Happy New Year!

A belated Happy New Year! We celebrated by having hot pot with my sister and my brother-in-law at our apt, which is a tradition. If you have never had hot pot, you are missing out, it's a fun group meal/activity. It's very much like shabu-shabu. In fact we used a shabu-shabu electric pot my sister gifted us when she got an extra from her registry. We gave them our extra bread machine, from our wedding.

I got my haircut in midtown today, so we decided to walk to the new multi-level Kinokuniya bookstore across from Bryant park. I bought 2 books, Ondori's Men's Knit Design in Japanese and Cute Dolls by Aranzi and Aronzo, amazingly in English. I find there are few men's patterns in American knitting books that I feel compelled to make, and they are hard to find. I figure I'll make a sweater for my good ol' dad, because he worries about me and constantly buys too much groceries for me to fit in my fridge. I bought Cute Dolls, because I have an unhealthy obsession with all things cute. I can make believe that I will be making a stuffed animal for a friend's kid. Hey it can happen! 1 for them, 5 for me!

Ondori's Men's Knit Design

Cute Dolls by Aranzi Aronzo

My hands are always cold, I blame bad circulation. As a kid my fingers and toes would turn quickly to blue-purple, and this would be indoors with the heat on. So, I decided to knit up the "Hand/Wrist Warmers" from the Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book. I used Blue Sky Alpacas Sportweight yarn in blue-grey doubled throughout. These two balls were reserved for an elephant for a friend's child, but I errr... didn't get to it. They knit up real fast, I skipped the last 10+ rows, because my hands are very small. They are so soft and I like the zig-zag fake cable pattern, it looks really neat. My hands are very happy.