Thanksgiving break, or the joys of ignoring your in-bin in favor of eating turkey for 4 days!

Thanksgiving at the fiberdiva house went well, I'm happy to say. Between my 2 sisters, one bil, one brother (with accompanying sil), 2 nieces, and my dad, we have a pretty full table. This year I did pretty much all the cooking, but my sister and 1 neice came early to help with the peeling and cutting. My brother and sil usually take Thanksgiving and I get Christmas, but this year I may end up with both, since they are having some work done on their house. I'm crossing the Christmas bridge when I come to it, though, and in the meantime, I'm refusing to worry about cleaning and decorating and cooking and finishing almost-finished objects to give as gifts until at least December 1 (and no, no one should point out that that's only 4 days away, thank you very much!)

In the meantime, I thought I'd finish up posting my exchange pictures with the tote photos that blogger decided not to post last time. First are the pictures of the tote that I made Chrissie in Singapore. This is tote in pieces on the drying board. and a photo of my trying to decide if 3 flowers was too many. Of course, the photo of the finished bag confirms that it's not, in fact, too many. The flowers were from a Noni bag pattern, but the bag itself is the Kiss bag from Sally Melville's book on color, using just 2 colors---Patons classic merino (in black) for the background, and Noro kureyon (don't remember the colorway) for the contrast. I used the two-handed stranded method on circular needles. With this technique, the yarn in one of the hands will tend to ride on top, and show more in the finished project. In this case, I wanted to kureyon to show more. You can't tell from this picture, but since I couldn't remember which hand needed to hold the "showier" yarn, I had to do a little experimenting at the bottom. Even worse, I now can't remember again. Yeesh! This is where a knitting notebook might actually come in handy, if I could remember to use one instead of just buying pretty notebooks for that purpose and then leaving them unused!

I found this bag a frightening, for 2 reasons. Not the applied I-cord bind off, which I've used before and feel pretty comfortable with. And not even the 2-handed stranding, which went well once I'd figured out what my hands were supposed to be doing (though, that's probably true of most new skills ;-).

No, my main worries with this were lining (ack, even though I sew a little), and applying the grommets for the strap. (Double ack---no---No punching holes in my knitting. I don't care if it is felted!) I don't have a picture of the lining, but it turned out that neither thing was that scary once I got them started. (ok, I was nervous the entire time I was doing the grommets, but I think it came out nicely.) In fact, I like the look of the grommets so much that I might use them more often, rather than trying to remember to make buttonholes in the fabric while knitting.

But again, I'm really pleased with the whole bag. In fact, I'm thinking of make something similar for my sil and one of my nieces (probably not the same shape, though---like to vary things a little bit, and I do have that noni pattern that I bought just for the flowers ;-).

As for my bag from Louise in Maryland, I got this great felted bucket bag with felted flowers and "vines." Louise used magnetic clasps on either side of the tote, and plastic handles, which I've never tried before. Also, I'm not sure if you can tell from the pictures, but the centers of the flowers are very stylish black buttons! Louise also lined the tote. She actually did me one better, because (you can see from the below picture) her lining has pockets and machine-stitch embroidery! Pretty cool. I also love the little feather butterfly on the blue flower (above). The open bag photo also shows the goodies---flavored coffees, a cute mug, and a chocolate spoon---that Louise included with the bag.
And here's another shot of the bag and all the goodies included. I took this bag to Stitches with me, and got a lot of compliments on it (you can see why), but I was good and didn't try to claim it as my own work ;-).

Although I've enjoyed the swaps, and you can see what great stuff I got, I'm trying to resist joining any more for alittle while. I'm currently finishing up a breed swap (more on that later), and I have a couple of spinning swaps about to start shortly. I think between those and the holidays, I'm probably going to be busy enough for a little while!