Flowers

Where is the Spring?? I'm getting really ready to have warm weather and flip flops again.

This morning when the kids and I went out to do some errands we saw that a daffodil plant in our front yarn has yellow buds! And some hyacinth (I think that's what it is...damn seasonal flowers, they confuse me!) on the other side of the porch has purple buds! I can't wait til we have plenty of flowers and the trees have leaves again.

Last night I finally finished a shawl that I've been working on, off and on, for 6 months. I kind of hated knitting it for most of the middle bits. I'm not even sure why, as I quite enjoyed the end knitting over the past couple of days. I need to block it, but then I'll post some pictures. The one real hassle was that the yarn (which was given to me by Giselle, who bought it thinking she'd knit regularly and then decided that she wouldn't) had had a run in with some moths and they'd chewed clear through in several places. OK, many places. So it was a huge pain in the butt to wind, and then there are probably 12 different joins in the yarn that I'll have to try to weave in somehow. Still, the yarn was free and beautiful, so I really can't complain! And I'm quite pleased with the finished product.

The only thing I have on the needles right now is...another shawl! This one is in laceweight yarn (think: slightly thicker than thread), and I'm hoping it will be finished and nice enough to wear to Mr. Faux's wedding in a few weeks. I'm not used to working with such thin yarn, however, and I have already damaged my shawl! I held it out yesterday to see how it was coming and gave the bottom a firm tug hoping to line it up with the top. One of the threads in my cast on row broke, leaving stitches dangling and just waiting to unravel all my work. I almost cried, and had to put it down (very carefully) as I didn't have the patience or energy to try to fix it at that point. Today I went back and slipped thread into the loose stitches and tied the ends of the broken yarn to the thread, so nothing else will fall out at least. When the shawl is complete I'll go back and fix it with the matching yarn.

Finally, in totally unrelated news, the kids made some "Get well" drawings for Valentina yesterday. Zion drew 3 variations on the same theme: helicopters. There was "Two helicopters driven by beavers", "Helicopter with toy plane inside" and "Helicopter driven by many beavers" (his friend Gari has had all the kids at preschool building a beaver dam out on the playground if you're wondering about the over representation of beavers in his current art). When handed any kind of marking implement Liel will, 99% of the time, draw what she asserts to be a bat. But yesterday she announced that she was going to draw a mouse for Valentina. A white mouse, in fact (and she didn't let a little thing like a lack of white crayons stop her, either!). I was super impressed, because, you see, Liel draws bats because Fluffy, her lovey/ favorite thing in all the world, is a bat. And Valentina? Her lovey is a stuffed white mouse.