Hello, Diane. Do you want to come over and take a look at my swatches?

I finished knitting around both Sizzle armholes
the other day, and just now finally got around to dunking it in the sink for a good soak.

The plan is to block it out, then sew up the sides, weave in the ends, and viola! a completed sleeveless sweater. Just in time for a cool, blustery winter. That’s one thing I do, knit light weight things in winter, and big heavy ones in the heat of the summer. Personality quirk.

While waiting for Sizzle to cook, I started swatching for another lace project. This is the Zephyr Wool-Silk yarn again. In Dianthus. Faced with that glorious color, how can I do anything but flowers and related motifs?

I wasn’t at all sure about either of these motifs at first. You can sort of see a little flower on the lower right, and a total mess to the left. Yes, working two motifs side by side that have wildly disparate row counts can get a little confusing—to say the least—especially when interrupted with dashes over to the neighbor’s house, telephone calls, that sort of thing. So I bound off some stitches, and forged ahead with the leaf motif on its own. The first repeat is… boring, but I was hopeful, so knit a second repeat. I love it. Nicely formed lacy leaves emerged.

Let me zoom in a bit so you can see those leaves a little better. Aren’t they pretty? I don’t know yet exactly what I’ll do with these little leaves, but ideas are stewing and brewing.

Catalog

And now for something completely different. I haven’t done one of these in quite some time. Without further ado, here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday.

Do you use any of the online book-cataloging sites, like LibraryThing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or… do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin)) If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

I’m not familiar with Shelfari (just went and peaked, looks promising), but I have my knitting library entered into LibraryThing. It took me quite a while the day I decided to enter all my knitting books into their system. Then I discovered the reason. I have 88 titles in my knitting book list. You know what? That’s a fair number of knitting books! Cool. Don’t get any funny ideas about my not needing more knitting books, about my perhaps already having enough knitting books. I always need more knitting books. Always. Knitting books are something a person like me can never have enough of.

I entered the knitting books into LibraryThing for a couple of reasons. I thought it would be nice to have a definitive list of them somewhere. Plus, they have this neat little widget that allows me to display random samples from my knitting library in my sidebar. How cool is that? I had to have it, so I had to enter the books.

Would I ever consider, would the possibility of the thought of entering all the books in the house into any online or other electronic system ever enter my mind? Well sure. It’ll enter my mind. Has done from time to time. It would be lovely to actually know what all is here. But then reality strikes. When faced with this many books, practically none of which have been cataloged, that thought flies out the window pretty quickly.