coming home

27 Dec 2004 in journal

hi there ~ hope everyone’s holidays were great. as always, i’m just getting used to writing and thinking 2004, and now 2005 is just four days away!

christmas was great, and crazy busy in a very happy way. this year i made three of my gifts. my immediate family, including spouses and kids, has grown from 7 to 12 in just three years, and it’s sure to keep growing for a while still. (after all, my little sisters and me haven’t even started yet with the whole kids thing!) so, this year i made a decision that i will make three or four gifts a year, and the rest will be storebought. this way, i reasoned, i wouldn’t be killing myself trying to get gifts for everyone done, especially since this invariably means staying up all night christmas eve and being horribly tired all christmas day. belatedly, a friend pointed out that means i have now committed to making gifts every year – eek!

this year i made three gifts, two of which you see here. the first is claudi’s felted bag. she’s a gal who likes bright colors, especially in the winter time, so i knew this bubblegum pink would thrill her. and she’s a girl who likes her bling, so the brooch works perfectly. i made the bag out of lamb’s wool worsted, just barely over a skein’s worth, using magknits’ sophie pattern, changing it slightly because claudi requested two handles versus the one twisted one the pattern called for.

the second handmade gift is shown in this great photo of my sweet niece rileigh right after she had opened her present and just pulled the kittyville hat on (thanks for taking the photo, luci!) i made the hat a while back and quickly decided it would fit rileigh to a t, and indeed she seems to like it a lot. yay!

i also made my older sister daniella a booga bag, using the same kureyon yarn that’s shown in the pattern photo. she loved it and was using it the next day, which was thrilling.

for both of the felted bags, i used my mom’s washing machine which had not very hot water. and since i couldn’t figure out when it was going into spin cycle, i ended up putting both bags through two cycles each. i think both of these things ended up shrinking both bags a lot and on top of that made them have much more of a ‘halo’ than i had with my first felted bag. i’ve read online that one could easliy just cut the halo away using scissors, but my sisters said they liked the halos.

other than that, i was supposed to be back in l.a. already today! the thing is, i got a call this morning saying my flight was canceled and that they were sorry but i wouldn’t be able to find a flight leaving d.c. until thursday. i was mighty pissed off – called half a dozen different places and finally got the last seat on a flight leaving tomorrow at 7 am, arriving in l.a. at noon. i’m so ready to go home!

ok, off to sleep for a half hour till i gotta get up to go to the airport (yay) – g’night and thanks for reading this thrilling post

~ andrea