It's his fault. His pretty pictures set me off on on a quest for self-striping kitchen cotton and gorgeous brown shades of kitchen cotton. I've googled. I've been to the Bernat website, and the websites for every yarn vendor I can think of that might carry it and I'm this close to checking the three Walmarts up in Salem.

It's distracting me from my black eye, which is nice, but I really do wish I could find an online source for the stuff before the purple and black fade and I can't use my owie as justification to buy some.

Sometime in the dark hours between Thursday and Friday, I got up to use the bathroom and ran face first into the edge of our bedroom door. Which should've been open, or maybe closed, not at an angle across the doorway. It really really really hurt and I knew there was going to be a horrible bruise just in time for Leif's appointment with the new pediatrician a few hours later.

It didn't bruise at all. Until this morning, three days later. How does that work? And when is it going to stop hurting?

I had more to write about today, something to do with the Rose Garden Shawl and Picovoli, but after five or six or seven interruptions, it's all left my brain. Hopefully it'll come back.

Jealous of everyone else's pretty pictures, I finally cast on for my Mystery Stole with the same yarn and needles I was using for Mystery Stole #1 before I realized that I was in over my head and lost my nerve.

All last night, I had doubts about the yarn and needles. Which I ignored, because I absolutely always have doubts about my yarn and usually have doubts about my needles. This morning, I blocked what I had done and I've still got doubts. But I found better needles and I'm going to switch to them. Both sets are supposed to be the same size, so we'll see what happens.

As much as the yarn worries me, I'm in love with the pattern. So far (halfway through Clue #1) it's been easy knitting. I can see why so many people are knitting more than one.

I think this has become my Deathly Hallows Shawl. Its real name never stuck in my head, and I've been so immersed in the Harry Potter books for the past few days, trying to get done re-reading the last couple so I can read the new one, and the color is perfect.

Some projects got tangled up with whatever was going on when I knit them. Months after the fact, I know that I was working on the Endpaper Mitts while watching the movie Wickerman -- twice, because I had to see the commentary to figure out that I knew the story because I'd read the book it was based on. I've got a dishcloth that conjures up a neat old movie I sat up until until something like 3am because I wanted to see if they got the guy out of the cave. They didn't. But I wound up with a nice lacy dishcloth.

I'm feeling a lot happier about the shawl after sitting up with it for three hours last night. The stitch pattern is finally flowing for me, even if I can't look at it and tell if I'm doing the right thing in the right spot.

Now I don't know what to do with myself while the kids are playing - read, or knit on the shawl, or play with the new computer...

Pictures! And no whining about the electronics, at least not today.

The Rose Garden Shawl really does exist --



It hasn't been as much of a boring struggle as I expected it to be, but with only 300 more yards to go, I've got mixed feelings about this project. I still love the colors and I'm glad I bought the yarn and got it knitted up before realizing that I really don't care for feather and fan, or whatever realative of feather and fan this stitch pattern actually is.

And look at my kitties! I saw the pattern in Quilter's Newsletter and immediately thought "I could do that with the scraps!"

The new computer and I aren't loving each other. I've just about gotten over the terrifying moment when I thought the memory card reader didn't work and we'd have to haul the whole stupid thing back to the store... but now I don't trust this thing anymore. Not that I trusted it to begin with, but now it's given me a reason not to trust it.

And the camera's throwing fits of its own.

sigh



I did manage a picture of the Luna Moth Shawl. The camera and I both think there was a picture of the Rose Garden Shawl, but the computer says we're wrong and apparently it wins.

Hopefully I'll have good stuff to show you tomorrow!

I pick up the new computer tomorrow afternoon! Bill went out and bought it yesterday and they're removing all of the annoyng demo software and making restore disks and I don't know what else. He's going to take the old computer in so they can save all of the baby and vacation pictures we lost. And he finally fixed the kitchen sink. Yippee!

I'm so ready to have a real computer again. I want to print patterns nad upload pictures and type on a keyboard that doesn't make my hands hurt.

And, spreaking of printing patterns, Elann has another new shawl, The Voyager Lace Stole. I'm not even a little tempted by the yarn they used, but I just can't live without the stole itself. And I think I know exactly what yarn to use. It's not the gauge the pattern calls for, and I've only got about 700 yards, but I don't need it to be as long as the pattern calls for... Worst case scenario, I guess I order a bit more yarn!

I got neat new stuff yesterday.

Neat thing #1 was a new prescription for real, honest to God migraine medication. For the past few years, I've been limited to the stuff that frequently doesn't work but always makes me sick to my stomach or the stuff that sometimes works but makes the room spin and wears off quickly. Which meant I usually just suffered through the headaches.

