It's good to share with your friends...

It's good to have friends, isn't it? Friends are the people who laugh with you and cry with you and give you excuses to drink lots of coffee and eat fattening food. Friends share secrets and wonderful household tips and cheesecake. My friends and I also tend to share our obsessions.

Take lace, for instance. This summer, my friend Julie decided that she was obsessed with lace. And suddenly I was obsessed with lace, too. The result was this (that's me on the right in the lace shrug).

Now it's my turn. Shortly after starting my Alien Scarf, I decided that I was obsessed with shadow knitting. And I've clearly shared my obsession with Julie.

I went to the store yesterday to knit with the girlies, and there was Julie, picking out some good shadow-knitting yarn for a scarf for her husband. Roger is a hard-core biker (as in mountain biker -- though he used to be the other kind, too). He's so hard-core, in fact, that he has a bike tread tattooed on his calf. While I was working on the Alien, I told Julie that I was getting my dear husband to design shadow knitting patterns for me -- so she commissioned him to do a bike tread pattern. He worked on it for a couple of days, and now Julie's got it. She's going to do it with a brown background (for dirt) and a black design (for the tire). Is that cool, or what? I'm so excited to see how it turns out!

And I'm glad I could share my obsession with my friend.