Recent Projects

I want to thank you all for your kind words and encouragement after my "funky" post of a few days ago. I'm determined to get myself turned around by keeping busy with projects and the joys of starting new ones and completing old ones. So here are a few pictures of some of the things that have been keeping me busy (and keeping me from feeling "funky") for the past couple weeks.

New Projects

Yesterday I took a quilting class with one of my co-workers (she's an expert quilter and I'm always inspired by the quilts she brings to work to show me). We worked on the Butterfly Blooms (a strip club quilt). I managed to get five squares done during the 3-hour class time.

I really enjoyed this class, which was held at the recently opened Pine Needles Quilt Shop a few miles south of my home. Another surprise at this class was finding out that one my high school classmates works at the quilt shop, so were able to spend some time catching up on friends and family news.

Here's the Sweet Alyssum Shawl I started a couple weeks ago--inspired by Julie's posts about alpaca.

This beautiful yarn is called Shimmer (from KnitPicks) and it's 70% Baby Alpaca and 30% Silk. The color is called "Happy Dance" and I felt compelled to start it during the lowest point of my funk. I looks as though I will be able to knit the entire shawl from this one 440 yard skein. It will look much nicer once it's all done and blocked.

Projects in Progress

Here's the afghan I'm making for Lynne's sister Phyllis. Lynne says her favorite color is blue. It's been nice working on this afghan and keeping my own lap warm on these chilly evenings. The pattern is for a baby afghan, but I use worsted weight yarn and a larger crochet hook and the pattern works up as a nice sized adult afghan.

Completed Projects

Here's a pair of dark red superwash merino wool socks. I washed and dried them with my regular laundry and they came out of the dryer looking great. They are a gift for a special person who's looking forward to a birding festival next weekend....

This is a prayer shawl knitted from a free pattern I found on the Knitting Pattern Central website. The pattern used 2 skeins of Lion Brand Homespun yarn.

Here's a hat (also knitted from a free pattern at Knitting Pattern Central). The pattern uses a plain colored yarn and Noro Kureyon for the contrast. Kureyon is a neat yarn that changes color within the skein, so you get nice color changes in your contrast work without having to change yarns (you can see that the middle design of this pattern changes from orange to blue to purple and that's all in the same strand of yarn).

I modified the pattern by knitting a corrugated ribbing to emphasize the contrasting yarn a little bit more.
I really like the way the top of the hat is patterned.

And even though this isn't a project, I thought you might enjoy seeing this little movie of my old girl, Daisy. The snow stopped and the sun came out along with the high winds blowing all the fresh snow around, but as you can see, it didn't deter Daisy from her backyard explorations. She's still pretty spry for a dog who's going to be 15 years old in April.