Flowers For Nanny

Happy Thanksgiving!


Once I actually sat down and worked on Rhiannon's Flower Basket Shawl, it went together very quickly. I really love this pattern, and as this is the second of the three I'll be making, I guess that's just as well. This took longer than the one I made back in January (9 days, people), but I don't have nearly as much dedicated knitting time now as I did back then — so what're ya gonna do? It was still faster than the Ragnarok Shawl.


There is something so very cool about blocking a shawl. Others have written about this marvelous phenomena, so I'm repeating old news here, but blocking lace is just groovy. Steph has likened pre-blocked lace to Ramen noodles — and she does have a point.

I do think that I'll be adding blocking wires to my Christmas wish list this year. I never seem to be able to put quite enough pins across the top of a shawl to make it as straight as my little anal-retentive heart desires.

Project Specs:

• Pattern: Flowerbasket Shawl by Evelyn Clark
• Needles: Size 7 addi turbos
• Yarn: Knitpicks' Palette in Fog

Under Construction

Please pardon my mess -- my blog Template is under construction. I'm in the process of re-vamping my sidebar.

Wish me luck.

The Death of a Dear Companion

I've no pictures of completed works to show you, but I have been a busy girl the past two weeks or so. My beloved and trusty Singer machine, my fiber-companion of some 18 years passed into the veil two weeks ago. By which I mean, in my overly dramatic way, the tension is frelled beyond all hope of my repairing it. I borrowed my bestest Gretta's machine to finish the Halloween costumes. (Y'all did catch that it decided to bite the big one a week before Halloween, right?) Her machine is a simple two stitch machine (it does straight and zig-zag) and yet it ran so much more smoothly and efficiently than mine. I believe that my poor old machine had been ailing for some long time, but I had acclimated myself to its ways, and did not see.

This is the part where I explain that my husband is the most marvelous creature in all this Middle.... Tennessee. (Sorry, I've been having my annual re-watching of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It makes me talk funny.) Anyway, point being, that when my sewing machine died, my old-man first spent several hours trying to make it be go. He doesn't know from sewing (in fact he's nervous of the whole concept of making things with string) but he does know machines. When that failed utterly, and I was sort of staring blankly in shock and horror at the carcass of my beloved (and filthy! How come I never noticed it was so dirty?) machine, he says to me, he says, "Baby, you've got to have your tools."

I love that man.

I spent the next several days researching my options, and am now the proud and ecstatic owner of a new Brother 6000. I'm a fickle creature I am, as I'm already so enamored of my new machine that I'm like "Singer? Singer who?" Frailty, thy name is seamstress.

Dude. It has 60 stitches.

I'm a happy woman.