Ka-Thump! Fell Off the No-Yarn Wagon

Well, just a bit. My dear friend Grace, who's known to the Elann Chat group as Queen of Shawls (QOS), designed a beautiful lace shawl, called Lovin' Comfort Shawl, for a design contest and it's been published by Little Knits. So I had to zip over to buy the pattern. Of course I couldn't just buy a pattern. So I went exploring and settled on some more of the really nice Happy Feet sock yarn I'm using in my Chevron Scarf (see below), in a lovely combo of browns and greyed browns and then fell hard for some Flying Sheep Blue Faced Leicester yarn from Fly Designs. I tried to get a good color match in my photo for the BFL, which is the most gorgeous, saturated deep teal, with very subtle color variations, but I didn't really get the color right. There's 660 yards in the skein, enough for a big shawl.


I'm making very good progress on a baby blanket, my first in a couple of years; I thought I'd sworn off knitting blankets, but a design by the so-talented Wendy Bernard at Knit and Tonic grabbed me. It's called Tender Blankie. Hers was done with 4 squares of the lovely Pakucho cotton; mine seems to have grown beyond just 4 squares. The blanket is made from 11-12in mitered garter stitch squares, sewn together and then adding a little ruffled crochet border. I had Caron's Simply Soft acrylic in shades of Country Blues, plus white and I think this will be a 9-square blanket of blues trimmed in white. I found a 3rd shade of blue after I took the photo. So far I have 3 light blue and 2 dark blue squares done. This is the ultimate no-brainer knitting, so much that I was able to knit a square last night while watching the exciting season premiere of 'Fringe', a combination of weird science and FBI-type investigations. BTW, you can watch the entire episode at the link, and I think there's a repeat later this week. This is definitely on my list of new fall viewing.

The Chevron Scarf has progressed, too; I've added the 2nd skein and it's moving along nicely. I've also gotten a couple of new books and I'm trying to be good and ease back on the knitting, but the blanket squares are sort of like Ripple chips - it's hard to knit just one. But some aches in my shoulder and left thumb are beginning to remind me that I need to be moderate.

And - excitement! - Apple just announced their new iPod Nano, with twice the GBs for the old price. I'm looking forward to reading reviews of some of the new features. DH has decided he likes the iPod, and he's happy with my 2nd Gen 2GB, so there's a new one in my not-too-distant future. There's a purple one, and y'all know about me and purple. ;-D