Finally, I can show you the Christmas hats I made!

It has become a small tradition in my family that I make something for family members. Not everyone receives something every year, it's something that I do as the whim takes me. My biggest inspiration is DS#2 who is a bit......ummm....experimental? edgy? He has always challenged me to come up with things I thought I couldn't do. We've done Jack Skellington hats, bearded hats with interchangeable moustaches, skeleton mittens with glow-in-the-dark skeletons, a risqué Nordic hat, etc. And both sons are with lovely ladies who appreciate handmade things, so I was off and running this year.

For the Lady E, who saw me working with a certain handspun yarn over Thanksgiving and admired the colors as being 'hers', I picked up an alpaca laceweight to bring the yarn up to gauge and crocheted a nice little bucket-type hat for her snowy trip to work.

For the Lady S, who loves elephants, anything green, and hats, there's the Elephant Hat out of a washable wool blend.

And for DS#2, a little something to wear under his snowboard helmet to keep his ears warm when he's flying through the air upside-down (he wears the helmet, that's all I ask of him cause I can't control any of the other life-threatening stuff he does).

On a completely new note, I am intrigued by Husbeast's worksite down in Louisiana. It sits in the middle of a sugarcane field and the seasonal changes fascinate me, along with the construction changes of course. Remember these pix? The ones taken in November of the cane standing in the fields and being harvested? I'll include them for comparison but I took shots of the harvested fields when I was there over New Years. If you see this every day, you never notice the change, but seeing it after a 2 month absence is striking.

November 2013

January 2014

November 2013

January 2014

This is what Husbeast & Company have been building. It's a DRI facility, and it's been a long 2 years to build this. I'll leave the technical explanation out because it's too involved to explain here. Suffice to say it is a process in steel making, which is what Husbeast's company does and does very well. It's a huge site and extends down to the dock facilities on the Mississippi, where I cannot go without Federal certification that I'm approved to hang around dock facilities, so no photos of that side of the dike. I included the long shot because the construction dog was sauntering across the parking lot and she's cute.