Finished the "Grandmother Vinson's Little Red Mittens" last night. I made the women's M, but made both the top of the mitten and the thumb a bit shorter than suggested (I guess I DO have small hands...a friend of my mother's claims that the reason that both my mother and I can do so many fine needlecrafts (and supposedly, my mother's friend cannot) is that we have "little fine-boned hands" and she has "boat oars"). It took slightly less than two, 50-g balls of Stahl Big (each ball ~85 meters) to make the mittens. (My mittens have 11 "ridges" in the welt part, if you're familiar with the pattern).

And I will need them, for it is cold here today, and it looks like there may very well be snow in Illinois when I get up there next week.

I also paged through some back issues of Family Circle Easy Knits, just for fun, and found the pattern for the wristers in the Fall '01 issue. (In an article on how knitting is "hip" for teens, and yet a rather hideous scarf is a feature item). I had planned on making these a couple years ago when the issue first came out. So I dug out some leftover Zitron Cambridge (leftover from socks) and have started them. (The gauge given is 5 sts per inch and that's about what I get with the Cambridge).

It's really fun to be able to make a bunch of small projects that finish quickly. It's also fun to stash-dive.

I'm still trying to decide whether to take the wristers, or the Bookworm Vest (as originally planned) as proctoring-knitting today. It's my Ecology exam, so I expect there will be people there the full two hours.

It's lovely to see the semester wind down. This is always a good time of year - first, you are frantically busy grading term papers, writing finals, clearing up the last bits of late homeworks and such, and then things drop off one by one, leaving you less and less busy. It is a definite pleasure to come home in the early afternoon on an exam day (after grading the exam) and realize you have nothing you must do until you collect your next exam.