" ringing around in my head and now it's refusing to go away. There is no way in the world that I could knit 2 ponchos and another bajillion pairs of socks in the time available of course. But that doesn't mean that my knitting imp isn't tempting me to try. What? Doesn't everyone have a knitting imp that sits on their shoulder whispering things like "Why don't you buy some Noro Silk Garden even though your stash is the size of Mount Everest and you have no particular project in mind for it"? Or in this case "Ponchos....you know you want to". Anyway, I am sternly resisting the imp at the moment, but I have no idea how long that's going to last.

In other news, this is new in the stash:


Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton

I expect the siren call of Klaralund will get me eventually, but at the moment I am quite taken with this little number:


Lovlund

Has anyone knitted it? I'd be interested in your experiences with the pattern, and particularly any views on yarn substitutions.