TD update and the "happy" gift recipients

I haven't worked on the tilted duster as much as I wanted to this past week. I thought I was going to knit the entire time I was dog sitting for my brother because I'd be bored out of my mind but that didn't happen. When I finally got a chance to take a breather I figured out how to seam the shoulders of the TD (as seen here)
and seam the sides of of the front and back portions using the mattress stitch seen here:
I love learning new stuff about knitting! I still have so much to learn. Here is the upper body finished:
I'm a bit further along since I took this photo. I knitted one sleeve, skipped the other and went for the skirt next. I'm about 5 inches into the skirt. Picking up stitches for the skirt was a complete bitch. I kept losing count of how many I needed to pick up and for some reason I was having a really difficult time picking up and knitting the stitches because they were really tight. Was anyone else out there having this problem? But anyway, I'm in skirt rib hell right now. It's taking forever. Peruvia is extremely rough on my hands while knitting but after blocking the front and back pieces they were surprisingly soft. I have about 5 more skirt repeats to go, still need to knit up the other sleeve, and then do the ribbed collar. Yup. That's all.

Here's my niece and cousin with their knitted gifts I made them:Marhiel has a purl scarf with some floofy yarn I found at Jo-ann's. Yes, it's acrylic but whatever...it can be thrown in the washing machine. There's no way in hell her busy mom would remember to handwash it. If I used wool it would be a felted mess by now and my efforts would've been wasted and I'd be upset.

Leila got the fingerless gloves and foliage hat made out of Malabrigo worsted. (She wouldn't put the hat on because she didn't want to mess up her hair. Whatever. *rolling eyes*)

If they didn't like them they definitely humored me and flashed a big smile for these photos.

Happy New Year to everyone and more fearless knitting in 2008!