100th post celebration!

Yes, you read right: This is my 100th post! It's taken me almost 7 months to reach this number, which I don't think is too long. And to celebrate this, we're of course going to have a competition! To enter the competition, you can go about it in three ways.

1) Write me a comment and tell me what your favourite finished object you made is, and why.

2) Become a follower to this blog (all of you who are already followers will get this entry for free :).

3) Write about this competition on your own blog, and then write in my comments, telling me that you've done so.

Those are the entry ways, and you can get three entries in total. On January 31st I will draw a random name from all of those who have entered, and the winner will be announced shortly thereafter. And now I bet you're all wondering what you can win, right? Well, I've been raving for a while now about a recent favourite sock-yarn of mine, Kunstgarn from Hjertegarn. So naturally I went out and bought a skein for you! Here it is, the grand prize:

The yarn is 75 % superwash wool/25 % nylon, and the skein is 100 g, which is 420 m. It should be enough for a reasonalby sized pair of socks, I used about half a skein to make my Ishbel shawl a while ago. I love the colouring of this yarn, and it's very nice to work with. So go ahead, bombard me with comments!

On my own knitting front, I've actually picked up the green bolero, and I'm trying to finish it soon. It's a pretty bulky yarn, and I'm working on 7 mm needles, so it's a pretty fast work. I finished the second sleeve yesterday, so now I'm working on the last stretch of the body. I decided to make it into more of a cardigan, so I added the last skein I had of this yarn too. It will probably reach my waist, or around there. I really like it so far, it's very soft and cuddly. And once I finish this one, I can cast on for something else!

On a more somber note, I guess you all know about the horrible situtation in Haiti, right? A lot of knitters around the globe have really stepped up, and are donating lots of stuff, both money and more material stuff. I chose to give money, I've donated some to Doctors without borders. And I also took the opportunity to buy some patterns that I've had my eye on for a while, where the designers are donating 50 - 100 % of the proceedings to different Haiti charities. On Ravelry, when you browse for patterns, there is now a button you can click, and then you get a full list of all the designers who are giving away their proceeds to charity. It's a great function, and it seems like it's in good use. I read on Ysolda Teague's blog that she just sent away a donation of over $6000, made from sales of her patterns. Aren't we great?!

And for those of you who want to know, these are the patterns I bought:

Guinevere gloves

The Betta Loves Shetland shawlette

The Faro-Easy shawl

The Butterfly Forest shawl

The Baby Cables and Big Ones Too sweater

The Coraline cardigan (and yes, that' Ysolda herself in the photo :)

I don't really know when I'll have time to knit all of these, but in this case it doesn't really matter. It feels good to know that you actually give something to charity while purchasing what you want for yourself :)

As you might notice, I've today updated my blog lists a bit. There are a lot of blogs that I've recently discovered, but forgotten to add to my blog roll. Now I think they're all there! Some are only listed under the Lace KAL, but once that's over I'll just add all of those blogs to the other blog list.

And can you believe that we're now up to 19 participants in our little KAL?! It's going to start on February 1st, and it's going to be so much fun! If you want to join, just tell me in the comments, or you can click on the button in the right column, that takes you directly to Kate's original post about the KAL. There are practically no rules: We start on February 1st, there is no deadline, you can knit anything lace-y you want, and you must have fun :) We have a Flickr group set up too, where we can chat and exchange photos.

I've surfed around these past few days and had a closer look at all the participants, and as usual, all the knitters seem really nice. We seem to be chosing a lot of different stuff to knit too, so that should be fun. If my KnitPick's order gets here in time, I'm going to make myself a Haruni shawl of the pink Shadow yarn I orderd. If it doesn't arrive, I'm thinking of starting a Percy shawl, in my Kermit green Simone yarn from Chili Gredelin. I'll just have to wait and see :)

Haruni shawl

Percy shawl

All photos of the patterns are borrowed from Ravelry. My sister pointed out to me a while ago that all my Ravelry links are not working for all of my readers who aren't Ravelry members. I guess most of my readers ARE members, but I know that my mother and sister aren't, so these photos are for them :) I noticed when I put them up that some of them are too wide for my blog format, but it's just too much of a hassle to fix it, so I'll just leave it. You'll have to cope...

Now I'd better continue reading, I got a lot of new reading tips from my co-superviser yesterday so I have a lot to do today. I find that I have a hard time concentrating on what I read when I'm at the office, so I ususally stay home to do that. And today we have a huge snow storm, so it's extra nice to curl up in the sofa with my bathrobe and PJ's, with Hobbe in my lap. Too bad I can't just surf around the net the whole day ;)

/ Jenny