Designing woman

We're going to be rather low on the photographic imagery in this post because everything I'm knitting right now needs to be kept hush-hush.

But I can at least show you what DD2 looks like in her birthday Sweetness top:

She wore it to her birthday party today (at a fire station!) over a matching pink t-shirt with black pants, and if I do say so myself, she looked terrific.

Also, the plan I talked about in my last blog entry, i.e. to pair leftover pink yarn with the self-striping pink yarn I was using for a sample piece? It worked okay. Turns out the change in pink tones was not too jarring, which is good. However, the sudden lack of self-stripingness is rather jarring, which is bad. So I'm not sure whether I'm going to be ripping a lot of it out and redoing it, this time regularly interspersing the self-striping pink with the solid pink so that it all looks self-striping...or just letting it go as it is. While I ponder that question, though, I am knitting a second sample of the pattern, in a different size. And I'm loving it even more than the first one. I should be very well positioned to submit it when the publication I have in mind for it opens up their next round of submissions.

And speaking of submissions, it looks like I will be able to meet the deadline I was shooting for tomorrow. All swatches are done, all sketches are done, the writeup is done - I'm just waiting for the final swatch to dry so I can photograph it. Tomorrow I plan to take shots, incorporate the best one into the submission document, PDF it up, and release it into the wild. And then cross my fingers, of course!

That, of course, will give me two design submissions made in 2012, out of the twelve that I'm trying to achieve before the next calendar year. The sample pieces I've been knitting will constitute submission #3. Which leaves me with nine more submissions to go. So I'm going to have to break some ideas out of hybernation and get going on them!