A week and a half of knitting...And here's all I had to show for it! You can all just start calling me speed-needles, LOL. This is one of the sleeve-bands. I've finished cranking out the second one tonight, so hopefully I'm a bit back on track with this project.

Unfortunately my cold turned out to be one of those nasty ones, all stuffy and coughy and yuck, but I managed to have a pretty fun weekend nonetheless. The nice weather we had went a long way towards making me feel better. The bugs even stayed away for the most part, which is truly a minor miracle. We had a nice walk up to a neat waterfall:And also took the obligatory moose sight-seeing drive and saw five of the goofy critters. Most of the rest of the weekend was taken up with eating, strolling around town, and general relaxing. Oh, and we also took my parents to the first dance of the season over at the Finnish Farmers Club and had a hilariously good time. I must say, my dad was the hit of the dance and took three or four turns around the floor learning to schottische (aka Jenkka in Finnish). My mom and I were quite amused by this!

Before we move on to the next color phase of Project Spectrum starting in June, I put together a green, yellow, and pink photo mosaic for April/May:See the Flickr photoset for full-size images.

I was having a hard time finding pink objects to photograph but managed to find a few. I also captured a photo of my favorite pink thing of all time:Cute little Quincy nose!

I'm going to have to post my "Seven Random Facts" next post as I need to go to bed and get rid of this darn cold...toodles for now!

Thanks to all of you who offered suggestions for lace patterns in the last post--there were definitely some intriguing options! The lace yarn may be temporarily cast aside in favor of a couple other projects I'm mulling over but it will re-surface at some point, you can be sure.

Of course, I first need to finish up Caister. Can you believe that I didn't knit a stitch last weekend? The show we went to was supposed to be outdoors but due to the rainy weather it ended up being indoors, and that was just not conducive to knitting! I've only knitted one of the sleeve bands (actually have 2 cm more to go which shouldn't take more than 10 minutes). All this delay doesn't really matter much anyway, as I still need to get buttons and I won't be able to for another couple weeks. Apparently they don't believe in selling buttons in this town. I hope we don't see a rash of falling trousers and half-open shirts. That would be scary!

I thought I would show how I have been dealing with the stripes/yarn issues. I was originally cutting the yarn after each stripe except for colors that would be used again shortly. However, it turned out that weaving in a ton of ends (besides being not fun) caused a slight change in texture of the final fabric, making it kind of stiffer and not as nice. So, I ended up carrying the yarn up the sides as much as possible, although I still cut yarn when it's a color that won't be used for a long time. Carrying the yarn up the side makes for a rather messy selvedge...Here is the "nice" selvedge:
And here is the messy one (with woven-in ends that are kinda sloppy looking too!):Not perfect but I decided this was the lesser of two evils. I guess with cotton yarn there are better ways of weaving in ends--for example, I saw it suggested that you split the plies and weave each ply in separately--but that just sounded excruciating, especially with yarn that is already very fine. Blocking seems to take out any irregularity but it will be interesting to see how the seaming goes. So, anyone have any clever tricks for dealing with stripes that I might be able to use next time?

We've been having some amazing summer-y weather (although it was a bit hot for my taste today--I think my ideal temp is 65 degrees). Yesterday G and I were intending to see a play about Patsy Cline that his friend's band is featured in. We went to dinner first, and right as we were finishing up the power went out. Went outside to discover this:Have no idea what happened here but it would appear that one pole was hit, pulling two others with it. We hung around until 7 PM but they ended up having to cancel the show.

All on the way down there and back, I kept having this little cough. Could not figure out what it was until I woke up in the middle of the night with my throat on fire! Looks like I got some kind of cold, ugh. Here is a little tableau of my afternoon (left work at 2 PM):Hope this goes away stat, as my parents are coming tomorrow to visit for the weekend and I don't want to be a miserable wreck! I'm starting to feel a bit better and I think I'm gonna run off to bed now so I can get a full night of sleep. Hope everyone has a fun and relaxing Memorial Day weekend!

One last photo for ya--I found out that someone loves yarn as much as I do:
I guess we'll have to share?

Lots of happy stripes and happy cats (sometimes) in my corner of the world:This project seems to have 8 million little pieces though...above you see the front and back, two sleeves, and the cute lil' collar (at the bottom). I still need to make the bands for the sleeve bottoms and the shirt bottom (which looks to be rather interminably boring), and pick up and knit the button band at the neck. Still need buttons too, which are impossible to buy in town unless I want real cheapies. Well, I should have some time to knit some of the remaining parts this weekend when I watch G play with his band at a local bluegrass festival. Should be pretty neat!

In other excitement, I received this handspun laceweight in the mail from Rebekah, as a prize from the Blanket of Hope project:I love the crazy colors, but I have been racking my brain trying to think of lace patterns that would work with such strong variegation. I guess it would have to be something very simple. Any suggestions are appreciated; feel free to leave one in the comments!

On a tragic note, one of G's Russian Boots has already sprung a leak in the bottom:Gah! I thought they would last a bit longer as they were made from a rough yarn, but alas I was wrong. I'm sure I can patch this up and make it last a bit longer, but clearly I need to make some felted slippers at some point. I imagine those wouldn't get holes nearly as easily. I do wonder though, is it just me or do guys seem to wear out their clothes so much more quickly? It doesn't seem like G and I live very different lifestyles or anything that would account for this. Perhaps it is just one of those mysteries of the universe?

Finally, a nice daffodil...they've been sprouting all over town despite the raw weather we've been having (I even saw a...gasp...flurry of snow and sleet yesterday morning. Luckily it didn't last long!).Perfect for Project Spectrum this month! Enjoy your weekend!

Apologies for my extended absence...the last two weeks were a work nightmare (including a delightful 16 hour day that involved spending the morning walking through wetlands and then managing a public hearing until 9 at night). And let's face it, when you're having that much fun, it's hard to motivate to do anything else during your relaxation time.

Anyway, here's a photo revue of what else has happened since my last posting. The crocuses finally bloomed:Took a weekend trip to Boston for an awesome Ale Festival and got to see this classic diner:And then later got to go to a party in this crazy old bank vault:My snowbank has (barely) survived into May, in very sad and shrunken form:It looks more like a dirt pile now! And the lake still has a thin layer of ice on it, but I can't imagine it's going to last more than another day or two, since temps have been in the mid-70's:As for knitting, I've finished the front and back of Caister and am nearing completion of the first sleeve (gotta love those short sleeves). I could show you more photos of stripes but I'll spare you!
Have a good rest of the week!