frosty mornings

Cold, frosty mornings have been making it hard to get out of bed lately. I just want to snooze and snuggle under the quilts all morning long. But alas, if I did that there would be no tea, and there must be tea.

Back when it was still summer-in-December, we had lots of laborious projects going, mostly new-house related. But with the wintry weather finally arriving, the building, digging, painting, staining, loading and mulching is over and we are sitting indoors again, and the nesting has taken on a quieter tone.


a mosaic of laborious projects: the repainted bathroom (yes i am still excited about it), new vegetable beds (with snow!), staining some shelves, a new pantry built by my awesome dad into a little nook in the hallway.

All that tool- and muscle-using is now over, and it's back to the knitting. I am so glad! There are too many UFO's lying around my house attracting intergalactic energy vibes, and I prefer to attract only earthly creatures.

So I have finally finished my sister's birthday socks. They came out quite nicely, but I had to frog and re-knit half of sock #1 because you know what? If you knit lace socks, don't put the lace underneath the foot. It was way too delicate down there on the rough-and-tumble sole, and I don't think those socks would have lasted more than a few strolls around the neighborhood, so I re-knitted them with the lacey stuff just over the top of the foot, and good old tough stockinette on the underside.



Of course I had to try on sock #1 before it ever occurred to me that this might be a problem, hence the frogging. Oh well. Lesson learned! With the socks out of the way, I had to get my travel project going, because I don't like desiging away from home. If a project is underway, I feel fine taking it to conferences, airports, etc, but please don't ask me to design a sweater on a plane. There is not enough caffeine in the world to allow such powers of concentration anywhere but on my couch. So here's the teeny start of the sweater, but from this I am satisfied that travel can begin:



And you know, I don't leave until Sunday... just enough time to get a scarf done? Can I go to San Francisco without a new scarf? See, that's why I had to start one. I'm hoping to finish it during a long meeting I have to attend this afternoon. Wish me luck!

P.S. Local knitter alert: Sauniell is rocking our world! Soon she will rock all of y'all's, too!