And suddenly, more than a week goes by

I'm not sure why the knitblogging fell to the wayside over the past 10 days...I wasn't tremendously busy, but somehow it just never got done.

I suppose one excuse could be that I am busy raising the next generation of knitters. :) My eldest, for example, is being tremendously enabled by June, the owner of the LYS, who has gifted her with some yarn over the past few weeks (most likely as an unofficial thank you for the cotton lace doily display piece and some more yarn from my friend's grandmother's stash for charity):

And speaking of my friend's grandmother's stash, my elder daughter has recently discovered the joys of...THE BALL WINDER. She watched me using it while winding up some of the aforementioned inherited stash, and asked if she could try. Heck, fine by me! Fast forward to about a week later, and she has single-handedly wound up at least half of the yarn, saved me a ton of time, and gotten me ready to bring the rest of the stash over to the shop for charity projects much sooner than I expected. Her chief complaint now is that there is no more yarn to wind up. :) I have promised to try and find her some.

And hey, on a related note, d'you remember this blanket project? The one where I ran out of turquoise yarn, knew it was discontinued and wouldn't be able to find any more, had to cannibalize the turquoise dragon motif in the middle of the blanket to have enough for the edges, and generally stressed out over the possibility of not being able to finish? Well, guess what was in the inherited stash:

Yeah.

Well, what can I say. Timing is everything. In hindsight, I'm still glad I got rid of the dragon motif, I think the blanket looked scads better without it.

The sock knitting class is moving along. I was a bit frustrated by last week's class. It was Heel Day - the students had to do an entire heel in two hours, and we went seriously overtime. This was more of a problem than it normally would have been, since DH's work needed him to come in an hour earlier than usual that day, so he had to walk over to the shop with DD1, leave her there with me, and take the car to work, leaving us all to walk home in the serious heat. To top it all off, DD2 sensed my stress about all this and fussed for a lot of the class. I was feeling a bit off my game, and didn't relay the heel knitting concepts as much as I wanted to. So...not one of my more successful teaching episodes, unfortunately. Fortunately, I think my students are willing to cut me a bit of slack there.

At this point, I am feeling a little better about the course generally, because I've already completed writing up the handout for the final class on Wednesday! I think it's good, thorough, comprehensible, and covers everything I want it to. DH gave it a proof last night and pronounced it good. So you see, Carrie K, he does have his uses, even though he will never mistake bread for yarn. :) (I must also tell you, in the interests of total honesty, that he adores your his sweater and would put up a serious fight for it if you tried to take it. So nice try, but no dice.)

Now all I need is for three more people to sign up for the next sock course, and I can do it all over again!

Still no picture of my great-grandmother knitting, guys, sorry - I keep forgetting to borrow it from my parents' place. Hopefully I'll remember this week.

Rainbow lace blanket

This is coming along very nicely.



I've finished the first ball of yarn, and it yielded 21 pattern repeats. The original blanket this is based on calls for 63 pattern repeats. However, since the remaining yarn is (guesstimately speaking) roughly the same amount as the first ball, I definitely won't make it that far. However, based on what it looked at at 21 repeats, 42 repeats will still probably give me a decently-sized baby blanket, so I'm not too stressed about it.

Sleep socks for moi

Finished the first sock!



Ends woven in and everything! It took tremendous strength of character to cast on for the second one, but I actually did it. I'm hoping to have it finished pretty soon.

Dress socks #2 for DH

Instead of just stopping at the end of the leg, I decided to complete the heel flap for the class to look at on Heel Day last Wednesday. Unfortunately, what with DD2 fussing during the class so much, I didn't get to demonstrate much of the heel turn on my own sock, so it hasn't progressed much beyond the flap.



I'm going to have to do some serious zooming along on this before Wednesday to get to the beginning of the toe.

Tubey for moi

I'm almost finished the body! Just an inch or so more to go, I think.

Like, totally top

June has very kindly offered to do some research with her yarn suppliers to try and find a good substitute for the Schaffhauser I wanted to use for this top. Hopefully she'll be able to find something good.

Ravelry update

You signed up on July 6, 2007
You are #14465 on the list.
6473 people are ahead of you in line.
8629 people are behind you in line.
33% of the list has been invited so far

The J and Carrie K rubbed it in by telling me they already got their invites. :) I cannot wait to join you in there! Alas, it looks like it will be many weeks. :(