Knitting like crazy...must be the holidays!

Hey there blog friends, how is everyone doing with their holiday knitting?  I hope everyone of you on the East Coast survived Super Storm Sandy...we were fine, I got to leave work early that Monday due to the MBTA closing early and Nate and I hunkered down for two days but other than losing power for about 10 hours we went by unscathed.  My parents, who live on Long Island are OK too - their house is fine and they finally got their power back last night.  After 6 days of no electricity my dad was pretty frantic to be able to watch TV.

I've been busy knitting.  I have some Christmas presents I've been working on:

These coffee sleeves (from the fall '12 Knit Simple) are super easy and quick to whip up!

I also managed to knit something quickly for me.  Like a day and a half quickly.  And I used some stash yarn for it! I pulled out a skein of Noro Kureyon that I've had for over a year - this was my first time knitting with Noro and all the rumors are true: there were a bunch of knots and it broke on me.  But other than that I love the color changing and think it came out really awesome.  The pattern is Turn a Square by Jared Flood and the grey yarn is Cascade 220 Super Wash.  

I learned how to do jogless stripes on this project which I think is great to know.  I didn't like the instructions in the pattern so I used a different method which I think is much easier - Knit a round in the new color like normal and on the second round slip the first stitch purl wise and continue to knit.  Piece of cake and I love how the decreases form the square at the crown.

Asides from more coffee sleeves I have a couple of hats I need to knit for Christmas gifts and I signed up for another Danger Craft swap.  Like my very first one last year, this is a mini Christmas/holiday ornament - and it is using more stash yarn! Happy day!

I also purchased some yarn for a selfish me knit - I fell in love with Candy Skein's Yummy Fingering Sock yarn in the Rainbow Fruit Chew color way when Tami posted a picture on facebook last week.  Despite saying recently that I wouldn't buy any yarn unless it was for a specific present, I caved and bought a skein.  It's very reasonably priced and the colors are soooooo vibrant (ignore the crappy lighting instagram photo above) and it is very squishy.  I am looking forward to knitting the Hitchhiker shawl with it :)

My lessons in crochet are going well and I even made my first amigurumi!