Cabled Socks and Gift Knitting

Thank you for all of your comments about my new pattern. If you decide to try it out, please let me know what you think! I'm working on two more sock patterns but they'll be secret knitting until I get them right!

I have a half finished pair of socks to show you. I put this pattern together off the top of my head and now that it's done, I think there are some things I would do differently. Nevertheless, here you have one cabled sock in Knit Picks Swish Superwash (Bordeaux).



Marly noticed that I was knitting on circulars and asked what I thought of using circulars instead of DPNs. Well, my dear Magic Loop friends, I hate circulars. I am begrudgingly knitting socks on one long circular because I have nightmares about poking little Miss Beatrix in the head with a stray DPN. She's usually in my lap when I knit and I'm too scared to risk jabbing her so I've moved to a circular needle FOR NOW. I'll be back to my dear double pointed needles when she's a little older. Speaking of the little devil, here she is in her new Santa suit: I don't even like Christmas but I couldn't resist dressing my kid up as Santa. There is something wrong with me.

Speaking of the holidays, I've decided not to do any gift knitting this year. A three month old baby is a great excuse, but I'm considering rethinking the annual flood of gift knitting. We have a tradition of only gifting handmade items so for the last 7 years, that's meant knitted items from me. However, I have decided that, in the future, I will only knit for people who are genuinely excited about handknits. Too often, I've gifted a pair of mittens or socks to relatives and I can tell immediately that the items will not be used at all. This doesn't offend me the first time - after all, how would I have known that X wouldn't like handknit socks? Who wouldn't wear handknit socks??? I simply try to remember who likes the handknit goodies and who doesn't for the next year.

Needless to say, there are only a few family members who are excited about the handknits. I've been thinking that it would be nice to knit for those people throughout the year and occasionally send them socks or scarves instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of knitting time in before Christmas. That way, the relatives that don't appreciate handknits don't feel like I don't love them as much because I didn't spend hours knitting for them. Is this a hopelessly flawed strategy? Will I gift knit again this Christmas? We'll see. I am capable of it, given my recent stash expansions (yarn prOn coming your way next week when all the loot arrives...)

How much gift knitting do you do? Are you bloggers frantically working away on holiday projects or do you take it easy and give other kinds of presents? I'm interested to see if there's a Blogland consensus about gift knitting.