Lately I've been doing mostly Dulaan knitting. I still plan to make a sweater for myself and one for my partner, and I'm starting to feel the urge to do something lacy, but I haven't been able to focus on deciding what to do, so I've been making quick-knit sweaters and hats for Dulaan. 

My first FO for 2007 was a scaled-down Seamless Hybrid from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting without Tears. The construction of this is really quite brilliant. Elizabeth Zimmerman never ceases to amaze me.

I changed the numbers a bit for the neck opening, since children have proportionally larger heads than adults. Other than that, I just followed the "recipe" in the book and used half of all the stitch counts. I love the look of this sweater! This was also a very cheap knit. I had enough yarn from the recycled sweater I used to make the child's raglan a while ago. So for a $5.99 purchase at Value Village, I made two Dulaan sweaters and a hat!

While I was looking at this pattern, I also came upon the Maltese Fisherman's Hat in Knitting without Tears, and decided I wanted to try that too. I didn't have any yarn thick enough, so I used a strand of a varigated Paton's Classic Wool and a strand of some leftover Wool of the Andes (natural). This combination is still thinner than the yarn called for in the pattern. I used the same number of stitches the pattern called, so I got a child-sized hat. Now that I know how it works, I may make myself one in a yummy yarn, and will adjust the number of stitches depending on the weight of the yarn.

 I have another sweater in the works, that should be finished in a couple of days. And I'm almost finished a pair of socks (my portable project).

Speaking of Dulaan, in December Tammy over at So Now What? held a contest. To enter you had to send Tammy photos (or links to photos) of items knit for Dulaan. I sent mine off, and was randomly selected to win one of five prizes. The prize I won was a still-to-be-named prize donated by Rabbitch. So after a bit of email discussion, she sent me 500 yds of her hand-dyed sock yarn in browns and creams

and some stitch markers

Wonderful prizes indeed!