I put our advent calendar up today. It should have gone up Friday night but I was a little behind on things (like finding the calendar). I made this calendar in a quilting class a few years ago. It takes advantage of a panel print to make all the little pockets. I love it every time I get it out; the colours are so bright and jewel like and in the class we used gold thread for all of the top stitching.
 
I was having trouble deciding what to put in all the pockets this year. I’ve used chocolate coins and mini candy canes before but I wanted something a little less sweet this year. I eventually came up with the idea of putting a slip of paper in each pocket. Each paper has a number at the top (which sticks out of the pocket) and directions on the bottom. The directions are all holiday or winter activities like “Drink hot cocoa” or “Watch White Christmas”. I hope it will be a fun way to count the days until Christmas.
 

I put this little green marker on my needle and it settled into the red yarn and I’m sure I could smell cloves and cinnamon. It’s hard to believe we are heading into our last week of November. I’ve got our Christmas boxes out but I don’t like to start any decorating until we are officially in December. The advent calendar will go up on Saturday (I’ll have to think of what to put in all the little pockets) and everything else will follow some time later.

For those interested these stitches represent my in progress red possum mittens. I’m about half way through the first mitten ... for the second time. I did the first one at gauge and it was way too big for my hand. This is a little smaller than gauge and seems to be working out perfectly. I don’t know if I have abnormally small hands or if the pattern designer just really liked roomy mittens. I like my mittens to be a little snug so I can put my hands in my pockets easily.

I haven’t frogged the first attempt yet and I should probably get to that. The yarn is going to need blocking and will take a while to dry. I don’t want to have to wait too long to get these finished. The temperature dropped on Friday and it’s much too cold to be wearing mittens with holes in them.

This is my possum yarn being swatched up for a pair of mittens. It’s so soft when it’s running through your fingers and has just a tiny bit of a halo to it once it’s knit up. It’s going to be lovely mittens.

It might seem funny to swatch for mittens. Even if my gauge is a bit off mittens are small enough that it might not matter too much. The thing is I’ve made this pattern up before. It was right when I started knitting and I just picked some needles I had - they may have even been the size called for in the pattern (US 7) - and started knitting.

You can probably see my first problem already. I realized just how much of a mistake this was when I was reading over the pattern yesterday and noticed that it calls for “3.25 mm (US 7)” - that’s a mistake in the pattern - US 7 is about 4.5 mm! My second problem was that I’d learned to knit from a book (and not very well) and it wasn’t until I was half way through the first mitten and showed it to my grandmother that I discovered I was knitting through the back loop. I don’t know if that effects gauge but it definitely changed the texture of my knitting. At any rate the mittens were huge - I wonder if Jane still has them?

I need a new pair of mittens for myself (my current pair have a whole in the thumb) and I really want them to fit (or at the very least to not fall off) so I’m swatching.