"I love you" sweater

Dear Cynthia,

Regarding your shawl, the only word which comes to mind and which accurately captures my admiration for it is a word I've heard my six year old say for only the most extraordinary: Whoa! (Sidenote: Very relieved here that the math held up and you didn't run out of yarn!) Seriously, it is beautiful, and that isn't a word which I use liberally.

I'm working on the first (of two) "I love you" sweaters. A couple of years ago, on the PBS (which is the only channel I let my kids watch, except for the occasional Wheel of Fortune) show "Mr. Rogers", he was talking about how a person might say "1 4 3" as another way to say "I love you" (substituting a letter count for each word in the phrase). So the boys and I started saying that to each other in place of "I love you" sometimes. My kids have a little picnic table in our play room, and they have spent countless hours drawing pictures there on scrap paper which my dh brings home from work. One day, they were chatting and drawing and ended up figuring out that a circle may be made with one stroke of a crayon, a square with four strokes, and a triangle with three strokes, so they started saying "circle square triangle" as another way to say "I love you". So, last year for Christmas, my dh had an artist friend work up some necklace designs using "circle square triangle" as the central motif, the boys selected one of those designs, and then the artist made a beautiful necklace for me, which was my Christmas gift from my kids, and which I LOVE! And so this year, I wanted to do something special for my boys using that theme.

And so, here is the almost completed front of the sweater for my three year old (who has big, deep, brown eyes). He'll notice the design on the front for sure. What he doesn't know is that using five "butterflies", plus another ball of yarn on each side for the background (total of seven working yarns), is what really says "I love you" on this sweater. It was a tangled mess, but for only 16 rows, it worked out fine, I could deal with it. Looking at it now in the picture, I wonder if I placed the design a little bit high on the front.....hmm.... Maybe it's just the camera angle.....

Here's the back without the ends woven in.

I got up early to make muffins this morning. The Inn we stayed in last week had a packet of recipes which guests could take home with them, and I had three rotting bananas greet me on the return from our trip, so the Inn's muffins are baking now and will be done in about five minutes.

It has been a long time since you and I took some time to just sit and knit someplace. I'll put this little bug in your ear: Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival..... It's not Lake Michigan, but, well, you know.....

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)