November 30th – December 31st photos

The last of my photo-a-day project for 2010!  I made it through the whole year (missed a few per month towards the end there, but still) and now I am so happy it’s over!  I love taking pictures (duh) but I don’t like that every day requirement… it resulted in lots of blah photos when I forgot to take one until nighttime and the lighting sucked, etc… but whatever, here’s December!

30th + 1st – Packed up for my Twisted trunk show, and set up the show on the 1st.  There’s part of my crowded table of goodies… After setting up the show, Pete and I celebrated with breakfast at Cadillac Cafe, which features my all time most favorite breakfast, eggs mazatlan!

2nd + 3rd – More trunk show stuff… got together a ton of stitch sets for Twisted, then my reception party was the 3rd, fun times!

4th + 5th – I brainstormed up this cabled box cover idea super last minute, knit up a prototype of the concept, and it worked pretty darn perfectly on that first try!  Rare occurrence!  And, a food shot, my favorite way to use up leftover pasta – scrambled up with veggies+eggs:

6th – Did my club photoshoot with this backdrop fabric setup, and Banzo saw her chance to pose:

7th + 8th – A Five Guys opened up super close to us, so exciting!  (Cheap grilled cheese with any toppings you want, like grilled mushrooms, peppers, and all the usual burger things you’d expect, plus great fries.)  And Pete took me out for gnocchi, yum!

9th – Wrapped the first of my xmas gifts to put under our tree!

11th + 13th – Missed a bunch of days of actual photo-a-day pictures, but I did pattern photoshoots on these days… Swerve, knit in some self-striping, and my cabled version of Betiko:

14th – And then Pete and I did the official Betiko photoshoot at Reed on this day – I love this campus so much, perfect for knitwear photoshooting!

15th – We put lights up outside our house!  LED lights, strung kind of messily across there… we have plans to try to do a better job with decorations next year, but it was fun having a house to decorate for the first time!

16th + 18th – More pattern photoshooting on these days spent finishing my Betiko pattern pdf… first, the backside of the striped example.  Then, I knit up a swatch with 2-row stripes to show some different things about striping for the pattern, so this can give you an idea of what a garter stitch edged Betiko would look like knit with 2 colors of bulky yarn striped (grellow!):

23rd + 27th – I crocheted up my first of 4 crocheted snowflake ornaments and hung it on our little tree!  I sort of followed this pattern, but it was actually my first time ever crocheting from a pattern (I’ve only ever improvised crochet, oh except for this project, which I need to finish someday) and I screwed it up a bit, but it turned out fine I think.  And, out of date order, I spun up some yarn just for fun while trying to give myself some vacationy time during the holidays, since I didn’t leave town or anything – this is a 2-ply from some “craft batts” (unknown fiber content) I got at a fiber festival a couple years ago:

24th – Christmas Eve dinner!  You may remember that we kind of missed Thanksgiving, due to some superlame food poisoning, so we made what Thanksgiving dinner would have been for xmas eve!  Stuffing with chopped apples and veggie sausage, mashed potatoes, and vegetarian gravy, yummmmm!

25th – Pete’s parents and uncle came into town on xmas day, so most of the day was spent at the airport, or driving to and from the airport (with breakfast at Kennedy School, yum!)… but then we all had a festive xmas dinner at Doug Fir and opened presents together – here’s Banzo participating in the gift admiration (and she enjoyed her own gift, from my parents, very much!) (and some gift highlights in flickr, just for fun):

26th + 29th – I decided to regift myself some handspun by frogging this oversized headband that I hadn’t worn in years, something I’d be planning on doing forever – Pete gave me the yarn for xmas 4 years ago and now it’s good as new to reknit into something fun!  I didn’t take a good photo on the 29th, but for some reason I snapped a photo of Pete’s new watch while we were hanging out at some point:

30th – We got a new piece of furniture for xmas!  A fold-out loveseat for our library – so now we have a comfy place to sit and read, plus a guest room!  We felt silly living in a 3 bedroom house with no guest room, so now our library serves that one more purpose (plus storage room, media room…).  Oh yeah, so this is the day it got delivered from Ikea and I built it all by myself!  (I was told to wait till Pete could help, but I like a challenge!)

31st –  And New Years Eve day!  We broke out this awesome Back to the Future card game Pete got me for xmas and taught ourselves how to play, then brought it with us to play it with friends for a super nerdy-fun celebratory night!  (We also ate fondue – both cheese and chocolate – ohmygosh way too yummy!)

Fun end to a great year!  That’s enough photos for one post, so I won’t do any kind of 2010 wrap-up or best-of, but you can see all the photo-a-day posts for the whole year… they started out happening every week or two, until the trip in October knocked everything off-schedule… Anyway, we bought a house and got hitched in 2010, so awesome year! Yeah!