Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! It's raining buckets and buckets here in San Francisco, and I actually heard thunder this morning! A rare event indeed. We're coming up to the new year when everyone reminisces about the previous 12 months and looks forward to a fresh start in January.

To that end, here are my 2008 crafty highlights:

• Learning to speed up my knitting. I can really crank it out now on simple knit projects.
  
• Working with two-color knitting (but not fair isle for all you purists out there).
  
• Finishing the piece de resistance of my budding knitting career, the houndstooth capelet. (Even if I have not yet posted photos of it on Ravelry!)
  
• Learning basic crochet stitches and finishing my first granny square-esque project.
  
• Learning tons about sock construction with all the fabulous ladies in my sock-of-the-month-club and figuring out that socks are really simple and quick to make.
  
• Feeling more confident about substituting yarns and actually making gauge swatches ahead of time.
  
• Actually finishing a quilted wall hanging. I seem to start quilt projects but never finish them.
  

Which brings me to my next list of 2009 crafty goals, in no particular order:

• Finish my redwork quilt. My mom embroidered squares with red cherries for it, so I've got to finish it!
  
• Finish the round robin quilt that my mom, aunt, and I are working on.
  
• Make a granny square afghan.
  
• Learn to take fabulous photographs of all my handmade items.
  
• Make a quilted cover for my sewing machine. I already found a cute pattern for it.
  
• Play around with weaving and perhaps acquire a cute handloom from Urban Fauna.
  
• Play around with beads and come up with more original jewelry designs.

That's about it! The list does not include any of the knitted projects in my Ravelry queue, so rest assure, I will be knitting tons and tons from my mountainous stash.

p.s. The photo is a family heirloom stocking that my mom knitted. We call it the "papa" sock, because it's around a foot wide and 3-4 feet tall. Fabulous!