kindred spirits

A feline after my own heart, this one is. Whenever I come home, she's here, lounging in my own favorite spot with some yarn close by...

My weekend involved very little homework, but it included lots of cleaning, the hanging of a new picture (my own birthday present to myself): and the baking of cinnamon bread, and yes, the casting on of a new project!This is my first foray into colorwork. It's the holiday lights tam from last winter's IK, and I'm excited for it. I had to dye some yarn today to obtain the lime-green color that I need. I can go no further until it's dried and wound and ready to go, but here's what I've got so far:
And, here's some recently purchased yarn that I'm just dying to start work with. Fortunately, my shrug will be done any day now and I've finshed the body of the february lady...I'm giving myself a week to do the sleeves. So hopefully, I can cast on for a new sweater in a week. I think Liesl will be next.
:

Felted bag with crocheted flowers

This is an old FO. I've been producing them so slowly, I have to turn to old projects to have anything interesting to show on my blog. I love how it turned out, but quite honestly, I don't use it much....not to carry my knitting around in public, anyway. It's always full of some WIP or other, but usually it's hanging on the back of my bedroom door.


No sooner had I opened my laptop to do some work when someone came and made herself quite comfortable on top of the keyboard. So then I pulled out my knitting, and not a minute later, she had abandoned the laptop to begin chewing on my yarn. Now I have a drool-soaked couple of inches coming from my knitting and the rest of that skein of yarn is in some other location. Good thing she's cute, that Clementine.

More WIPs...

Here's my February lady, which is still coming along slowly. About an inch more of lace, then I can knit the bottom edge and then finally get some sleeves on that baby.
Quite the endless knit, this one. After finishing the piece and pinning it together and trying it on, I realized the ribbing section was not big enough. The thought of ripping it all back to the first section of ribbing and adding some more made me ill! My friend Jenny suggested that I just knit a couple extra inches of ribbing to graft onto the cast-on edge, so I knit a couple more inches on the other end and tried it on again. Turns out, the mock-rib section in the middle was really too long. So I ripped back all the ribbing on the end and about 2 inches of the mock-rib section, too. (About 2 1/4 balls of yarn frogged!) Now I'm re-knitting the ribbing on the cast-off edge, and when I'm done with that, I will try the grafting thing. I'm definitely scared of it, though.

I was supposed to do about 8 hours of homework today. I fell very far short of that goal, but I did get a new haircut and color. Since that's the most productive thing I did all day, here's a photo:

The lone cable footie

I thought I might never post again...but miraculously, I'm back. No photos at the moment, however, since I stupidly left my camera in my parents' hotel room in NYC. It was a whirlwind trip to New York--too fast, and too full--I'm still recuperating. But I'm glad I went. (Update: camera made it safely back to me; hence the above photo.)

I finished the second of a pair of cable footies (from One Skein) on the plane. Unfortunately, I left the first of the pair on the plane. So after a weekend of knitting, I still have only one cable footie. It remains to be seen if Continental Airline's superior customer service will be up to the task of finding the lost one and sending it on home. If so, I'll be sure to post a picture. If not, when my camera comes, I can at least post a picture of the remaining one. It's quite comfortable, if I do say so myself.

In other knitting news, I finished my circular shrug, but have not sewn it up yet. I'm waiting for my knitting guru to examine me in the pinned shrug and determine if I can somehow salvage it and get the thing to close across my bust without ripping it all back for the purpose of adding another inch of ribbing at each end. Sigh. I'm still plugging away at February lady. I'll be honest, I am not loving this knitpicks superwash wool/bamboo blend. It's just not very soft and it's quite splitty. I read somewhere that superwash wool can be kind of plastic-like. I'm finding it to be true. Hopefully, the finished product will be worth the hours spent working with this yarn.