4S: late for spring

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

We had fun times at the Treehouse last weekend. Got quite a soaking from Irene - enough to prompt me to bring in the patio furniture and weigh down the outside basement window covers with bricks before she arrived. She left a mess of leaves and branches strewn everywhere, which in my densely tree'd neighborhood is quite a lot for clean-up. The floor drain in my basement overflowed and soaked the nearby rug. The power went out a few times, but thankfully came back on. No sleep at all on Saturday night for all the noise from the wind and rain. In short, a hopping time was had by all, which did not leave me in a fit state for blogging about knitting or anything else.

If you had to deal with Irene, I hope the damage was minimal to none.

The up-side to being stuck inside during a storm and unable to sleep was that I made some decent progress on the late-for-spring shawl:

I'm 2 rows away from completing chart A, which was a 56-row section. Then it's on to six or seven repeats of chart B, which is an easier chart to follow, and is only 12 rows.

I tried to resist buying a copy of Wendy Johnson's new lace book, but I made the mistake of looking through a copy that another knitter brought to knitting group, so I crumbled and ordered my own copy. It's a beautiful book with great patterns. I don't buy pattern books or knitting magazines unless I like and would actually make at least half the patterns in them. Otherwise, it's a waste of money. So it's always a big deal when I come across a book like Wendy's. When my copy arrives, I might do something similar to Carin, who is knitting her way through Cookie A's sock books.

Maybe that will be a knitting goal next year - a whole year of lace knitting. Maybe a project a month? There are a bunch of Anne Hanson lace patterns in my queue as well as ones by Wendy. A mark II of this for mom, one of these, and this, and this, and maybe this.

Knitting lace and socks through this spring and summer was a great idea. I wasn't sweltering under heavy yarn, I got to work on smaller needles for a change, I made leaps and bounds improvement in my chart-reading skills, I got some good brain workouts, and I managed lots of de-stashing. There's quite a bit of room in the storage bins in my yarn closet now. Just in time for my knitting group's yarn swap at the end of the month.