A Year Ago Today

Exactly one year ago yesterday was my youngest granddaughter's fifth birthday.
Exactly one year ago yesterday, while I was in Texas to celebrate her fifth birthday, I fell and broke my ankle.  Ouch...

Exactly one year ago today I went, on crutches and with a plaster cast on my ankle, to Hill Country Weavers in Austin, TX to buy this yarn:

Shelter by Brooklyn Tweed

It is sold in very few places in the US and no place in the Atlanta, GA area, so I HAD to go to the store in Austin, no matter what the doctor at the ER had told me. I hobbled up the ramp to the store (Which came first in indoor living? Ramps or stairs? I bet ramps. A ramp is a wonderful thing.) and the saleswoman took me directly to the Shelter yarns. I had planned on a neutral color, but when I saw this Thistle color, with the help of my daughter and the saleswoman, I changed my mind.  Pick the color you love, one or both of them said.  And I did.

SO, would you like to see the sweater I bought the yarn for one year ago today?

So would I.

This is all there is so far:

In my defense, I have knit two zillion things---well, maybe seven or eight things---since then, and I am working on another sweater at the same time.  

But it WILL be finished some day, maybe by the first of the new year.

More importantly, however, this itty bitty baby girl:

born five weeks early six years ago yesterday,

is now a very sturdy, lively, completely charming six-year old!

Good things come in teeny packages!

Elizabeth's Hat

My poor, sniffly self needed an immediate-gratification project and this is it. It's a hat for Elizabeth, knit from Seacoast handpainted yarn (Raymond, New Hampshire). It is called Panda, Thistle colorway, and it is 60% merino wool, 30% bamboo, and 10% nylon. I doubled the strands, since it is sockweight yarn, to see what would happen with the colors. Instead of getting straight stripes, I got this cloud-like blend of colors. I think it's pretty! I pulled the strands, one from the inside of the ball, and one from the outside, and somehow the colors were almost the same in the same spots. But there was just enough blending to make it interesting to knit. The bottom few rows are in seed stitch; the rest is stockinette.

Now back to some of my longer-term projects....