Opinions needed

So, first I'll start off with a finished picture of the Pinwheel Baby blanket. I finished it on saturday at the sunny day knit-a-thon held by the Tuesday night knitters, well except for Carmen... :-) It still needs to be blocked, but I love it. Yeah me!
Binding off 600+ stitches in a picot bindoff was not fun I will say.

In other news, we got our Sockapalooza 4 pals today and I'm trying to pick the perfect yarn for her. She likes greens, blues, pinks and pastels, so these are the yarns I'm contemplating...

The first is Socks that Rock Watermelon Tourmaline. I like the subtle colors in it. Greens, blues and yellows/little bit of orange in it. And, it's Socks that Rock, what more can you say??? I'm thinking possibly Tropicana with it...

The second yarn is from Th'Read Head Yarns and it is a 50% Merino/50% Tencel blend. You can see the sheen in it from the Tencel below.

It's Greens and pinks with just a hint of lavender where the pink and green blend together. I haven't really decided what pattern yet, but I'm kind of thinking a reverse RPM. My friend Teri did something similar and it turned out very neat.

The last contender for sockpal yarn is this Trekking XXL. Stripes of Blue, Green, & Pink.
I'm a huge, huge fan of Trekking. I love to knit it. I was thinking Jaywalker or something else to break up the stripiness.

So, my friends out there in the electronic universe, which do you think I should use??? I'll be taking suggestions through Friday when I cast on.

In yet more news, guess who's coming to KC!!!! Just one of my favorite authors, Jennifer Weiner. The woman who wrote Good in Bed! Totally love her. Thanks to Joanna for cluing me in. I'm so there.

PS. Carmen, still not forgiven for not even stopping by with the boy... Teri even ditched her mom and stopped by.

We had a meeting of the Tuesday night knitters on a Saturday...well, all except for Carmen who dumped us for a boy. Christine hosted it at her house and we sat outside on her screened in porch and stuffed our faces and knitted a lot. Joanna and Johanna came. Joanna made this fantastic bean dip and brought yummy bread. Joanna made brownies. I made fruit salsa that was supper yummy too. We sat outside and knit until about 9pm. It was very relaxing. I love Christine's house. It's exactly how you imagine the Weasley house from the Harry Potter books. You can go upstairs and then around a corner and upstairs again and then you can go to a basement and then to a lower basement. It's awesome!

I finished off the pinwheel blanket, but will wait to post a picture until tomorrow when I can weave in all the ends and get a good picture of it all spread out. It's bigger than I thought it would be, but I think that's good.

So, Shelby, My Secret Pal 10 hostess this round, is having a contest to see how we organize our yarn. She's looking for good ways to organize her stash. Mine is perhaps an example of what not to do. My stash is all over my house. Stored in baskets...

In a chest that also holds all of my needles (notice the 2 missing drawers as I searched for a size 7 circular)...
Shelving unit #1...and the box on the floor...
Shelving unit #2...
Closet IKEA holder things. The small blue one holds sock yarn and works well, except I've overstuffed it. The larger one works okay, but when it gets really full, it falls down...
There's yarn stuffed in various places all over the house. I can't sit in my knitting chair at the moment because I have a sweaters worth of yarn sitting in it...

In other news...Krista Tee is no more. I frogged it since I made an error in the lace pattern...

I'm getting to the completion stage of the baby blanket. I started this back in January after I found out my Brother and SIL were having a baby. I knew if I started it in peach, they'd have a boy and I was right...
I figure odds are at some point they'll have a girl and this beauty will have a home. In the meantime, I need my 42" circular size 7s and all of my stitch markers are being held hostage, so I decided to finish it off.
Here's a close up of the finished part. It sadly took me 1.5 hours to go approximately halfway around the blanket. Sadly these pictures aren't a very good representation of the yarn. It has a beautiful sheen to it. So, theoretically, tomorrow I should have a finished object, which should consol me a bit as I fear I'm going to have to rip out the Krista Tee again because I made a mistake in the lace. UGHHH!!!

I've been reading about that ex-fiance from the The Bachelor, Jen Schefft(sp?) who wrote a book on the joys of being single and I read something else recently that said more and more women are choosing to remain single. Yeah Me! Going with the tide for once. So, as I sat there this evening eating my dinner of cottage cheese and Banana Nut Crunch Cereal a little bit later because I was still hungry that one of the perks of being single that the ability to eat whatever the heck you wanted for dinner...

