Happy New Year! It’s the Eighth Day, or Octave, of Christmas, better known as New Year’s Day. That brings us to the number five in this Twelve Days of Christmas Knitting coundown, and today brings another scarf.
Jared’s siblings do a sibling gift exchange every year, so that between all of them and their spouses, we don’t all go broke or have to get a bunch of lame gifts. We were a little suspicious this year when I drew the name of the girlfriend of Jared’s only unmarried sibling. When the significant other’s name goes into the gift exchange hat, you know the situation is serious. This suspicion meant we were not surprised to get an international phone call from Jeremy early in December that he and Mollie had gotten engaged.
I was pleased that I would be her first sibling-gift-giver, and kept an eye out on our facebook group to see if she posted what she wanted. Seeing nothing, when I went to the Big Craft Sale that weekend, I got her a Pang hat. It’s a style of crocheted hat that is very dense and warm, originated in the nearby community of Pangnirtung. (That’s actually the English name for the place. In Inuktitut it’s Panniqtuq, which is easier to say. Not sure what happened there. Anyway, everyone just calls it Pang.)
The hat I found was cute, was made by a lady I often sit with at ACW, and had ulus (women’s knives) on it.
So of course, I got back home, looked on facebook again, and Mollie had posted a request: an infinity scarf. Thwarted!
It was not too late. One of her favorite colors, she posted, was dark green, and the hat I got was lighter green… I could work with that. Jared was going to the hardware/craft store, so I made him facetime me to pick some bulky yarn in a coordinating dark green. Add in some silver to tie it in to the hat’s pattern, and I had the start of something.
I did some fast and loose math, did a fast and loose cast on, and thirty-six hours of seed stitch later, had a big, cushy, reversible infinity scarf ready to wrap and put in the mail.
We were three thousand miles away from our family for the sibling gift exchange. But that morning I got a text from my father-in-law with a picture of Mollie, with her hat and scarf. She looks happy!
Did you have any hail-mary-pass gifts this year? How did they go?
Osborn Fiber Studio 