I promised Cate–who is waxing rhapsodical about lace herself, these days– a look at my Flower Basket Shawl. I’m into my fifth pattern repeat and my third (of four) colors. The quilt colors are kind of taking away from it a bit though…

  A closer look at the colors, though it’s not quite perfect in terms of color. The darker color is at the top left corner, and will be followed by an even more intense green.

  Isn’t the Chai beautiful?? I’m going to end up with extra, too–not necessarily a bad thing!

  I forgot to mention, yesterday–my favorite part about finishing my NbaT? Including sewing it up, this is how much yarn left in my skein. I love that. (I mean, sure, I have another whole, untouched skein of Coral Calmer, but wouldn’t it have been frustrating if I’d needed to start it just for a yard or so of sewing yarn? That would be as frustrating as, gosh, not having quite enough yarn in your skein to finish your Peacock Feathers shawl.

On a technical note, have any of you Typepad users noticed that, since upgrading their system this weekend, one of the “custom themes” you can pick for your blog is “Knitting.” There were only 5 “Special Interests” available–travel, wedding, baby, stitch, and knitting. Does anyone get the impression that there are a LOT of knitting blogs out there?? (grin)

I’m psyched for London for winning their bid for the 2012 Olympics. I admit there was a small part of me rooting for New York–it would have been close enough that I might have actually been able to attend some of the events. Because while I’m not a sports-follower at all, I’m something of an Olympics junkie. I’ll watch almost anything if it’s got those five rings behind it. This fixation dates back to my high school days, and I blame it squarely on two movies. Chariots of Fire (of course), and a 2-part TV movie called The First Olympics which my best friend and I watched almost as much as we watched 1776. It was about the first modern Olympics in Athens 1896, and the struggles of the U.S. team to get there and to compete . . . we taped it when it was aired and then watched it over and over and over (grin). (Hey, it was the mid-80s and it cost a fortune to rent or buy a video–the movies we had on tape were the choices. Period. End of story. And even the blank tapes cost $, so we had to be selective about what we decided to keep!) Louis Jardin as Baron Pierre de Coubertain, David Odgen Stiers as the head of Princeton’s Classics department, David Caruso as James O’Connelly (first gold medal winner in 2000 years) . . . fun movie. Anyway, it would have been nifty to get to see some of the Olympics in person, but I’m very happy for London. It’s nice when the under-dog wins!

The new Knitty is up, but I can’t say I’m inspired by any of the patterns. I don’t have a man in my life to knit for. My father has told me that he’s not interested in having a handknit sweater, I don’t think my brother-in-law would want one, either, but I suppose I could make a hat for my nephew (the one with short rows, in Mets colors?). . . but that would be about it. Still . . . I liked it better than the lingerie issue they put out last summer!

Here’s an interesting article about Identical Twins. (Found at Mirabilis.ca again–she finds some of the most interesting news items!) I’m always interested in reading about twins–I had an identical twin, but we were 7 weeks early, back in 1966, and she didn’t make it. Mom and I were just speculating the other day as to whether Susan and I would have had similar hair, but guessing that we would probably have worn it differently . . . but maybe it wouldn’t have been the same texture, after all! (The conversation was inspired by a pair of middle-aged twins we saw at Starbucks on Saturday who had the exact same hairstyle. Looks just a little odd on adults, I think.) Interesting.

Tags: General, Knitting/Spinning // 4 Comments »