Yarn Along: December

 I am joining with Ginny for the final Yarn Along of 2020.  Can you believe we made it to December?!?

The baby sweater I was knitting last month is finished, with exception of blocking and sewing on the buttons.  I have some buttons that will work size-wise, but I'm not in love with them.  Which is why it's not totally completed yet.  I need to get out and do some button shopping.  Or online and do some button shopping ASAP, considering shipping is taking a while this year.

My orange hat I use for deer hunting had gotten stretched out and didn't fit well anymore, so I found some blaze orange yarn from Jimmy Beans and made myself a new one.  The yarn is wool, and I love how warm and cozy it keeps me, for the most part (40 mph wind gusts off the field being the exception to toasty warm ears).  The pattern I used was Christina which has mock cables made with yarn overs and k2tog or ssk.  I'm thinking the wind gust air leakage is because of the yarn overs; my only regret is that I didn't use a pattern with real cables.

More small projects I have been knitting are some dish cloths.  Many of my dish cloths in the kitchen seem to have bitten the dust in recent months, leaving me with less than a week's worth.  I dug out my bag of scrap cotton yarn (from making dish cloths in previous years) and have been piecing together color combinations.  The finished sage green one is the pattern Honeycomb dish cloth, and the one on the needles is Copycat dish cloth.  

I also began a pair of socks, intended as a Christmas present for Surprise, although I may end up finishing them next year and keeping them for myself.  Long story, possibly a future blog post, maybe not, we'll see how things turn out.  The pattern for those is Branching socks, the yarn is some Knit Picks Stroll Gradient yarn I've had for a while, the color is discontinued, but I think was called Star Dust.

Not a whole lot of reading has gone on since the last Yarn Along. I read two books, one of which was the one I picked to take to the deer stand with me (I typically bring a book out to help me sit still and quiet; it has to be a book small enough to fit into my hunting bag, and not have a crinkly or shiny cover).

The hunting book this season was Snow Country by Kristin Neva.  While the story line was kind of predictable, I did enjoy this book because it is set in an area of Michigan that I am very familiar with and it was fun to recognize real places in the fictionalized towns.

The other book was Among the Wicked by Linda Castillo.  I love her Kate Burkholder series of books and absolutely devoured this one.