no more pencils, no more books

Knit? Blog? School's out, dontcha know. There are sprinklers to dance in, trees to climb, bugs to collect. Also, planning the lemonade stand has been using most of my free time. I'm overcome with gratitude for the support from the good people who have visited our little virtual lemonade stand. Your kindness and generosity are a blessing. I thank you. PeeWee thanks you. Little bald kids with cancer who are just like every other kid and simply want to play--they thank you. If any of you gentle readers are new here and are following links from other's blogs, please see my last post for more information about the lemonade stand. Thanks for coming by! I so wish I were really pouring lemonade for you.

There has been a bit o' knitting, though. We have ball games every night, so I get a few stitches done in between yelling "That's okay, buddy. Nice swing!" and trying to sweet-talk PeeWee into thowing away the used sunflower seed shells she finds under the stands. I've been working on a 24-month size of the Presto Chango pattern. I thought I'd try out a few mods--shaped shoulders and sleeves. The shoulder shaping is done by coming out a few stitches from the neck (about 6 rows before the neck is bound off) and increasing on each side. Matching decreases will be done after reaching the summit of the shoulders and coming down on the other side. I've been shaping the sleeves by doing short-rows. I like the shoulder shaping, but the short-row shaping is causing me stress, because I didn't write down what I did as I did it and mirroring the shaping on the down-hill side of the sweater will likely be tedious and nit-picky. (How many stitches was that?!?!?)

I'm going to confuse you with some random pictures of yarn while I talk about something else: RAVELRY!!! Wahoooo! I got an invitation to join in last week--It is SOOOOO COOL. If any of you have put your names on the request list to join and have not heard from them, be patient, it is worth it.

The site designers, Casey and Jess, just put out a message tonight asking for understanding and patience. Apparently some people are getting frustrated with the wait. At the beginning of May when they put up the form for requests to join, they got 3,500 requests within 2 weeks (!!!) and another 1000 in the following weeks. They said that they're up to #1,166 now and working as hard and fast as they can to catch up with demand. There are beta issues they have to take care of before they can open up the site completely, but for now, it's metered merging.

We need one more picture...


Ah...Socks that Rock in Rooster Rock. See the brown and purple? Me loves it!