Christmas looked like this

The spinner-in-training thought he was in heaven when we erected a lump of plastic in the middle of the living room and decorated it in beads and baubles, tinsel and tat and even candy canes and biscuits. It was almost, but not quite, enough to distract him from my knitting.

It's been plague season here at the biscuit barrel, as both Skye and River have been down with colds- nasty ones at that. Skye's been running a bit of a temperature and was feeling poorly enough that she went back to bed for most of Christmas day, and River hasn't been sleeping- but then, what else is new?

Without intending to, this has turned out to be a bit of a handmade Christmas- I gave Steve a camera of his very own and one of every different selection pack on the market, and he, bless him, trashed the budget totally and gave me a sewing machine AND the Celtic Collection by Alice Starmore AND a beautiful pair of ebony needles from the lovely Doreen at Scottish Fibres AND

an itunes gift card. The boys got what they wanted- Alex wants money for a bike and Isaac wanted lego- and Skye slept through most of it. River got the aforementioned destructatree and was very happy with it, thankyou very much, but we also bought him a rocking horse.

We all got lashings and lashings of glitter and paint, thanks to Alex, who crafted all of his presents to people but also bought me a truly beautiful little ceramic mirror from the brewery arts centre in Cirencester: the perfect colour to go with our newly decorated living room, which is an intensely unfashionable warm violet and I love it. My father-in-law and I are both in recovery from 20+ years of smoke-dyed white anaglypta and DH just goes with it- after all, he and I met as a result of a hot pink and purple living room, so there's some sentimental memories there for us.

Appropriately enough, the question on the UKSwap blog this week is about neck warmers, and at the moment I'm working on Wabenschal in 2-ply cashmere from Plum Knits that I got in a magic ball swap on MDC. I'm knitting the goodies out of it (because I just couldn't be bothered to unwind and rewind that kind of yardage of laceweight and I've lost my ball winder somewhere) and I'm just getting to the good bit now- I'm literally about 10 rows away from a pot of handcream and trying hard not to cheat. Unfortunately, River loves this a lot and is obsessed with breaking the yarn (and this is exceptionally fragile stuff) or pulling my needles out, which is making it slow going. The colourway is called peacock, but I'd describe it more as a bottle green, if I'm honest. It's very pretty, and definitely one of my colours. Oh, and in the absence of a finished lacy cashmere scarf I've been wearing my clapotis wrapped around my neck a few times, which was knitted in hipknits silk in their pixies colourway.