From the Work Basket

Dear Mandella,

No worries on not touching the knitting needles. Sometimes the muse just calls you over to something else. In fact, I'm hoping to get over to my mom's on Saturday or Sunday to work on a quilt top I've had going for a while. I'll post photos when I have some. Right now it's nothing to look at.

Aside from the tiny hats (I've made three this evening while sitting through reruns of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, two shows I think they should broadcast everywhere), I've got the following project in the works:

Opera Shrug

This is a shrug I've been designing for one of my sisters (Mary) from Nashua's Grand Opera yarn. It's a wool blended with a touch of viscose and a strand of "metallized polyester."
I used the "swag sox" pattern for the back panel and along the top of the sleeves (left sleeve done; right sleeve in progress). There will be 2 x 2 ribbing all around the opening (top, sides, and bottom where you see a circular needle employed to hold all of the stitches until I'm ready to pick them up.)

It's like a short jacket with sleeves that only go out to the elbow. I had the back panel done a long time ago, then struggled to get the sleeves just right. Now that I've got those figured out, I just have to finished the second sleeve and then do the ribbing all around. But, as I said, earlier, I've been a bit sidetracked by making tiny hats.


Oh, here's the photo of the socks I finished for my niece, Marky:

This is the first yarn I ever dyed. It's a DK weight and I space-dyed it in a class last year in November. I started with cool colors (violets and blues) on one end and warm colors (reds and oranges) on the other end.

These were knit on US 4.0 needles. My niece wanted something colorful, but short. And she's only 9 so she still has kind of little feet.

I did feel rather clever in fudging the placement of the heel flap on the second sock so that I could mirror the color pooling, but that only worked for the top portion. Well, I think she'll like them anyway. I told her that they might be a bit thick to fit into her regular shoes, so it's OK if she just wants to wear them around the house to keep her toes warm. I mailed them to her on Wednesday.

Just two more pictures (well, three more, but only 2 subjects) and I'm done, OK? Here's one I took on Wednesday morning (on my walk back to the office from the post office that's on the air base where I work full time):




You asked me to send you some sunshine, and here it is. This was at about 9:00 a.m. (my time) and the weather was heavenly!

Of course, yesterday was humid and eventually raining, and today will be something of the same.

At any rate, I hope some nice weather came across the pond and brightened your day.

(Oh, this is looking approximately north and the building I work in -- although it's not in the photo -- is on the left. My building is a converted dormitory. It's not great, but there are certainly a lot of nice compensations what with having lots of trees around and a large campus for walking.)



Last but not least, here are photos of my dog, Charka. As I was telling you on the phone, she's mostly Malamute. We know the bitch was pure bred Malamute, but the sire was unknown as the owner of Charka's mommy had taken her into the vet to be spayed and the vet said, "Ooops! Too late!" Charka was in a litter of nine live pups born the weekend after Thanksgiving (the 4th Thursday in November) in 1995. She'll be 13 people-years old this November.

We think the sire was a German Shepherd (or a Shepherd mix) since Charka is actually small even for a female Malamute, (she weighs only about 61 lbs) and her body shape is very like a German Shepherd. But she is definitely a Malamute in characteristics!


And here she is asleep in her favorite chair. This is generally where we find her in the mornings.


It's also one of those rare moments when the living room was clean. (These photos are from 2006.)


Well, I should get my behind into bed. We have one of our corporate VPs visiting the office tomorrow, so I should try to at least appear to be alert when he meets with all of us. I'll be at the stationery shop again in the afternoon, and then I plan to come home and go right to sleep as this has been an unreasonably challenging week in so many ways.


I'm so glad we got this blog going, though, because it's one of the bright spots in my day to check it.

Hugs and good knitting to you!


Judith


PS - I'm a "House" addict, too! I'm on pins & needles waiting for the new season to premiere! Check out the web site for some great House-isms. Among my favorites are "Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is almost always somebody screwed up."