It's starting to look like Christmas

Are you like me and facing the holiday season with a bit of excitement touched with dread? I love the Christmas season and all the singing and decorations, but I loathe the commercials and forced jollity. This year at least some of the stores held off putting up Christmas decorations until after Halloween, but it's gotten to the point that they're just waiting for Thanksgiving to be over so that they can slam us with advertisements. And people fall for it. Some folks spent the night outside stores on Thanksgiving evening so that they could be the first in line the next morning. I suppose that if you have a family to shop for you have to go to such extremes, but it seems very foolish to me.

Our office has a family to shop for this year. One child is a girl who is into crafts, so today I'm off to go shopping for her. She'll be getting a kit on how to learn to knit. I'll see what kind of yarn I can find plus a pair of needles and a book. She's into beading now. The knitting will be another fun craft she can learn.

My needles have been busy this week with holiday knitting. Last weekend one of my fellow Knitbloggers was working on a Moebius cat bed from Cat Bordhi's Second Treasury of Magical Knitting. It must have sparked something because I got the idea to do items from that for Christmas gifts. I already have two items done and a third on the needles. It won't take much time to get all of them done, especially since I get to pick from my stash what yarns to use. The beautiful part is that some of them are great single-skein projects so not only do they go quickly but they use up the singletons I have on hand.

What with all the surfing I do on the web for ideas, I find things that would be nice to have on hand. Most of the time I go ahead and get them for myself but not always. But if someone were to ask me what would be on my wish list, I would have this:

1. Knit Visualizer. This is software that is used for designing knitted patterns. Of all the reviews I've seen for knitting software, this is the one that gets the most positive reviews. I'm at the point now with my designing that I need to seriously consider software to make it easier to compose patterns.

2. A WooLee Winder for my Louet wheel. I love my Louet S10. Just love it. It spins like a dream. But I don't like stopping to move the flyer loops to wind the singles/plies onto the bobbin into another space. A Woolee Winder would resolve that problem.

3. A birds-eye maple orifice hook. To match the Louet.

4. A small niddy noddy in birds-eye maple. For sample hanks.

5. A subscription to Spin-Off magazine. I already subscribe to Interweave Knits. Spin-Off would be a nice complement to that.

6. Spinning fibers. I'm not up to cotton or flax but I'd like to try silk or other types of wools such as Blue Faced Leicester.

What's on your wish list?