For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her

...What a dream I had
Pressed in Organdy
Clothed in crinoline
Of smoky burgundy
Softer than the rain...
(Lyrics by Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle)

Just look at what was waiting for me when I came home last night in the evening hours......

Do you know that I cannot find that lovely Soak concoction anywhere near me? And that I'd been coveting it for far too long - but reluctant to give in and buy it (with it's resulting shipping & handling charges) on the off-chance that I wouldn't like whatever scent I had decided to go with? But now I can try! And I can try them all! {insert a shamelessly greedy mwaaahh-hah-hah-hah type laugh here...}

And !OH! the Brittany cabling needles! They're so lovely and wee yet super strong and sleek to the fingertips. I keep petting them. And taking them out of the packing and putting them back in again. And the butterfly is already a favorite of the Munchkin's - in fact minutes after opening the packing I had to wrest it from his sticky little fingertips so that it wasn't twirled around the room as he ran in circles on the living room rug in butterfly-induced happiness!

We won't even discuss how lovely those little Lifesaver candies are.

At first I thought it was my happily-anticipated package from Miriam Felton, as back at the beginning of the month I was one of three totally lucky winners in her Birthday Contest (!) so imagine my total jaw-dropping amazement when I saw that the From: name on the package was not Ms. Mim's , but instead Emily's! She enclosed - along with the goodies and the booty - a lovely little note, too, saying that it was just something meant to brighten my day after the loss of my friend, which indeed it truly did. So much so that I was able to shake off the weariness of a very long work day (working until 9 pm can be pretty ucky - but working until 9 pm when you were up the previous night with your son from 3:15 - 5:30 am is really & truly an ucky of a totally different variety!) and pull out my knitting needles, load up the last disc of the Deadwood series that I have been watching lately thanks to the loan from a friend, and knit away happily and peacefully until 11:30! This was indeed a day-brightening package and just a truly lovely, kind, and all-around wonderful thing to come my way. Much like, I would imagine, Emily to be in person. (I myself would not actually know, as unfortunately I haven't yet met her in the flesh!)

I'm mildly ashamed to say that I'm not currently working on my pal's sockpal socks - I finished the first without too much trouble at all and have cast on for the second (and am 3 rows away from finishing the ribbing and moving to the calf) and am not at all worried tha t I won't finish in time. So instead I'm totally indulging myself by swatching and knitting and ripping for a sock design that I have floating around in my head. And I have to say that this is just So Much Fun that I can hardly bring myself to stop to do other stuff like, you know - Eat. Sleep. Go to work.

I first started swatching and suchlike with the sock yarn that I intend to use on the finished product - the above luscious Apple Rose from Misty Mountain Farms, but I quickly realized my error - not only am I using size 1 needles which means weeny stitches, but due to my ripping/frogging/yanking out in frustration I'm wreaking total hell on my lovely sock yarn - so now I'm swatching and suchlike on some kitchen cotton and size 6 circular needles - faster progress, easier stitches to see/count and no worries if I fuzz to hell and back a length or two (or three or four or five) of kitchen cotton!

This current design interest is due first to Gryphon's post asking for design ideas for her yarn - and then suddenly one popped into my head. But while I can imagine a knitted item that I'd like to wear, I have literally no idea ho w to design one. This came up one day in e-conversation with Mel, as she had just heard that a design of hers was accepted at MagKnits (!), and she graciously offered to see if there was space for me to join a design blog that a friend of hers was running - the perfect place for me to post all of my stupid questions and run my ideas and problems past sympathetic, like-minded people. So join the blog I did - just last week! - and while I was browsing through Barbara Walker's first two Treasury of Knitting Pattern books (Woohoo! my library owns them both and now they're checked out to me until the middle of 2008!!!) looking for a stitch pattern to go with my original idea I stumbled across another pattern that immediately said to me STOP! KNIT ME AS A SOCK! So I figured that as a sock is smaller and as that might (?) mean that there is less room for me to screw up, a sock would be a better first design project than the sweater than I was thinking of. (But never fear, the sweater idea is still there, and I found the perfect stitch pattern and am now really, really excited about getting this all sketched and schematic'd out, too, after I'm done with the sock!)

Well, that 'tis all from me for this post - I need to go back to work and keep making all of the necessary changes to the Copyright web pages that my Dean handed to me yesterday - what fun, 'ay? Happily enough, though, I have an hour of virtual reference desk service to do right before I leave, which always means a little knitting-related time in some way, shape, or form, for myself between questions, so I most certainly have that to look forward to!!!!