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?