more cowbell, er ketchup, er catsup, er catch-up

I'm trying desperately with this post to play some catch-up. I've been off the last week on "vacation". Normally that might be a good excuse for a general lack of posting, but the reality is that I didn't *really* go away, and my time off has mostly been about packing. (yes, we still have not moved...soon, soon). I'm going to state the obvious here and say that packing totally sucks. Yarn, however does make good box-fill for fragile items.

We managed to get away a bit and do some fun stuff, but i'll save the deets on that for the non-knitting blog and leave you with a pseudo montage of some of the stuff I got up to over the course of that week.

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Some of you who regularly pop in over here might also recognize Miss Muffy up there. We managed to get ourselves up to their cottage for a 'lil sunshine. Not nearly long enough, unfortunately.

How many projects did I bring for one lowly day? Yeah you guessed it:



Too many. I knit about three rows of the green stuff that became this, and has already been finished, blogged about, and now borders on the verge of destruction. No other knitting got done that day by me, no siree. I did how ever bring a boatload of snacks with me...



Green tea cookies-- not super sweet, but me and the matcha flavouring are pretty much inseperable these days. The recipe for those can be found here if anyone's interested.

And still more cottage snacks,



The recipe for those cinammon biscuits can only be found in my brain right now, but if anyone does want it I'd be happy to type it up.

Some knitting DID finally get finished...Elisa's Nest tote from the Purl Bee.



I think I learned my lesson from the last (frogged) tote I made --Emerald String and made this one way, WAY smaller. These things are unbelievably stretchy.



And actually even since these photos I've torn back on the handles again and made them about 5 inches shorter. This was originally supposed to be a stash-busting project for one lowly skein of Lionbrand Cottonease I had kicking around. Naturally I still didn't have enough, had to go out and buy another ball to finish off the handles, and now basically find myself in the exact same situation I originally was in with the exact same yarn in my stash. Isn't that always the way? Anyway, it's for a co-worker, so I hope she likes it.

And finally, speaking of things I've torn apart of late...Flair is no more. Flair was pretty much my first sweater project and was a real learning experience for me. What I mostly learned was not-to-eff-with-the-pattern-too-much. Especially when it's your first sweater. But anyway, there's no love lost there. I never liked it, it was enormous on me, and I needed the buttons to finish off those Prairie Boots that have been hibernating.

I'm hoping she'll provide me with enough yarn to make Wallis:


(sorry, best picture I could find on the internerd for some reason)

I suppose a smarter person would have soaked all the curly-ass yarn that came out of that sweater BEFORE actually knitting with it...

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But a smarter person I am not. Naturally it is knitting up a bit lumpy, but I'm sure it'll all come out smooth in the final blocking (fingers crossed).



I'm actually a fair bit further along than this picture would indicate, so with any luck I'll post progress pics soon. I'm really enjoying knitting it...the pattern is keeping it interesting so far. And I know, I know --more batwings!

Baby likes her batwings. (well, for now...)