Secret Santa Revealed

   Today was opening day for our secret santa packages on the Quilting Board.  Wow, I can't believe all the goodies I got.  It is definitely a Quilty Chritmas day today.

  Here's a list and a couple of pix:

three beautiful postcards showing the area where my secret santa lives
a pack of Vine in Frienship stickers that have a design that look like birds using the drunkards path pieces,
a magazine "Yukon, North of Ordinary" the official inflight magazine of Air North with lots of interesting information about Yukon and the people that live there, can't wait to read this,
a snowman tin,
a half yard of beautiful fabric with sewing notions on it,
jingle bells, to add to my collection,
a beautiful J. Wecker Frisch panel, Sewing Seeds,
a tin of Snow Now, Snow in an Instant, just add water to the snow powder,
a fat quarter of fabric with thread spools on it in orange, yellow, and red,
a magnet with art on it from a Yukon artist, Jim Robb, Secret Santa says the artist dated her Mom back in the day, cute, the name of the art work is Gold Mine in the Sky,
a fabric basket made by secret santa with sewing notions fabrics, love it,
a note pad with cover art by Lynn Blake, the art is called "Small Town Days" and secret santa told me she used to be a daycare teacher at her niece's school before she left to pursue art full time,
Filigriee Fat Quarter Sampler containing 15 fat quarters,
Literary Fat Quarter sampler containing 10 fat quarters,
a package of Insul-Bright for potholders (not pictured),
and last but not least, 1 yard of fabric called "My Hometown" by Cat Williams with quilts pictured on it,

   This swap was awesome this year.  

Time To Start A Knitting Project

    So I bought some red and white yarn a couple of weeks ago.  I'm going to make myself a Santa hat.  I made one a few years ago and gave it away in a Christmas swap.  I really wish I had kept it.  I don't think it was appreciated.  So I'm going to make one just for me.  I'll be using Wool of the Andes yarn that I bought from Knitpicks.com.  I love Wool of the Andes yarn, it comes in a great selection of colors, it felts well and it's cheap.  I bought three skeins of red and one skein of  white to make my hat.

    Here is a picture of the hat I gave away.   This one was started with 100 stitches and I knit a 3 x 2 rib section in white for about 3 inches. I'll be using 16" size 8 circular needles to start.  This one was a  little too big (you can see how big it is with the white section on the neck of the head model) so I'm going to reduce that number of ribbing stitches to 80.  The red section is knit in stockinette stitch, and I reduce the number of stitches every 7 or 8 rounds.