Catching Up

It's been busy, but knitting has happened, as well as major housecleaning and stash organization, which of course was in preparation for Thanksgiving. We had a guest from my seniors' group, and as Erma Bombeck wrote years ago, "If you want your house cleaned, invite company." I really *intend* to keep the clutter down, but there's always knitting to do, knitblogs and knitting forums to read, and, uh, yeah, some Sudoku. I always swear that the knitting patterns in particular multiply overnight. But the company thing really does work, and this time I started early enough that I wound up with only one small box of last-minute 'shove it in here' objects. Midnight and Shadow (left to right) escaped the commotion by curling up in the bedroom windowseat.

We set a pretty table, IMO, so here's a quick view of the before-food table. Our dining room has become our office, so we now dine in the library end of our kitchen. We've had 4 adults and a 7yo at this small table; I don't know where we'd put a 5th adult, lol!


OK, the good stuff, the knitting! I made a kippah, a yarmulke, for the nice Jewish guy who is the head of the nice Catholic nursing home where Mom has been living for the last 4 years. I found 3 patterns online, and I tried one, but I thought it was far too large and I didn't like the all-over reverse stockinette, so I winged it. This is knitted from the center out, in 6 segments (for the Jewish star)and in the Israeli colors. The yarn is Elann's Devon, worked double on US6 needles. It's right at 6in in diameter, and is soft but with enough body to hold a bit of shape on its own.

I switched from the ill-omened brown Di.vé Autonno yarn to the same yarn in a combination of greens, brown and aqua. I like the way this is coming out in brioche stitch; the pattern is just *yo, slip 1, k2tog* over an even number of stitches. What you see is 2 skeins (200 yds), and it's right at 3ft; I'll add one more skein. This yarn is flying out of my LYS, and Stephanie just got some new stocks, including some new colors. I saw them yesterday, and it was really tough to pass on the deep red or the blues/purple.

While this is Lacevember, and I joined the KAL, not much happened with my Dayflower Lace shawl until Thursday evening. This is a rectangular shawl, with separately-knitted end edgings. Because the pattern calls for a finished size of 7ft by 4ft, and me being 5'2", I decided to downsize to 5ft by 3ft. This took a lot of math since I had to refigure to the pattern repeats in both directions, 17 sts wide and 18 rows long. I quit last night on main pattern row 12, since I was starting to make mistakes. This changes stitch counts every row, so I don't expect I'll be memorizing the pattern, even though there are a few clues to what should be in which spots. It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm happy with how it's coming out. I can't get the color right in the photo; this is Elann's Baby Silk in Cedar, worked double on size 10s. Cedar is a luscious deep foresty green.

Remember, you can click on the photos to see a bigger view.

BTW, the consensus of my friends who have done the accent quiz from my last post is that this quiz doesn't know squat about accents, since we have native New Jersey and Canadian speakers coming out as Midlanders and so forth.