Starting the holiday season

Every Tuesday night, I get together with a couple of friends and drink wine.  I mean knit.  We knit.  Usually with a bottle of wine.  They saw me through my first, aborted blanket attempt.  They saw how much better my second attempt at that blanket came out.  We've knitted hats and mittens and cowls and scarves and even, albeit unintentionally, one lovely pair of granny panties.  We also once made a blanket all together, each of us knitting one strip.  I think we all enjoyed the idea of working together on a single project. 

Behold the project we came together on for Christmas:

 

Our (almost) entirely knitted Christmas tree!  It was the brainchild of Meryl, craft project comer-upper-with extraordinaire.  She wanted to enter a tree into our town's annual Festival of Trees, a charity auction that is so popular, groups wanting to enter a tree have to win a spot.  When Meryl won herself a spot, the rest of us gamely joined in.  We took a cheap plastic tree and knitted limb covers for it.  Then we knitted lots of little scarves, mittens, socks, and sweaters for ornaments.  And one little hat for the top.

It wasn't the fanciest tree at the festival.  It certainly wasn't the most glamorous or the most sought-after tree.  But it was our little tree and we had a lot of fun (and wine!) putting it together.  (Well, ok, knitting the teeny, tiny thumbs on the teeny, tiny mittens wasn't all that much fun, but the wine and girl time was.)

At the festival last night, we got several compliments on our little tree, some from people who didn't realize they were speaking in front of the tree's makers.  I was still nervous, though.  What if people thought it was cute and sweet, but only in a Charlie Brown "aren't the little knitter girls cute" kind of way?  What if no one wanted to take our tree home?  What if no one bid??  All three of us who attended last night, I think, shared this nervousness.  We knew we weren't going to draw the $1400 the spectacular Santa tree did, but we didn't want to be like the sad tree that only got one pity bid of $150.  Good thing we had free wine to get us through our nerves.

But we had nothing to worry about.  We had bidders, real ones, not pity ones.  And in the end, our tree went for a very respectable $300.  Then the nice woman who bought our tree came over to us to let us know how much she appreciated our work.  Talk about warm fuzzies.  We got to hang with friends, drink wine, get compliments, and raise $300 for a worthy cause.  All in all, a pretty good way to start the Christmas season.