Giveaway: Win a $25 Shell Gas Card for Your Holiday Travel!

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If your friends and family are scattered across the country, the holidays can get awfully expensive! To help make it easier for you to celebrate, Craft Gossip is teaming up with Shell to offer a free $25 gas card to one lucky reader. This giveaway is part of an effort to promote Shell’s Fuel Rewards Network, which is a great customer loyalty program that lets you earn Fuel Rewards savings in several different ways and then redeem them for cheaper gas.

Here’s how you get savings:

Dine out one of the 10,000 participating restaurants, you can earn 10 cents off per gallon for every $50 spent
Shop through their online mall at more than 700 merchants and earn 5 cents off per gallon for every $50 spent
Earn additional bonuses for every grocery or dining purchase that is made with a linked MasterCard
Link grocery rewards cards to your account and use e-coupons that offer Fuel Rewards in addition to their regular savings

When you want to redeem your Fuel Rewards, you insert your card into the pump or hand it to the cashier before you buy your gas. You can then buy up to 20 gallons of fuel at the reduced price.

Visit the Shell Fuel Rewards Network website to sign up for this free program or to search for a Shell station near you.

When you’re done signing up, leave a comment telling me about your holiday travel plans. You have until 5PM CST on November 14 to comment. I’ll announce a randomly selected winner on November 15.

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UPDATE: Random.org helped me select commenter #14 as our lucky winner. Thank you to all those who entered!

Not too long ago I did a test knit for another designer that was for a cabled cardigan. It’s really cozy and nice but it just about broke me in a ton of different ways. I couldn’t get gauge, which I suppose is my own problem, but mainly I was somehow both bored and forced to pay attention at the same time.

Because it used the same cable all over, I always had to know what row I was on, but nine out of ten of those rows, nothing in particular was going on. So I couldn’t stop paying attention, but what I needed to attend to was boring.

It may have ruined me for knitting cabled sweaters, but maybe I just need something that’s more engaging. Like this Modern Aran Cardigan pattern from Lion Brand Yarn.

This is a reworking of an old pattern from their archives, and you can tell that form the classic look of the cables and the oversized feel (nothing cropped about this one!). It has allover cables, but like a classic Aran sweater it’s not the same cable, so you’ll have to pay attention to what row you’re on and what cable turns happen for which cables on that row.

Because of this, it’s considered an intermediate knitting pattern, but if you’re comfortable working from multiple charts at once it shouldn’t be a problem for you. There are three different charts and seven different cable moves.

Also because the pattern is so big and boxy there are only two sizes available, with a finished chest measurement of either 49 or 63 inches (that’s 124.5 or 160 cm). It’s up to you to decide how much ease you would like and whether that will work for your body.

The pattern uses worsted weight yarn (and calls for another classic, Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool). It calls for six buttons and includes pockets to make it extra cozy.

This one looks like a great winter project to make and to wear if you’re up for a bit of a challenge. You can grab the free pattern or buy a kit with the yarn needed direct from Lion Brand Yarn.

[Photo: Lion Brand Yarn]

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