snow and knitting go together

I have pictures of what I've been up to since my last post. Knitting, knitting and more knitting.
I knitted some bath puffs out of cotton chenille for my girlfriends and was in such a hurry to send them off that I forgot to take a picture. They turned out really cute and just when I finished them, my yarn order finally arrived on Friday so I've been knitting my dad's scarf like crazy. Every spare moment I was knitting and I finally finished it last night. When I got up this morning my first thought was that I didn't have to knit that scarf today and I was thrilled! I have so many other Christmasy things I want to get done and now I can because the scarf is no longer consuming me. Part of the reason I was able to finish so quickly (really in 3 days because I didn't knit Monday because I went and saw U2 on their final show of the tour!!!) was that it snowed on Sunday! I got sent home 3 hours early from work and went in 2 hours late on Monday because it was icy so I had more time to knit. Portland doesn't usually get snow so the city kind of freaks out. My dog had never seen snow and he went nuts! He ran around like a crazy possessed dog and scooped up lots of snow in his mouth. Here's a picture of us in my snowy backyard. So my dad's scarf is knitted out of Knit Picks Andean Treasure. It's 100% baby alpaca in the color Granite and it's so soft! I love it. If it weren't such a boring, masculine color, I would be tempted to keep it for myself. I don't think any of my pictures captured the true color. It's a pretty medium shade of brown mixed with a little grey. I think my dad will like it. I knit three braided cable patterns with a seed stitch border. My original plan was to knit a complex celtic braid since my dad is Irish and loves all things Celtic but that was before the yarn took so long to arrive. Since I was running out of time to knit, I realized I needed a simpler pattern that wouldn't take so much brain work to knit. So this is what I settled on. Before I blocked it, the seed stitch edges curled in.But after blocking, it looks great. I woke up this morning and it was actually dry. I was hoping that it wouldn't take forever to dry as I only have a few days to get it in the mail but all it took was one night. I love this yarn!
I made Mike model it to see how long it turned out. Notice his cute grey hat knitted by me a few years ago. It's the only hat he wears. I'm such a good knitty wife. Did you notice his arm in the picture above? That's his flame sweater he's wearing! Here's one last picture of my dad's scarf. This shows the back, too. This pattern makes me think of the forest and I think the back looks like tree bark, althoughit's kind of hard to see in this picture. I hope all of you have a great Christmas and a happy new year! I don't know if I'll post again until the new year as I'm going to California to hand out some lovely knitted gifts to the family!