Belated Birthday Knits

In my family we party from Thanksgiving until my birthday.  The holidays are jam packed with the usual (Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years) and then you add in, my father's birthday and my sister's birthday (which are the same day!) and then mine and my brother's birthday, and now the Girl's birthday--and it makes for an exhausting but super fun level of chaos.

This year I was all kinds of caught up knitting my baby girl's birthday dress, which meant that I have just barely mailed off my sister's birthday mittens.  She lives out west and it has been a bitterly cold winter.  They keep their own chickens and she runs in addition to running her kids around everywhere.  So I asked her what would be most useful and she requested some fun, stripey fingerless mittens.  Well, I tried.  I really did.  I tried three different incarnations of the stripey fingerless mittens, and I just could not get them to work, or could not get them to work in a manner that I liked.

So I threw caution to the wind and decided to go against her wishes and knit her something else.  I kept the fingerless mitten plan, they're incredibly useful, and a way to add a layer of warmth while maintaining the use of fingers and hands.

Last winter I had purchased this lovely dark, cranberry red wool, and a ball of cream intending to knit her a pair of color work socks with a bird motif on them...but the pattern was written for toe-up and I've never done toe-up socks, so I got scared and shelved the project.  Well, two weeks before Christmas I pulled that wool out and started rifling through patterns until I found one that I had been contemplating for a while.  I knit up the cuff first and just LOVED it.  Then I started on the hand section, which was a different motif and so much harder that I couldn't even have background noise, which meant that I lost my momentum and couldn't work on them.  When I figured out what was wrong, I pulled out that hand section, got down a book of motifs and picked new ones that I liked and worked well with the colors I was working with.  I set to work and within 10 days they were done.

I washed, blocked and mailed them off last week, and they're so pretty.  I just hope she's wearing them...

And staying warm, poor girl.  I just thought it was cold here...