Christmas Sweater

Sorry for the long absence. I've been busy working on Christmas presents. At first the plan was making knitting bags for my mom and sister since they just got into knitting this year, making another bag, but for quilting (same pattern, but labeled for a different use,) a sweater for my dad, two pairs of socks and a sweater for my husband. It's at this point in time that I should point out that I've been sewing for several years but have only started knitting this year. My list of finished projects included a scarf and a pair of socks that I finished after starting the sweater for my husband. (I do have a sweater for myself that's knit, but hasn't been assembled.)

My quilters party was on December 6th and it was strongly encouraged to bring a handmade gift. Turns out most of the handmade gifts were table runners, but I'm also new to quilting this year so I stuck with sewing rather than quilting. (Pretty sure I could handle the piecing, but I don't have a quilting foot for my machine yet and wasn't going to try real quilting for the first time on a gift.) I tried taking pictures for a tutorial, but they all turned out really blurry so after Christmas I'm going to make another one of these bags and will make another attempt at a tutorial.

Unfortunately the bag took 6 hours to make. After completing one I decided that my mom and sister would probably like DVDs just as much as knitting bags since they haven't really become hardcore knitters yet.

Because I'm such a brilliant and fast knitter (ha ha) I figured I could work on my dad's sweater during my breaks at work. The only catch to this plan is that my work place has been under construction for the past year. Once I move into my new room I'll get breaks again, but right now I'm watching over the residents during break so have no knitting time. It sounded like we'd be in the room before Thanksgiving, but we still aren't in there yet which means no knitting time at work. Hey, dad would like dvd's too, right?

I realized the sweater wasn't going to happen, but they said we'd be getting breaks by December 8 so the socks could still be possible. (Note the massive amount of optimism here.) Thankfully my husband isn't overly picky about dates and won't be upset with receiving Christmas socks in June. This left me with only the sweater left. The pic below is an early one of the sweater, but gives you an idea of the color and design.

I was doing great on the sweater. I have the back and one sleeve done. The front had been coming along really nicely and this weekend I made a big push to finish it up. Right before I started binding it off I measured one last time (yep, 27 inches long) and checked to make sure that I followed the pattern correctly. The fact that I didn't check the pattern until the end should have been my first warning sign that things would go horribly wrong. I followed the first part of the front "work same as back" but forgot those key words "until piece measures 20 inches." Yep, I made two backs for my sweater. Since my husband is insisting that it doesn't need to be done by Christmas, but it does need to have a hole for his neck I may have just doomed my last handmade Christmas present. There's still 12 days until Christmas so maybe I can pull it off.

*While I was deleting all of these projects from my list I did add one more for my husband that is sewing based. I've even managed to keep that one a secret so I'm not going to write about it until after Christmas though.