I can't believe it's February.

I just looked at my last blog post and it was in November!  Boy does time fly.  I have been in the middle of a big project to catalog all my yarn the last few weeks.  I wanted to do a sanity check before Stitches West next week and I think I'll be finished with this project before I get there.  I'm going to be in the market every day and although I might buy yarn, I certainly don't need any.  I'm taking pictures of it and putting it all up on Ravelry. I'm putting it in my 'Stash' pages, if you are interested.  I'm Loomitic there.

Here are a few of the things I've finished in the last month:

Daryl Lancaster designed vest. I took a 2-day vest workshop with her a couple of weekends ago, which was a lot of fun. She custom fitted a basic style to all participants, adding or subtracting from the basic pattern in certain spots. Mine was a bit of ease in the rear of the jacket. I wonder what that says?


Sorry, I couldn't figure out how to rotate the pictures. I've tried in a couple of ways to do it but it doesn't seem to work and there aren't any tools in the program to do rotations. I used to be able to do it but I can't seem to today.

The next thing I finished (in January) was this:

It' a vest called the MontagueVest from the New England Knits book. It's super comfy. It's made from a chunky yarn called Kathmandu Chunky (Queensland Collection). It's a pretty easy lace knit and took about 2 weeks to complete.

The last thing I've done recently is a Mother Bear.  I finished it last night by putting a face on it.

The photo could have been a bit lighter, but you get the idea.  There is a project called the Mother Bear Project from Minneapolis, MN. Amy Berman is the lady who started this to give bears to children in Africa who have been affected by AIDS.  This little bear is only about 12" tall and takes a couple evenings to make while watching TV.  I'm a bit slow so it took me about 4 nights, which includes one night just to do the face. I'm not very proficient at the faces yet, but I'm sure I'll get better over time.

That's about it for me at the moment.  Here is little Ella in the hat and sweater I made for her for Christmas 2012:

This is an inkle band that I made in January 2013.  Daryl Lancaster encouraged me to start doing inkle bands as trim for garments. This is a first completed piece that I might actually use some time.  It's quite pretty although I didn't realize that it would look like a flag with the colors I chose:  black, violet and cream.

I just realized that I hadn't posted a photo of the Austin Hoodie I finished in early January.  It's made from Madeline Tosh Merino Light - Lichen colorway.  It took me from last July till January to finish this. There were many thousands of stitches in it and it was something like 6-8 stitches per inch: