Happy New Year!!

Hope everyone is enjoying their New Year's Day! And I am especially excited because I felted my tote bag this morning and it looks GREAT! Here are the pictures:

In a previous life, this is the yarn I used. From my UFO list is the Bloom Shawl, made from my own handspun, easter egg dyed wool. I realized I would never wear a wool shawl and wasn't really thrilled about how it was turning out. So I frogged it and it became this:

Pre-felting. I realized after I felted the tote, this picture is sideways. Those openings are actually the handles. But you can see the color changes pretty well. I also forgot to measure it. I'll be doing a before and after measurement from now on. And it felted up like this:

Yes, that IS the Yarn Inspector giving it her stamp or I should say "Paw" of approval. It turned out great. The picture is a little fuzzy as I was trying to keep the YI from giving it her full body approval by laying on it. The colors are very subtle and the bottom is square. It is drying now (I need to see if anyone is laying on it!) and I'm already planning the next felted project.

I have quite a lot of small balls of wool I spun and dyed back before real estate. These will become project bags. I picked up the book "Bags - a Knitter's Dozen" at Gourmet Yarn yesterday as well as yarn to make the "Market Squares" bag found on page 2. But I also like the felted pocketbook on page 12 and will probably use that as my guide for the project bags.

Are you making resolutions for 2006? No, me either. But I am putting together a list of goals. I didn't get much knitting done in 2005 except for a handful of "No Hair Day" hats which I'm still wearing (I have "boy" hair - it's still really short but it IS growing). I didn't use the yarn called for, I used Fun Fur and any other fuzzy yarn I felt like. Although I just realized I'm wearing a sweater I must have finished in February (the last month before everything happened). But I didn't weave in the ends! Even though I have it on, I'm still not sure I like it well enough to keep it - how funny is that!! I'll try to remember to post a pic of it when I take it off.

So back to the goals, I have a handful of UFOs I mentioned in an earlier post but today my plan was to felt the tote bag and start the blue baby hat. I need to get those in the finished box soon! I have a couple of sweaters to finish so am going to try REALLY hard to work on them and not buy yarn for sweaters until these are done (we'll see if this will actually work in real life).

One of the big reasons for starting this blog is to keep a record of what I knit this year. I've already started a picture file for 2006 (and it already has an entry in it!! I don't care if I knit most of it the last week of 2005, I'm counting it!).

I still have some medical challenges to deal with this year but with my pointy sticks, yarn, and good friends, I'm looking forward to 2006.