More Christmas stuff, some music, and a plug for Yousician!

I finished the elephant hat, and also made a Panda hat for a great-nephew (grand-nephew?)

I also managed to get a good start on warping the floor loom in the bedroom.  I threaded the reed last week 

and this week I threaded the heddles.  It took me two days to thread the heddles, and in the process I found several threading errors in the reed.  A couple of threads have been added, and some threads will have to be moved over after I get the warp wound onto the back beam.

Today we had our family Christmas party.  I dropped off most of the corn bag heating pads I made, and brought back several gifts for our family - a new couch blanket, the usual (and highly anticipated!) bags of Dunkin Donuts coffee from my dad, some chocolate, and a very special and totally amazing gift from one of my sisters:

This is a bluetooth speaker in the shape of the Millennium Falcon!  I love this!!  What an amazingly thoughtful gift!

I also had a great extended practice session downstairs this evening with my keyboard and my Breedlove guitar.  I have been using the Yousician app to practice guitar.   I love it!  It's so much fun!  I showed it to my guitar instructor; he said it's like "Guitar Hero, but for real guitars."  I like it so much that I paid for a subscription.  One of the fabulous things about Yousician is that you don't have to get a subscription.  The program gives you a half-hour (or so) lesson a day without a subscription.  No one-week or 30-day free trial, no putting in a credit card number and then needing to remember to cancel it.  And Yousician is good for guitar, bass guitar, ukulele, and piano.  Even though I have a subscription for guitar, I decided to try out the free program for piano.  I asked online and was told that you need at least a 61-key keyboard to use the program.  I found one very inexpensively on Craigslist, and two weeks later hunted down a full-size 88-key keyboard to continue with.  I ended up getting a Yamaha DXG-500.  It's so old it has a disk drive, but it works!  I passed on the 61-key keyboard (Casio CTK-611) to a family member.  I hope they sign up with Yousician and have as much fun with it as I do.