Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year!  We got together with family at Christmas but New Year's Eve was very low key.  It's not usually a big blow out around here, but Max had the big snip snip on the 30th so we were doing our best to keep things quiet.  Not that he wanted things quiet, he was attacking Logan's head a few hours after we brought him home from the vet's.  He seems to be healing well and Logan was of course thrilled to be attacked.  This morning Mickael and Caleb are off to work and school while Logan and Max sleep and I drink my tea.  It was a wonderful Christmas break and none of us were ready to go back to the usual routine (Logan actually groaned when the alarm went off this morning), but it was time.

There wasn't a huge amount of knitting while I was away from the blog, more reading and watching movies actually.  I did get a few hexipuffs made, but it's been so long since I did that, I had to get out the directions.  The pattern is back in my head now, but I'm not making them quite as fast as I was when I started them.  (Yes, I time them.  Yes, it is a race.)  Also, I decided that I needed a new hat and a few weeks ago I saw Gretel from Ysolda Teague and couldn't get it out of my head.  I dug up the leftovers of my Tea Leaves Cardigan (Berrocco Ultra Alpaca in Cream or Ivory or something else that means Off White) and got to work.  This was a very fast knit and I made the slouchy version of the pattern, but when I went to try it on I realized that this style of hat really doesn't work for my hair or face shape.  I think it might work better with curly hair to balance the flop of the hat (and to help hold the hat up a bit), but with my straighter hair, it's just not working.  (Also, despite the rather possessive paw in the picture, it doesn't work on Logan's head either.)  So while I love the hat and think its a great pattern, I will probably be frogging it and making something else with it - possibly another Riply (I've done the lace edged, non floppy version and it's really cute - scroll down a bit to see this version).  It would be pretty in the cream color.  So now I've learned something already this year (floppy beret type hats don't work on me) and it's always good to learn stuff, right?