This year is the year. Every other year that I’ve committed to making homemade gifts for friends and family, I’ve managed to finish in time. But this year I’m going to have to accept defeat. My sister just told me last week that her fiance wanted a pair of dark brown or black fingerless gloves for Christmas. Last week. And I’d been planning on just ordering him an Amazon gift card online. Oops.

I could have said no. I could have said he was getting a gift card and that’s that. That he could have gloves later, for his birthday or as a wedding present. But I can’t resist a request for a last minute gift, especially from a future in-law who hasn’t shown an interest in hand-knits before. So I quickly cast on the gloves with some Comfy Fedora from my stash. The problem is my family lives in North Carolina, and I’m not flying home for Christmas this year which means I had to ship their presents this week. Instead of stressing out and pulling an all-nighter to the gift done or paying a small fortune for expedited shipping, I simply printed out one of Knit Pick’s downloadable IOU’s, put it in a gift box, and tied it with a string of Comfy to give him a preview of the color. Done and done.

Now I’ve got a whole month to finish up the gloves before I go back to NC for a visit in January and can present them in person. Which is good because I haven’t even started knitting the cats’ Christmas toys yet this year!