Fiber Dreams

The stole progresses

I started knitting the border yesterday. I made pretty good progress, too, until I got too tired to knit, made a mistake, then couldn’t find it to fix it. That was my cue to put down the needles for the evening.

I’ve been working up the pattern in fits and starts, massaging the charts, adding text. I’m up to seven pages already. No photographs yet. I know there will be more. A lot of charts are going into this stole. It’s kind of amazing.

I kept changing my mind about the bead placement on the border. I couldn’t decide if the beads should be on every third right-side row, or every fourth right-side row. I finally decided on placing them on every third row. Are they too close together? I’m not sure.

I’ve also been wondering what to call it. I’ve been referring to it so far as my ocean stole, but that falls short. I’m thinking more along the lines of South Seas Stole or Poseidon or something. I dunno. Any thoughts on that?

The Harlot in Los Angeles

My dear friend Kristie has procured tickets to the Yarn Harlot’s talk this weekend in L.A. Woot! I tried to get tickets, but was too late and ended up on the first page of the waiting list instead. I understand that there are only 230 seats available for this shindig, and there are 300 people on the waiting list. Yipes. Sounds like major under-planning to me. But Kristie’s a dear, and when she saw that someone on Ravelry had some extra tickets, she was johnny-on-the-spot and snapped up two of them, intending to give one to me all along. Isn’t she a dear? I can’t wait. I’m totally excited.

You know what this means, don’t you? I have to start some socks. And quick. My other projects are all way too big to tote along to an event. I must have socks to take. With that in mind, I got out the measuring tape last night, and measured dearest Dave’s feet. As I suspected, they’re long. Eleven and an eighth inches long, to be exact—that’s nearly two inches longer than my foot-stubs. In spite of that, my feet are almost as big around as his are. Gads. I only have two balls of the yarn I’m going to use, Crystal Palace Maizy that I got from Susan as a free sample earlier this summer. He’s going to get a pair of summer shorties to wear with his topsiders. I’ll be digging through my stitch pattern books again, looking for a good stitch to use. Something understated, but interesting to knit.

I needed to include this photo of Ricki. This morning she took absolutely no notice of me while I was taking pictures in her nap room. Even when I accidentally let the flash go off in her furry little face. Didn’t twitch a single whisker.

Glasswings

Mom got an email from an old friend of the family that she forwarded to me. It’s subject: glasswing butterflies, or Greta oto. This photo is one of the many that were in the email message. Here’s the blurb from that same message:

Lives in South America. A butterfly with transpar­ent wings is rare and beautiful. As delicate as finely blown glass, the presence of this rare tropical gem is used by rain forest ecologists as an indication of high habitat quality and its demise alerts them of ecological change. Rivaling the refined beauty of a stained glass window, the translucent wings of the glasswing butterfly shimmer in the sunlight like polished panes of turquoise, orange, green, and red.

Yes, the center of the wings are transparent. I found a whole raft of photos of these lovely little creatures on Google. I also found this photo, and these. Aren’t they fabulous?

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