Spring Knitting

I seem to have shaken some of the cobwebs out of my knitting and made some real progress. Yesterday morning I got together with some of the gals for breakfast tacos, fried chicken, waffles and knitting. Don't laugh 'til you've tried it. I did the tacos, but I'm thinking of waffles next time. Man, they smelled god. Many of the women I knit with are accomplished photographers as well as knitters -- Meg took this picture of me. I thought it was quite flattering, and since I can never take a good picture of myself, I'm including it here. It was a wonderful way to spend the morning.

Afterwards, I got some serious yard work done that needed doing. Leaves were raked, blown and sucked, weeds were whacked, edges were edged and grass was mown. I could barely move afterwards, but it was necessary. It was terribly windy last night and today too -- so it doesn't look any leaf removal took place yesterday. Sigh.

I finished Johnathan's baby blanket this morning. Here it is pre-blocking, looking kind of lumpy. Staci has extra stitches bound off from within other stitches to mirror the pointiness of the cast on edge. A little tricky at first, especially since it involved purling into the back of stitches, which I don't think I've ever done, but I got the hang out of it -- toward the end of the row, of course. Of course, the cast off edge doesn't look quite like the cast on. I bound it off pretty loosely (or so I thought), but it's still a bi more "uptight." I don't think the difference is too detrimental to the overall effect.

We have a bit of a clutter issue with the guest bed where I normally block things. A range of boxes, letters and other miscellaneous things have managed to take up residence there. So I had to get creative. Enter the dining table.

I knew I couldn't put pins in the dining table, but I figured I could use blocking wires and then find something heavy to hold them in place once I'd stretched the blanket out. For the most part, it's working well. Luckily, there were a few bottles of wine sitting around that could do the trick. I didn't know we had so many bottles in our wine rack. Looks like we got some drinking to do.

But not until the blanket dries. My next mission is to figure out whether the baby has arrived yet.