I started back knitting on my pinwheel blanket. I finally decided to do a seed stitch border on it. I'm 3.5 rows into the seed stitch border. It's like 600 stitches around now and it takes forever to go around once. 2.5 more rounds and then a bind off and it's done!!! Yipeee. Unfortunately, no one I know is having a girl...darn.

I hearby resign as the photographer for events that involve the Tuesday Night Knitters. I never proclaimed to be a good photographer. I was just the one that brought a camera with batteries...

Behold the Krista Tee.
I'm about 2.5 inches into the bottom lace pattern and have about .5 inches left to go before starting the main bodice pattern. So far I'm liking it and it's going by pretty fast. Especially since it's not twisted this time.

I decided I really, really needed to start knitting some sweaters because I've bought yarn for about 10. So, before I can buy yarn for the Nashua Surplice sweater, I've got to at least make an effort to finish one, don't you think??

These three balls of yarn represent TRUE FRIENDSHIP...

What are they??? They're 3100 yds of this amazing cobweb weight merino/tencel yarn called Heaven...or maybe they should have another representative name beginning with an Hxxx...
Teri and Joanna bravely helped me wind the yarn... until HORRORS!!!!
Yes, that is Teri and that is a giagantic knot in the cobweb weight yarn...
Here's a close-up so you can see the true horror. I credit Teri the "yarn whisperer" for the save. I can't thank Teri and Joanna enough for their assistance in saving my yarn and the hour and 45 minutes they lost out of their lives while we tried to wind and save my yarn. They are true friends...

So, now that you've recovered from the heart attack, here's the rest of the haul from the yarn crawl.

No Sheep For You, which I tried to buy at Borders the night before, but they did have. I'm in love, love, love with the patterns in it. 2 more balls of laceweight yarn (can you tell I'm dying to try some of the patterns from Victorian Lace Today or what??), some sock yarn and a soap scrubbie thrown in by the wonderful ladies at the NeedleNest in Louisburg, KS. I would have bought more, but the yarn I wanted for my sweater they only had 10 balls of and I needed 12... I was very sad.

Now, some pictures from the Sunflower Knitting Guild Yarn Crawl. Here's Carmen cheesing at the Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS (yes, we did a lot of driving).

And Teri, who found the only copy of No Sheep for You and let me have it.
Warning - The following photos are of an actual stop on the yarn crawl. No participants in our car were harmed during the visit. You know that you're in for a weird experience when this is the view accross the street from the visit location...
And here's where we went...
Only, we didn't go in there, we went around back via the bridge of death.
Yes, definitely not fat girl friend. I made sure to stop on the cross supports on the bottom. The owner said "perhaps only 1 of you should cross at a time..." Now, admittedly, this is the home of a local dyer, who dyes amazing yarn, but risking death for yarn??? Umm, yeah we did it.

All in all, a good time was had by all and we were all very tired people after shopping, knitting, winding and then dinner out with the menfolk (not mine, I don't have one, but the others...). Then I went home and crashed in my bed. Too tired to even blog about the adventure.

Ummmm...Houston, we have a problem...

So, I'm an inch into the Krista Tee and I decided to make sure that it would fit my hips before I went any farther...and when I stretched it out instead of having it squished altogether on my circular...

I discovered this... Yes, you can barely tell, but it's a twist in my circle. You can obviously tell from the fact that it is a sweater and not a mobius that this is an issues. UGHHH!!!!!!!! Yes, it's frogged and restarted.

The Krista Tee has kind of typified my week this week. 2 steps forward 4 steps back. The only good news is that I got my car back all fixed up. The ended up having to replace the bumper because although it just looked scratched on the outside apparently it was all crumpled on the inside. So, just in time for the warm up, the convertible is back. Yeah!!! I, of course, had the top down on the ride home today.

I'm going on a yarn crawl tomorrow with the local knitting guild, so I'll be sure to post pictures and...ummm...hopefully not too many stash enhancement photos tomorrow.

I'm home again in KC. It was a very busy weekend. Having a baby shower for someone is hard work. He's going to be so spoiled. There are many people who will think that he could perhaps be the child of a knitter because Aunt Gwen went a little crazy.... Ummm several Mason Dixon bibs.




The Child's Placket neck sweater from Last Minute Knitted gifts in Classic Elite Flash.






