Let's reveal the mystery project:Jana guessed the closest, it is indeed a stuffed animal...Sheldon the turtle. I knew I had to make this because my friend is decorating the baby's room with a turtle theme (her favorite animal). He's looking a bit sad here as he still doesn't have legs or a shell, but those are coming along quickly. I am using Plymouth Dreambaby DK yarn and it's awesome. It's extremely soft, machine wash/dry, and reasonably priced. I'm not sure how well it would hold up to repeated washing, but if that isn't a problem it would be a great yarn for baby garments. However, it wasn't a very close match in gauge to the recommended yarn for this pattern, so alterated it by making the body a bit wider and longer.

I am also getting ready for the kick-off of Project Spectrum. For February and March, the colors we are focusing on are blue, gray, and white. I just recently bought this yarn that I'm really excited about:
This is locally produced yarn, from a farm only about 20 minutes from us. I had seen their sheep grazing all summer and (of course) I wondered if they sold the wool. Lo and behold, they do! They also sell eggs from their chickens so we bought some of those too. The yarn comes only in the natural colors but there were a bunch of different pretty shades of gray, white and black. I am going to attempt to use it to make this sweater, from the VK fall/winter 2004-2005 issue:The only problem is that the homespun yarn has a somewhat different gauge that what's called for. I spent what seemed like a couple hours on Saturday trying to calculate the numbers to customize the pattern. In the course of things, I found what may to be a minor error in the pattern...for the increases prior to beginning chart #2, the instructions for two of the sizes (34.5 and 43) seems to have you increase to a number of stitches that is different than what is required for working Chart #2 per the instructions. Nothing that would be difficult to work around, but if you are thinking about this pattern see if you find a problem too (maybe I'm missing something?).

Here's a gauge swatch for a portion of the fair-isle chart:
I'm very happy with the colors and pattern, I think they go very well together. I am curious to see if my calculations were right and I can get it to come out to the size I want, though! Will it be success or disaster?? ;)