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I was dreaming about showing y’all my new market bag this weekend.  Or at least showing a close to finished version.  It’s what I’m doing with the rubber tubing from the earlier post — my plan is to turn the tubing into handles and have a really sturdy felted bag to use at our farmers market, which starts up in a few weeks.

You know what I did?  About 5" into  rounds of 150 stitches, I realized that I twisted the stitches when I did the join.  Arggghhhh.  How did I knit for that long without figuring it out?  Well, I had stored my circulars in a really pretty silk needle case, and it required me to bend them around themselves to fit.  When I took the needle out to knit with, it was pretty kinked up.  I thought I was being extra-careful because of all the twisting.  I wasn’t.  I discovered it while knitting during the conversation after a dinner party last night.

After thrashing myself for being so lazy, I straightened out the cable (easily done by setting it in a bowl of very hot water for about thirty seconds and then smoothing it) and cast back on.  All you get to see is this:

Hopefully there will be more progress soon, but this has the feel of one of those black hole knitting projects already.

In far more exciting news, my friend Ramona came home from spring break in Paris and brought me this:

It came from the Anny Blatt store.  And most amazingly of all, Anny Blatt was there when she bought the yarn and she met her!  She bought the yarn thinking it would make up into a wonderful little tank for summer, and I think that is just the right project.  Isn’t it lovely to have friends who are knitters who go to Paris?

More jewelry news too.  In the second class, I completed this bracelet, which goes with the earrings I made and showed you earlier in the week.  As a completely self-taught beader (I only went that direction because of some felting projects that required beading and then one thing led to another), this class opened a lot of horizons and I can’t wait to incorporate some of what I learned back into collage work, and specifically, into a couple of artist’s fat books I’m in the middle of working on!

There are two other things I want to show y’all.  One is really odd, and one is really beautiful.

This is the odd thing:

I asked the 16 year old boy to cut up carrots to go with the roast, and this is what he left for me.  It is strangely sculptural.  I would like to think it is his teenage attempt at communicating to me that he sees beauty and value in art.  Do you think it’s an over-reading?  After living with teenagers, I sometimes find myself grasping at straws.

The beautiful thing is this — I am managing to grow lilacs in the deep south.

Lilacs don’t grow in the deep south.  But I baby these two, just outside my front door, and this is the fourth year they have bloomed for me.  The scent is incredible.  I’m starting to notice that I grow all the same things in my garden that my Grandmother and Mother loved best.  I grow roses and iris and gardenias.  I manage a small strawberry patch.  We have three peach trees, which is a feat in a small urban yard.  My Mom loves lilacs.  I can’t even count the number of times she talked about how she remembered them from her childhood in the east and how much she regretted that they wouldn’t grown in California.  So I grow them, for my Mom, even though she is still in California, and can only see them in pictures.

She who must be obeyed (that would be my eight-year old), has absconded with my  long awaited Handmaiden silk ribbon yarn.  "Make me a mini-skirt" she commanded airily as she left the room.  Because I live to serve, as soon as I can do the math to recalculate Colinette’s Giotto Mini-Skirt pattern, I will be casting on.  It will look better on her, than it would have looked on me, in any event.  It is really pretty yarn that isn’t available on their website, but that I was lucky enough to get my hands on.  Pictures forthcoming.

Ellie only got her grubby little hands on the Handmaiden, because I had pulled out all of my spring yarn and was eyeing where to start.  I haven’t knitted with a ribbon yarn before, so I decided to warm up with a little tank made out of Colinette’s Giotto in the Paintbox colorway (an ebay purchase that I was ecstatic about).  It is essentially just row after row in moss stitch — very good meeting knitting.  Not particularly mind boggling although the needle is a bit prone to slice through the ribbon, so I think I’m going to have to beware.  Knitting with this yarn gives me a chance just to see how beautiful it is  It really could pass for silk and the colors are mah-velous. 

I’m also swatching for new socks, hopefully for myself this time.  I have misplaced the ball band, but I have emailed the store where I purchased it, in hopes they can identify it for us.

Isn’t that beautiful?  This is my last pair of self-patterned socks for a while, as I received the new Interweave sock book I posted about last week and can’t wait to start in on those patterns.  This yarn, however, has been on top of the stash box in my bedroom for months, calling my name.  It got too loud to ignore.

Here are some tidbits from my early morning.  On the other end of the leash is my neighbor George, being walked by his dog and my cat.

Harry & Hermione love Little Miss Ellie, and they come running to see her when it is time for their walks.  They also take great delight in stalking her….and attacking.  The kittens have now befriended all of the neighborhood dogs and go running to see their friends Pierre and AJ too.

Can you see how beautiful it is getting here?  Everything is coming out.  My roses are blooming.

The dogwoods are out and my lavender is in full bloom.

I grow an obscure tall garden iris called Eleanor’s Pride, that I planted when Ellie was born.  It was a Dykes award winner in the 1961 and is subtle and lovely.

And we even have early blooms on our Meyer Lemon tree.

It is truly spring, and if we can manage to survive the pollen, it’s going to be a wonderful one.  I’m off for one last day of work this week, and then a mad weekend of children’s birthday parties, visits from out of town friends, and yarn dyeing.  I’m going to rave at length about my Mama Bear skein winder, which arrived on Wednesday and proved incredibly easy to assemble and use.  I wound up a test skein of my British Blue Face Leicester and dyed it.  Two new loves in one week — this skein winder and this yarn are going to be making my weekend really enjoyable.  The pink yarn is the first bath of a yarn I’m working on — Meagan, take note.  And the undyed skein is some bulky merino I’m playing with.  I have been wanting to add a bulky sweater yarn to my line up and I think this one is going to be it.  It is incredibly soft, evenly spun, and the first few test skeins are looking great.

I just love spring and all it holds in store!