stalling

Let's start out with a cute picture, shall we? Here's our Pretty Princess PeeWee, applying her lip gloss. She calls it her "diptick".

Many thanks for telling me about your favorite pies! I wrote the entrants' names on cards, shuffled them, assigned each card a number, then let the random number generator do it's magic. (And this time, I only asked for one number. It's definately better that way. I'll play around with the numbers on my own time.) Tina wins the Whoops-I-Picked-a-Prize-Winner-a-Day-Early-So-Let's-Have-Another-Drawing prize. So our two winners are Nell and Tina. I'll send out Nell's froggy and yarn on Monday. But Tina gets her yarn hand-delivered, because it turns out that we live in the same town! How about that? When she sent me her entry email I followed it back to her family website and was surprised to recognize her son as a classmate of my 9-year-old son. I need to get out more. I go to a bi-weekly spinning night, but I don't get out and meet with any knitting groups--and I think that needs to change.

Eric is gone to a show. He took our two older daughters (13 year-old Bob and 6-year-old LB) with him. It's very calm and quiet in the house. I like it. To be sure, I dearly love and miss my absent family members, but I'm really enjoying the near complete absence of sibling rivalry. Eric called today and said that even sleep didn't stop the two girls from bickering last night.

I've been working on that magazine sweater. Want to see the swatch? I think that would be legal, don't you? I have figured that if I could manage to knit 40 stitches per minute (that would be SPM) in the reverse stockinette sections and 20 SPM in the charted areas, I could knit it in 22 hours. I have 19 to go. I finally got the right yarn about a week and a half ago, swatched and started writing out the pattern. Yesterday I actually began knitting the thing. It has made my hair go grayer. I figure there's a learning curve to this process of submitting, writing, and knitting a pattern for a magazine and I'm at that first really steep part. I'm not quite sure if I want to keep climbing. Maybe I'll just go back down the trail and sit on a rock.

In order to restore my equilibrium and relieve the tension caused by worrying about my SPM, I spent yesterday afternoon focusing on RPM. Me loves spinning. I finished up this Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club wool, 4 ounces of Blue-Faced Leicester called "Tulip".

It went fast, 'cause I spun (spinned?) it bulky. I got 145 yards out of it, and I think I'll make a hat. Speaking of hats...

I cast on for this hat after finishing the Tulip spinning. It's Kuryon, number 215. My LYS got some new Kuryon colors in last week, so I went in to get a couple balls for my Lizard Ridge afghan, and ended up getting maybe a few extra of this color. It was calling to me, "Valerie, hold me, love me, knit me!" It might just get turned upside down and become a collar for a sweater. And I could carry the cables down the sleeves. Yeah.

You don't think I'm stalling on the magazine sweater, do you? Nah.