I made a snood from the free pattern that Karen made WORLD FAMOUS on her blog, Did You Make That?, a few months ago. Now she can add New York City to her world map of snoods!

I bought this Merino wool yarn from the Brooklyn General Store in early December and started knitting it up at a friend’s apartment nearby. The wool came from upstate New York and was so fresh it still had some hay in it. Talk about organic! Does that happen?

I’m a novice knitter, so it was nice to work on a project and actually have something at the end of it! I knitted 2 more snoods (another Merino wool one and one from baby alpaca for my mom, both made in Virginia). I was able to whip up the 3rd one pretty quickly; after watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and The Philadelphia Story I was done! (By the way, I added this project to the “Celebrations” theme over at the Sew Weekly.)

Some tips for those who are new to knitting:

• There’s a contraption at the yarn store that winds the yarn into a ball for you for free. I didn’t realize this and spent too much time winding it myself, complete with tangles!
• I found knittinghelp.com videos very helpful for such things as the mattress stitch since I wasn’t able to finish this in time for my friend to show me.

For Christmas, I made these 3 pillows (plus a 4th larger one I didn’t photograph) for my sister. She bought the yellow and red fabric during our trip to Hawai’i last year, and I took some of the blue fabric I bought for a dress in order to make a more complete group. We found a great and affordable fabric store called Kapaia Stitchery on the island of Kaua’i. I recommend!

I bought the pillow forms from JoAnn’s, which was easier than stuffing with polyfil. These will be bright, warm reminders of our trip during the cold, dreary winter that has yet to come (thank goodness).

And, lastly, I made these festive reindeer table runner and napkins for the grand family Christmas dinner! I used sew-in interfacing to make the table runner more solid.

For the napkins, I finally used the narrow rolled hem feature on my serger. Very exciting! The edge looks like a bias tape finish from far away.

So there you have it. I guess that’s the last post of 2011. I hope you have a great end to the year and I’ll see you in 2012. Happy S’new’d Year, all!!