It’s All In the Needles

Yesterday, I broke down and bought a 60” Addi circ. I sat there for quite a while, staring at it, all packaged up in front of me, as I knitted with the girls. I wasn’t going to do it. But I did it. And I'm ecstatic.

As I curled up in front of the TV, ready for The Apprentice, I knit my shawl onto my new Addis. By the time the show was over, I'd finished four rows. By the time I called it a night, I'd finished two more. SIX ROWS! WHILE WATCHING TV! It's a miracle! I kept telling Paul how happy I was. And when I finally stopped, I looked at him and said, “Look -- I just finished six rows of my shawl without bitching once!”

“Now that is impressive,” he replied.

I now have six full repeats of the pattern done -- and, for the first time since I started the shawl, I actually feel like I may be able to finish it by the wedding -- and still allow myself to get a decent amount of sleep.

Here she is, at the end of the 6th repeat:


And here's a closeup:


I wish I could get accurate color. This really doesn't do it justice.

I had a blast with the girls yesterday. It was Miss S's birthday -- a fact of which she’s reminded me every week for the last, oh, two months. So I stopped by Kroger's on my way in. I was about to pick up the standard cupcakes (three pink, three yellow), but then I remembered how much of a mess we made with them last time (cupcakes don't travel well -- even if it's just across the parking lot). So I ended up going with the old standby, Lofthouse cookies. In yellow. YUM! While I was there, I also picked up birthday napkins—and party hats, just to shake things up a bit.

Miss S was the first to arrive, as usual. We dug into the cookies right away -- and I made her don a special blue party hat, which she put jauntily to the side of her head. Then we settled in to knit. I started to worry for a while that poor Miss S would have to celebrate her birthday by herself, but Miss H finally showed up.

Miss H was jealous of Miss S's hat, so I gave her an orange one -- and took one out for myself, too. Of course, then Miss H decided that she didn't actually want to wear it -- but I didn't give her a choice. For the rest of the afternoon, Miss H's hat went from looking like a bright orange unicorn horn to a bright orange duck beak (NOTE: eating cookies through an orange birthday-hat-duck-beak doesn't work). And mine sat jauntily to the side of my head, like Miss S's.

Miss H informed us that she had food. Apparently, she had to cook for her French class yesterday, and she had the leftovers in a plastic bag -- some kind of bread with cheese, an onion/sour cream dip, and steak. She admitted that it looked pretty bad, so we chose to stick with the cookies. But for the rest of the afternoon, the store smelled like cheese and feet.

As I'm sure you can imagine, the abundance of frosted cookies led to a whole bunch of giggling -- which also led to the Birthday Girl almost spitting out a mouthful of her cookie (which, in turn, led to more giggling).

Poor Miss H somehow managed to lose the bag that she'd been working on for weeks, so we picked out some new yarn from the clearance shelves and a cool scarf pattern from KnitGrrl2. Miss S continued, amid the giggling, to work on her Barbie rug. And I, as is often the case, worked on a dishcloth, much to Miss S’s dismay. “You're supposed to be working on something else,” she told me, “And I'm going to try not to be mad.” And she narrowed her eyes and stared me down until I made her start giggling again.

Miss S has acquired an unhealthy fascination with the Super Secret Project that is still waiting to be frogged and re-worked. And though I've told her that I don't have time to work on it at home, thanks to the shawl, she doesn't care. And I'm starting to worry that when she finds out what it really is that she’ll be disappointed. But it's too late to turn back now…

As promised, I also have a picture of the sweater. When I tried it on, I realized that, since I made the body a bit bigger than needed, the sleeves already had a head-start in the length department. So I'm almost done with sleeve #1. I'm about at elbow length now. Just another inch or so, and I’ll do the ribbing and move on to sleeve #2. Maybe I'll even finish before the end of Project Spectrum Orange Month…