As 2010 is drawing to a close...

...I thought I should post a little update of what I'm up to. Right now, I am studying - or trying to study! - for an exam I'm sitting in a few months' time. It's make or break time, and I'm really hoping it'll be the former, so I will keep this post short and sweet, so that I can get back to studying!

I started knitting the vintage top from issue 47 of Knit Today before I went on my Hawai'i trip at the start of December (details about that will have to be in a later post, I'm afraid!) and took it out again on Boxing Day to work on, while everyone else was out at the shops, battling it out with other crazy bargain hunters (I don't go Boxing Day shopping as a rule, because I don't like being pushed and shoved, and having my toes treaded upon). I am very bad at keeping focused, when it comes to studying from books, and recently read the intro of Knit Fix in which the author writes that she picked up knitting to keep herself from looking at her watch all the time in meetings. Hoping this could work for me, I have been knitting intermittently, and I'm halfway done with the back piece of the garment already! Ahem, not much progress with the studying though..

The garment is categorised in the magazine as an intermediate knit, but it's really quite simple (yay, I'm an intermediate knitter! :D) and pretty straightforward, with no shaping required at all so far. Initially I was going to buy a green alpaca yarn to knit with, like the one used in the pattern, but in a different brand, but I couldn't get past the only shade of green that was available - a gross bright moss green. I ended up using the deep magenta Patons Zhivago yarn from my yarn stash, which I had initially bought to knit a shrug from one of the Patons Zhivago knitting books I have. I didn't really realise it's almost the same shade of magenta that I bought in the Patons Mist for that other shrug I posted a picture of! I'm not a particularly big fan of magenta, so I'm not quite sure why I chose the colour. Maybe it looked good with the lighting at the shop at the time. Or maybe it was because it's the colour used to knit the garments in the pattern books. Yeah, that's probably it actually.

I also recently purchased the deluxe set of KnitPro interchangeable Symfonie wood knitting needles online, as well as the Patons Serenity DK yarn needed to knit the pretty pink daisy sweater from an issue of Let's Knit. I haven't received either parcels yet, but I'm really excited! No doubt I'm going to be very distracted from my studies though! :P

Anyway, back to my essays!