Christmas Gifts, part I

It will take two posts to properly show off the knitting-related Christmas gifts I gave and received, and I'm gonna be greedy and show off the stuff I got first. Fear not, you will *eventually* see pictures of Dad's socks and Mom's scarf-sized Clapotis.

Several awesome family members helped me instantly double the size of my stash:

Four skeins of the pretty brown and light blue stuff, that fun bright boucle which just screams "Baby blanket!" (must find a baby) and two skeins of a boucle yarn. Two 300-gram skeins of boucle. OMG. Each one is bigger than my head! I measured, and it's 13 inches across and over 18 inches around. My home church is going to be starting a Prayer Shawl ministry soon and I think each of these will make a pretty generous shawl. Yay!

Mom gave me a couple of awesome treats:

Two skeins of DK weight Alpaca in a natural alpaca color. Really, really gorgeous stuff and buttery soft. It's actually a lot of yarn and I'm thinking hat and scarf or mittens.

The real prize:

All the yarn a girl needs to make the Venezia pullover in Winter 06 Interweave Knits her own. Squee! This sweater is SO much fun. Early into the knitting Dave decided it looked like a snout with wooly tongue:

I decided to do the sleeve-as-gauge-swatch thing, which allowed me to get right to the good stuff. As you can see, I certainly have:

Don't worry, I will post *plenty* more pictures of this as work continues. I'm in love.