- Signed, Sealed, Delivered -

Today so far is a Very Good Day.

I woke up and almost immediately my ears were filled with the sound of massive giggles coming from my son as he and Peggers tickled each other on the bed and were generally Quite Silly. That's a stunningly good thing to wake up to.

Then I had a slice of the farmhouse oatmeal bread that I made on Tuesday smothered in creamy peanut-butter and a mug of ginger-peach black tea with a splash of milk for breakfast while I read the ending of Greenwitch. It wasn't bad. Not as good as The Dark Is Rising, but still not bad. The series is shaping up to be a decent way to work your way down from the crushing disappointment after finishing HP#7, if I do say so myself......


Then I came into work and packed my Sockpalooza package:

She hates yellow, and I've been teasing her for ages now that I was knitting her a pair of Tweedy-Bird yellow socks, so I couldn't resist covering up everything with this yellow tissue paper...

Absolutely anything and everything looks better packed in a nice basket, don't you think?

We have starting at the top and going counter-clockwise: finished sockpal socks (!), Tarantulas Gummies, a mini skein of sockpal pink yarn for darns or whathaveyou, a lavender sachet, some Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, and a greeting card with a little note from me plus a printout of my blog page from the day I posted about signing up for Sockpalooza 4 in the first place. Dead center (hidden somewhat by the insanely-pink ribbon) is a lavender aromatherapy candle. Also scattered in the basket are some salt-water taffies from a local candy shop.

And last but not least, the all-important Care & Washing tag to let my Pal
know how to care for her pink lovelies.

Everything was carefully packaged up, sealed, addressed, and then stamped via Priority mail - and finally entrusted to Carl, my lovely local postmaster. As she's only over in PA I'm wondering how quickly this will in fact make it's way to her. I'd like to think Saturday, but I'm guessing in fact next Monday. Now all I can do is hope that the box doesn't get lost in transit and when the socks arrive and she pulls them out her face doesn't immediately fall with disappointment!!!!!

I showed the basket and contents to my two new co-workers and they both ooh'd and aah'd over the goodies and the socks - and the two of them were BOTH wearing pink shirts today - so there was no need to ask if they liked the colours! - so I took that as a good sign.

There is no new painting news to report, as I took a break this morning to not only eat breakfast but to also do the dishes and tidy up the house a bit - something that hasn't been done in nearly two weeks (the tidying, that is - dishes have been dutifully washed while painting was going on!) I also worked a bit more on my EZ Baby Surprise Jacket.

Pattern: BSJ from EZ's Opinionated Knitter
Yarn: Gedifra 'Dandy' in this insane yellow/green/purple colourway
Needles: Addi Naturas - size 7 - 4.5mm
Finished Size: 3Tish or thereabouts
Mods so Far: like many others, I've done a provisional cast-on so that I can add length to the sleeves as necessary once everything else is finished...

I started this Tuesday night and managed to get a good amount done yesterday evening while eating cheese fries out of a plastic baseball helmet, watching our local minor league baseball team play - and lose - over 7 innings. Good times. Tonight is the bi-monthly Boys Night In - where Peggers and his mates all congregate in our dining room until late in the evening - and while I shut the french doors between the dining room and living room and happily curl up on the couch and knit and watch DVDs or listen to books on CD. No idea what I'll be watching or listening to tonight, as we've no new Netflix DVDs to watch and I've seen all of the ones we already own, and I've listened and re-listened to every book on CD that we likewise own. Hmph. A visit to the public library might be necessary before I go home tonight. Oh shoot. They close at 5 PM tonight. Damn budgetary cutbacks! Looks like I'll be hitting the Redbox $1 DVD setup in the grocery store instead this time! (hmmmmmm........maybe I can get that monster bag of peanut M&M's that I've been craving ever since I read Franklin's comment about how peanut M&M's are his favorite movie food......)

Speaking of Franklin I was thrilled to see that there is a Dolores Devotees group in Ravelry - you can betcher' bottom skein that I ran right on over & joined that particular group as soon as I found out! Isn't the banner for it just fantastic???

.....and my day just keeps getting better & better! See what I found waiting this afternoon when I got back to my desk? It took the journals folks almost 10 weeks to have these sent off to the bindery, bound, and returned to me - but for less than $20 I now have four full years of Interweave Knits in sturdy, bound form safely at the ready for my reaching hand whenever I need them. Hooray to no longer hunting down that one last elusive issue, or finding that an issue was wrinkled and squashed underneath a pile of comic books, a pile of cooking magazines, or a large Tonka dumptruck!

Happy Weekend everyone - I'm home with the Munchkin starting tomorrow until Friday the 10th, so don't expect more than one post from me - if any - in that interim time. I'll be too busy painting the house, taking the little guy to the beach, and hitting the zoo to once again check out the Stinky Buffaloes!

