A piece of cake

Or I should say, a clever deception. A present from Sixer came in the mail today. She had me throughly convinced that she was sending me cake mix for my birthday, so imagine my surprise and delight when this came in the mail!

They say it's necessary to have a swift in order to use these things.......

And when the instructions say "don't try to do it yourself, get a friend to help if you don't have one" it's probably safe to assume that they know what their talking about, and deciding to 'see if you can figure it out' as something to 'keep my hands busy' while making appointments on the phone is probably not the best of ideas. But whatever. No matter the method or the duration, what matters is the end product:

I've always been kind of envious of everyone else's pretty yarn cakes, looks like I'm one of the cool kids now XD

A String Fling

Dear blog,

I was wandering around michaels crafts store yesterday, drooling over all the halloween craft stuff and, more importantly, picking up some extra yarn to finish up my Ravenclaw scarf, when I noticed the bins of Sugar N Cream. I must admit, they caught my eye. Their so small and dainty, and they have the most delightful selection of colors. I was tempted, and even though I knew I had no interest in completing a project with them (I've never liked them much, on a whole ), even though I knew I couldn't commit even to a scarf or a small hat, I bought some. After all, I thought, what's the harm in some innocent fun, right? And then, because I was also eyeing a certain crochet pattern book, Tabby bought that for me as a birthday present, and now, what am I supposed to do with myself?

I'm not actually committing to anything from this book yet - I still have to finish all these lace shawls I'm working on, but there are only three patterns in here that I hate. All the others I can see myself crocheting, and there are one or two that I want to drop everything for and start RIGHT NOW. So in preparation, I'm re-learning the basic stitches. I'm finding the hardest part right now to be keeping my tension the same for each row. ^^;; And of course, I'm getting no end of pleasure from the fact that it's not knitting, and it's not red.

In other news. Only two rows to the end of the main lace chart for the Peacock shawl, after that it's just rows of mostly plain knitting.

Raising from the ashes

Dear blog,

I recently cast on for the peacock shawlette, and that's going well for now. No I haven't finished the sunshine shawl yet, there's been a snag with the lace edging that has set me back, and frankly I'm not even sure what I did wrong, much less how to fix it.

Knitting in general has moved to the back burner recently, I had a huge test this past week, and I've just been studying like crazy. I feel like I'm already behind on the new unit and we just started it!

definitely starting to feel the edges of panic over all this deadline knitting too. Starting to have dreams about hats and gloves!

On a more upbeat note, went to the northern california renfair this week. It was awesome, of course. Got a huge kick out of seeing Royale hare there, with all their roving and spinning wheels and everything. Looking forward to the day when I have space to keep a spinning wheel in!

Cheers

Theo

A little spin at the fair

In order to distract from the fact that I remain 6 rows away from the end of the sunshine shawl, I'd like to show you this :

They had a county fair this weekend, and Friday was free admittance for Military types so I Went with a bunch of friends ^^;; All I was really looking for was some fresh squeezed lemonade and funnel cake, but what I got was a whole room full of women on spinning wheels (not pictured) with a bunch of hand-spun yarn and hand-spun knitted garments. It was amazing, and across from that room was the natural dyes garden. Made my day.

Anyways, there's a spinning workshop this weekend, and I think I might go. So, fingers crossed.

Cheers