Some people are crafty enough to make their kids beautiful handmade holiday gifts.

My kids get craft supplies and how-to books instead.

This year they got Kids Crochet and See and Sew, plus knitting needles and crochet hooks and knitting towers and fabric scraps and wool felt squares and yarn. Lots and lots and lots of yarn. (It’s easy to go overboard with yarn, there are so many colors/weights/materials to choose from!) (They got some other stuff too, but we’re talking about crafts right now. Because I have a mildly amusing anecdote about the craft supplies. Ahem.)

So Abigail started asking Dane and I to teach her to knit on, say, December 25th at 11am or so, and didn’t let up, um, ever. Despite the fact that I did buy knitting needles, neither Dane nor I actually know how to knit. At all. Never even seen it done up close. So we did what I think any parent would do: we put the kids to bed early and tried to teach ourselves to knit. With the help of this book and also this one (though that one’s not exactly a knitting book). Obviously.

There was plenty of unraveling of yarn, much swearing, and absolutely no knitting produced by the end of the night. At one point Dane accused me of purling rather than knitting [???]. At several points I picked up so many stitches that they wouldn’t fit on my needles. (Where the frick are the extra stitches coming from?)

The next day I showed Abigail what I had kind-of learned, and she immediately began producing long skinny rectangles of knitted yarn. I, on the other hand, have spent the last week and a half producing this:

It looks rather more like a dead blue mouse than like the beginnings of an (admittedly very skinny) scarf. And why oh why is it skinnier at the top than the bottom? It’s just four stitches across, every row.

The kids would like their yarn and needles back now. I really don’t blame them.

On a related note, will 2009 be the year I get a real camera and stop taking random photos with Dane’s phone? Unlikely, but stay tuned.