I Don't Believe I Just Did That

I'm totally jumping the gun here, as I have a post edited & 90% written, just waiting to be posted, and I finished a Knitted Object yesterday (started & finished!) and have pictures of that to show you too, but first I apparently must post about what I just did.

I got the new Interweave Knits mag (Spring) in the mail yesterday and looked through it last night between the hours of 12:30 and 4 AM during which I was up with my son as he played in our living room. (UGH!)

And today, while at work, I went online and bought yarn for two sweaters I saw in there yesterday. TWO.

I just hopped online, did some comparison shopping, and then hit "Add To Cart" and bought a grand total of 18 skeins of yarn.

Man. O Man. I never EVER do stuff like that!

(should I blame it on the lack of sleep and cold that is slowly but surely overtaking my body?)

I bought 5 skeins of SouthWest Trading Company's Bamboo in Plum - the most amazing colour that will just be so much fun to wear. Plus the yarn should be incredible - all of the raving reviews really sold me on this stuff - plus 5 skeins of it (and 5 is buying one too many, but better to have one extra than be one short, right?) at only $12/skein is MUCH better than buying the pattern-required Classic Elite Bam Boo - at $7.50/skein but having to buy a whopping THIRTEEN skeins! (Classic Elite comes at only 77 yds/skein, but SWT Bamboo comes at an amazing 250yds/skein!!!) A grand total savings of over $30.

The Bamboo in Plum is for the Green Tea Raglan by Cathy Payson that is on page 56 of IK.

Which I will present to you here & now:

I've been dying to knit (myself) a raglan for AGES now - and I adore adore adore the way that the designer contrasted the smooth knit of the sleeves with the seed stitch of the body - and the way that there is a teeny slight break between the body & the shaping stitch before you hit the sleeves.......well I could go on & on. Simple as anything yet stunning, I think - and while I know that someone of my hourglass-type shape needs to wear v-necks to help keep me even more shape-focused and defined I think this boat-ish neckline will still look nice on me - and the knitted belt (if indeed I decide to go ahead with it) will help to add definition to my waist even more.

So, that's sweater #1 - I can HARDLY wait to get cracking on it!!!

Sweater number two lept out at me almost as quickly. I sat and stared at the sleeves a bit until I suddenly realized that I could ignore the extra cable on the sleeve that was so distracting to me and that would make an already-incredible sweater all that much more incredible (although bearing in mind Emily's advice about designers throwing in extra stitches to compensate for the amazing way that cables pull in a knitted fabric I might need to swatch a bit and cut back on my number of sleeve stitches correspondingly!) and with that realization I was a goner again for a second time.

(Now just think about this - how many times have you seen a sweater in a magazine that you just loved and how many times have you gone out and bought the yarn for it RIGHT AWAY? I've never done it - never! - and today I did it not once but twice!!!

Sweater number two calls for 8 skeins of Gems Worsted at $14.50 a skein - a grand total of $116. NO WAY. I know it's a cheap hobby when you break it down by time spent and total cost per minute/hour/etc. but still. I couldn't bring myself to do that. So instead I went looking for worsted weight substitutes and remembering a favorite blogger's passion for elann I went looking there and found myself just drooling over their Peruvian Pure Alpaca - but what colour? The price was certainly VERY right - and I needed 13 skeins due to slightly shorter yardage per ball but still - at $3.98 per ball you do the math and realize how much I was saving on this sweater by again switching yarns! I looked at all of the colours and then looked at the top of the page where they had some already-knit items and saw this picture below which is apparently the 'Lift & Separate Cardigan' from Amy Singer's Big Girl Knits. Also knit in Peruvian Pure Alpaca and the colour just LEPT out at me........

But which colour was it? Was it in a now-discontinued colour, or was it in a currently available colour and due to monitor differences I just couldn't really tell which colour it was? I thought I knew - but a look at the colour card that Elann offers made me doubt myself. So I spent about 45 minutes looking all around all over trying to find out WHAT colour this sweater was knit in and then simply decided "oh the hell with it!" and went ahead and bought myself enough yarn in their 'Celery' dyelot and figured that probably no matter what I'd be happy with any shade between what seems to be the two that I keep finding in my searches.

But which sweater is it ultimately for, you ask?

Why, the Cable-Down Raglan by Stefanie Japel, of course!

The part that I don't like on the sleeve is the simpler of the two cables - the ones that appear to be on the 'sides' of the arm - both front and back. Makes it far too busy to my eye and really detracts from that most incredible cable that runs down over the to of the shoulder straight down to the back of the wearer's wrist. So I'll take those cables out and it will - I think - make the sweater look all that much more incredible because of it. And the way that the simple cables on the back of the sweater pull it in like a corset? For a curvy girl like me that's how you spell love love love in wool!!!

So - that's what I did and that's how I spent the last four hours..............between answering reference questions and putting more paper in the printer, of course!

;>