Start my Christmas knitting in January, so that it will be finished in time with no rush knitting involved.
This year, the planned recipients are:
My sister ireth_telruenya will receive one pair of socks, knitted in this yarn. (I don't think she's particularly active in the queer rights movement (besides being a Bay Arean 20something and therefore being in favor of it) but she does like garish colors.) I will have to look over Knitty and see if there are any particularly good patterns for handpainted yarn.
I drew my aunt N in my family's not-so-secret-secret-santa pool. Or, rather, I drew several members of my immediate family, drew two people I've knitted for before, drew my cousin Z (who is male, and not particularly enthusiastic about this sort of thing, and was not there for me to interrogate), and then someone said, "Just give her N" (who is the only woman who I have not knitted for, and also who has expressed her disappointment in me not drawing her every year since I started knitting gifts).
Having completely given up on this surprise Christmas present thing, I got her to tell me exactly what she wanted: a hat, the size of my green Coronet, and a scarf, 6"x48", both in off-white (I figure this probably means natural wool).
I've made my mother one sweater and my father two sweaters, so I figure my siblings need some too. So my brother R is getting one this year, and my sister is getting one next year. (My mother has expressed the strong opinion that she should get one in 2011.)
He expressed a preference in favor of "not boring". He used to be a big Discworld fan (he seems to be less into it lately, but he doesn't seem to have a particular replacement fandom). There is already a turtle pattern out there (although I'm likely going to end up scaling it up...maybe the little one can go on the sleeves or something), and I've been meaning to make an elephant pattern for a while (elephants are distinctive; two lines for tusks, one line that opens up into a triangle for a trunk/head, bump for an eye, big flappy ears and you're there), and eight-rib cables are easy enough to do. ("Eight is the magic number" is a Discworld idea that is more prominent in the earlier books than the later ones, but since R has actually read all the early ones, this is okay.) So he is probably getting a Discworld sweater.
People keep asking me how long it takes me to knit a pair of socks. So the next pair of plain socks I knit I am going to time. That is, I will knit them while watching Netflix, only while watching Netflix, and write down what I see in the course of one sock. Then I will be able to tell people that "one sock is about five movies", or whatever the true answer is.
(Yes. The correct unit for the time it takes to knit a sock is a movie. This is something I'm reasonably likely to be able to do while knitting a sock, it gives people reasonable estimates on both knitting time and overall time (five movies is about ten hours, but it's also a couple of weeks), and also it's funny.)
I only got three skeins of yarn for Christmas this year: two skeins of mellow variegated tan sock yarn (which will probably be used in the great sock timing event above), and one little ball of qiviut. That one little ball of qiviut is probably destined to be a lace scarf.
I have 454 grams of Louet Gems 4-ply left over in French blue from (a) my dad's sweater, and (b) Stuart's hat. I think I bought 14 skeins overall. So this isn't far from making a sweater for me, if I don't add a hood or too much cabling. And another soft wool sweater that can be machine-washed is always good.
(Yes, I'll have dye lot issues buying extras. But you know something? I think color-matching technology has improved. I suspect I'll probably be fine.)
I've been dating tortoise for...seven and a half years now? And in all that time, I've never knitted him anything. (I crocheted him a Klein bottle hat once.) The thing is, he loses hats and scarves and gloves, so he doesn't really want them, and he seems pretty happy with his current footgear. But maybe this year I'll knit him a sweater. With tortoises. And nine-strand metabraids. And probably in two different colors, so he can have a sweater that is green and not green.
I want to reknit the butterfly sweater to get rid of the wonkiness at the edges of the reverse-stockinette patches. (Which may mean just doing the entire thing in reverse stockinette, à la Leaves in Relief.) Once I've done that, I want to write up the pattern, properly, in sizes from "Newborn" (or possibly "preemie") up to about six years or so. (There's an age when this sort of thing becomes deeply uncool. I'm guessing it's about seven or eight, which is the age I was when my classmates all suddenly got mean.) Then I will sell it through Ravelry, or the Knitting Vault, or something.
Of course, to do this, I'm going to have to find out what those sweater sizes are, not to mention when a child becomes developed enough that doing set-in sleeves instead of a modified drop shoulder is actually worthwhile. zathrus could probably tell me, but if any of the readers of this blog know, I'd love to hear your opinions.
squirrelloid and ashke are getting married this summer, so I might want to make them something. ashke has expressed an opinion in favor of a pink blanket with Cthulhu on the front in some way. I think this is a bit unlikely (blankets are big) but I could maybe make them a lap blanket in chunky weight, or a pillow, or just some fuzzy dice or miniatures, since they're big roleplaying geeks.
Write up an article for Knitty on...oh, right, if I tell you, they won't take it.
Update this blog more often.
Keep better track of when I start projects, when I finish them, and how much yarn they take. (I hear rumors that this Ravelry thing helps with that...)
(edit) Finish making a knitting symbol metafont, write the requisite (La)TeX macros, and post the whole thing to CTAN. Possibly other places too---the knitting community probably needs to see this more than the TeX community does.