And the last, but certainly not least..., a log cabin blanket from Mason Dixon Knitting. In Mission Falls 1824 cotton. 6 colors, 2 skeins each and then 1 skein of black for the center square and the bind off border row.

All of it was much loved. We had a good time. I can't wait until the baby is born!!

I love my friends. I've had a few hard weeks at work and yesterday was a bad. I met my knitty friends in the evening and they cheered me up a lot. In fact, I almost lost my dinner I was laughing so hard. I swear one of these days they're going to kick us out of a restaurant. Maybe it's just something about the Macaroni Grill...maybe it's just that Carmen gets a drink there. :-0 Anyway, I appreciated that so much last night. I went to work today in a much better mood and got a lot done. Thankfully I'm off on Friday and I'm going home.

Speaking of my trip home. We're having a baby shower for my SIL and I finished my super secret project this evening, just in time to board a plane tomorrow after work. I'll bring pictures back for next week. I'm so excited. I hope she likes it.

Be back after the weekend and I should be a better blogger since I'll be working on projects I can actually show. :-)

My Very Busy, wonderful Family & Friends weekend

I'm home. I'm tired. It was a jam packed weekend. Friday, my sister and I went shopping. Bought more stuff for ourselves than intended. We met my BIL for lunch at Mongolian BBQ (So much better than BD's). Then we met two of my friends from college for pedicures. Thanks to my sister's influence. I now have red toes instead of my normal pink. Then we picked my neice up from school and went home to play a bit. She's all my sister. It's like a mini-Kelly, except with this obsessive mess complex. :-) She talks in sentances now and knows so much. It's just amazing the change in 3 short months. Later that evening, I met Colleen & Beth again and Jenn for some knitting and chick flicks.

Saturday, I mailed my package to my secret pal. Met Beth for lunch. Went to Knitorious, our favorite yarn store in St. Louis, where I bought a Nashua pattern book. Came home and dyed Easter eggs with my neice. She really loved it. She colored 16 eggs in 5 minutes flat. She had all of the colors in front of her, except the blue and I was allowed to dye 2 eggs blue. We went out for a family dinner and then I met Beth again for more knitting. I miss her a lot since we're so far apart...shortly after I moved to KC, she moved to Cincy, so we don't see each other all that often.

Sunday was just spent with the family. The Easter Bunny (AKA my father and I) hid eggs in the yard for my neice to find. We told her the night before and all she could talk about was how "Easter Bunny hide eggs" and "I find." And, she found, all 16 in about 15 minutes. It was very cute.

So, now I'm home to resume my nice relaxing life and work for 4 days before going back for my SIL baby shower. I can't wait to see her!

Note to self...When taking the 6:30 am flight to Chicago or anywhere... Take caffeine with you when you leave the house. This is a very important lesson from a person who almost boarded a plane to Grand Rapids this morning. Yep. No idea what I was doing. I was doing it. Getting up early and functioning, obviously not my forte.

It snowed in Chicago today. Thank god I decided to bring my winter coat after checking the weather. Flurries of fluffy snow pretty much all day. Nothing stuck. I don't even thing the ground got wet, but it was pretty to watch outside the window of the conference room I was in all day.

I got home okay. Now all I have to do is pack my bag so I can go to St. Louis tomorrow night. Sadly, last night I only packed gifts for my neice, birthday gifts for various family members, underwear and my knitting. You obviously understand where my priorities lie.

I'll try to blog from St. Louis, but no promises.

Thanks for all the well wishes. I'm over the shock of the accident. I have an appointment to get an appraisal for repainting my bumper tomorrow at 4pm. Yippee. It was just such a sucky week last week. Nothing went well.

I'd say this week was starting off better, except I had a blinding headache that started at noon and I finally left at 5pm to come home and nap for 2 hours before I could be upright again. Sadly, it's the last nice day for the week and I couldn't even drive home with the top down because the sun would have gone right to my brain and blinding pain would have ensued.

I finished the 3rd bib for my co-worker in Chicago this evening. I'll put on buttons on it tomorrow night and then all I have to do is remember to stick it in with my computer for my 7am flight to Chicago on Wednesday. I just love those fly in, fly out trips. Worse than that, I'm going to turn around and come into work on Thursday and then drive to St. Louis Thursday night for the weekend. That's going to be fun. It's a good think I have Friday off is all I can say.