After a string of nasty four and five day ones, I decided there had to be a better way and demanded an appointment with a doctor who knew about medications and breastfeeding and what can and can't be done -- turns out my theory was right and that as long as I wait long enough between taking the Caffergot and nursing the baby, we'll both be happy. Yippee!

It also turns out that occasionally having my arm and half of my face go numb and losing the ability to speak coherently is just a migraine aura. Guess that's reassuring. It's also the symptom that convinced him I really do have migraines and not just plain old headaches.

Trust me, this is really exciting!

Nifty thing #2 was the yarn I'd ordered from Knitpicks six days earlier. I never get stuff from them that fast and almost didn't bother checking the post office box while I was in town. The new colors of Palette (at least the four different ones I ordered) are gorgeous! More shawls will soon be on my needles, I guess.

I'm still happily playing with my newest shawls. Rose Garden has become my TV knitting, and I'm almost halfway done with it already. The Luna Moth is giving me just enough trouble that I'm afraid to work on it when there's much danger of anyone jumping on me or asking a question, but it's starting to look like something.

And if there was ANY way for me to post a picture, I'd show you the absolutely enormous snake that was spread out behind the van when I walked around it to unload the groceries last week. I don't know how we pulled into the driveway without squishing him, but all four feet of him were stretched out in the gravel and I didn't see him there until I almost stepped on him -- then I jumped and screamed and said some words the kids probably didn't need to hear.

He's at the other end of the yard now, hopefully eating mice or something. And hopefully he's the same fella that left the big skin Bill found in the barn last year.

This way lies insanity

I did cast on for the new shawl -- all 541 stitches of it. I think I've finally figured out the long tail cast on, so it was a lot less painful than I expected. And I made it through two of the nine yarn skeins before realizing that it was going to make me nuts if I kept pushing myself to keep up the same pace. That's too much purling and too much wrestling the stitches along the cable, and the clues for the new mystery stole are out.

Not that I can print anything here at the house. So we went to the library to do it there. They used to have computers on the main level that you could use for a couple of minutes, but I got directed to an eerily quiet room downstairs where they won't let you go with babies. Can't use those. Can't use the computers in the children's section, not even if I had a kid in my lap.

I did get a reference librarian to help me out, and I've got the first two clues, but by the time we got home from karate and hours of errands, it was too late to hunt through the sewing room for Mystery Stole yarn, so I wound up casting on for the Luna Moth Shawl.

How many shawls/stoles/wraps can I have on the needles at once?

5,000 Gram Update

In just over two months, I've managed to knit up 1500 grams of yarn -- yippee! I got a lot done in May, but I was so convinced I wouldn't be able to do much knitting in June that even though our plans changed and I had time to knit, I didn't get anything done.

Now, I feel like knitting. I finished Askew last night and did mange to get the circumference right, which doesn't matter because the straps hit in an impossible place. It's my fault because I didn't make sense of the schematic and pictures until it was too late. So that's in my sewing room, completely done except for the straps. Maybe I'll have a flash of brillance and figure out how to salvage it one of these days. Or maybe I won't.

Immediately after that was done, I cast on for the second Horcrux sock and stayed up working on the leg until I was too tired to see straight. I finished it about an hour ago and I'm a lot more excited about these socks than I expected to be.

A friend commented that she expected something more spectacular to live up to their name. I didn't even remember what a Horcrux was, just liked the idea of socks that would knit up fast. But I didn't have wool, didn't think one skein of Wool-Ease would be enough, didn't want to use a tiny bit of a second skein... And somehow I wound up with a solid reddish brown color and a bit of varigated stuff that looked like it would be enough for heels and toes.

I didn't realize until I was halfway through the first sock that the varigated stuff was the last of the yarn I used to knit premie hats for Quinn while we were in the NICU. Those hats were too ugly to save, hopefully because I was recovering from surgery, stressed out of my mind, didn't have a pattern and the stupid nurse kept forgetting to give me my pain meds even though I kept asking for some. And after typing that, I'm not sure why I want a souvenier of that stage in our lives, but while I was knitting the sock, I thought it was kind of neat to be using that same yarn in socks for me.

Tonight's plan was to cast on for the Rose Garden Shawl, but after rummaging through three rooms to find the yarn and pattern, casing on 541 stitches may be too much for me.

Oh, and Knitpicks has the last few Memories colors I've been coveting on clearance and yummy new colors of Palette and Telemark and a couple of new sock yarns. So I happily spent the last of my birthday money. Now there's really no more yarn until I get 3500 more grams of my stash knitted up.