advent calendar. day one. star

Since this year was the first in FOUR (!) years that I haven't been pregnant or had a young baby I celebrated the vast amount of extra energy and time (!) I have by making my kids a keepsake advent calendar that I hope they will love and cherish for years to come.

After some research I decided that I wanted to knit the ornaments since I would rather be knitting than almost anything else. So I started making the ornaments way back in September and the advent calendar design kind of evolved as I thought more about how I wanted it to look.

Thankfully I finished JUST in time and my kids were excited to see this when they woke up this morning:

Day one: Star

For the star I used this pattern. It was mostly pretty straightforward. I used size 3 needles and this yarn. I did find that I needed to knit the setup row using size 8 needles in order to have enough yarn in the purl bumps to be able to do the two-way cast on more easily. I also found the original pattern made a star that was too large for my needs (about 5" diameter) so I scaled it down and cast on 65 stitches and started knitting on round 5 which made a cute little star about 1.5" diameter.

Let the holiday season begin!!