Will work for yarn

A typical day of finding this in my mailbox:



is made infinitely better when this is shoved in there with it:

The knot of colorful loveliness on the right will be transformed into Skew for a fellow Raveler. It's Steam Valley Fiber's Hand Dyed Fingering Sock Yarn in Rainbow, and it's scrumptious, and I'm already contemplating absconding with the socks upon completion. On the left is Luster Sox from Dye Dreams in Shades of Ireland. Every photo I've seen makes it look gray, but it's actually a luscious charcoaly green tonal, as its name suggests. This is my compensation in advance (mistake? See above) for knitting the socks, so it's mine, all mine to have my way with. I swear I won't use it till I've completed my assignment...probably.....well, I'll try. I think I'll stash it under my pillow for safekeeping and sweet dreaming.

 

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Egad! It's already Tuesday!

Labor Day weekend set me back on several fronts - laundry, knitting, Bible reading, maintaining a sensible bedtime, and owning a desktop computer that works, to name a few.  Unbeknownst to us, our primary family computer, though still in the prime of its life, was in the final throes of what appears to be a terminal virus (pardon the pun).  Yesterday at 3:50 pm it succumbed - died on the table, so to speak, at Staples. A somber ending to a long weekend otherwise spent blissfully enjoying plenty of football, beach, friends, food, drink, fun and laughter.  A great, great weekend in many ways that count.

Friday Night Lights!  My son is the "O" in Vero :)

DD, DH & DF spectators at Skim Jam

Generally I do my household catching up on Mondays - a little bit of cleaning perhaps, a lot of personal bookkeeping and desk work, schedule appointments, find the laundry room floor, stuff like that - but since I woke up this morning to find Monday already gone, I'm already feeling slightly stressed and very behind and it's not even lunchtime on what I consider to be the first day of the week.  I'm managing, however, to stuff the rising panic and guilt about my haunting personal to-do list, and focus instead on my knitting-related to-do list.


I started the morning by sheepishly emailing a new client and asking her to resend the pattern I'm editing for her as I had saved it on, and only on, the one computer in the house that died over the weekend.  Very first pattern she's given me to edit.  Impressive, no?

Next I got started on a test knit that I'm really excited about.  Can't give it away, of course, but I'm always tickled to learn new techniques or constructions, and it's a bonus when I can use stash yarn to do so.  Out comes some brown and greens left over from last summer's twin blankies, and some more green from two summers ago.  The test is a cowl pattern which intrigued me enough to volunteer even though I have no earthly use for  a wool blend cowl in Florida.

It starts out with a crochet provisional cast on.  Now, my summer knitting made me quite proficient at a knitted provisional cast on ("front, behind, behind, behind"), which I used for Lente, and the Blue Hen Blankie, and Rad Vlad; but I'd not yet learned a crochet version till this morning.  Wish I'd taken a photo in process, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.  I crocheted a chain of 50 sts in waste yarn, then simply knitted into the back bump of each chain.  Voila!

Even better is that the cast on is followed by quite a few simple rounds of reverse stockinette ribbing, so I can catch up on the past several chapter of Gulliver on Cratlit!