Cure for insomnia....

Greetings and Dear Cynthia,

Thank you everybody for your kind reception of the Hanami stole. After checking Ravelry (great idea Cynthia G) and also sending the designer an e-mail, I'm convinced that my 900 yards should be sufficient, so that will probably be one of my next projects.

No progress on SuperNova. Thank you, Kitty Mommy, for alerting me to the fact that I should be careful not to sew the sweater **to** the ironing board. Seriously, I'm totally capable of that, and am glad for the warning, and as you suggested, I won't ask how you know about that.

The baby blanket has been a rather quick knit. I'm in the home stretch here: I'm not too crazy about this acrylic yarn, but soon it will all be gone and I'll have a baby gift in the finished items stash. The border of this would really benefit from a good blocking...so in that regard, I'm not so sure acrylic was the best choice for this...

DH gave me a gift card to Lakeside Fibers for Christmas, so I bought yarn to make the Tangled Yoke Cardigan. Here's progress so far on that:I'm revising the lower half of the waist shaping -- more on that if my "plan" actually works... I'm loving how the yarn is knitting up -- It is Rowan Felted Tweed, the yarn called for in the pattern, though I'm using the color "camel". It is very light brown (tan?) with flecks of blue, very dark gray, and white-ish. I've never noticed any camels having blue flecks, though, having seen only a dozen or so camels in my lifetime, I'm no expert -- but I like the blue flecks...reflective of reality or not.

Having no class this semester is a little bit weird. On the last day of the class which I took last summer, one of the guys in the class told me, "And so ends our brief association." I thought that was a bit odd, but then I realized how true it was. A class full of people spends hours and hours working together, laughing, getting to know each other, and then **poof**, it's all done, and everybody goes his/her separate ways. The older I get, the more attached I seem to be getting to everybody, too. And, it is generally just not practical to stay in touch with everybody. I guess I'm missing the social aspects of being in a class. Incidentally, I ran into that same "brief association" guy about two weeks later as I was walking down the hall on the first day of the fall semester...

So, to keep myself busy, I started working on the caulk around the tub. I know there were problems with leaks in the distant past, because the support beams below this particular tub have some water marks on them. However, just before we moved into this house, I think the previous owner went around this tub and floor with a jumbo caulking gun, because it is just globbed on:... and is loose in places so that I've been trying to get both boys to "not splash" when they are in the tub. (Have you every tried to get two boys to "not splash"?) Anyway, I have the caulk mostly out, and am working on scraping out some of the remaining residue. Here's what it looks like with the "globs" removed: After a little scrubbing and then reapplication of caulk without globbing it, I'm confident things will look and function much better around that tub. Estimated timing for completion is the end of this week.

My seven year old just had his "half birthday", which is a nice way to let kids with summer birthdays get a "special day" during the regular school year. So, he picked out a treat to make -- zebra cookies -- possibly the most difficult/tedious recipe in his kids' recipe book. In this photo, you can see the picture of what the cookies are supposed to look like, and also our finished products which don't look anything like zebras:My son wanted red and white, and we were going to cut them in the shape of Wisconsin -- very cool. Then we started having all sorts of problems, including the dough not holding together, and there you have it! I can't say they tasted very good, either. We succeeded on what matters most, however -- my son loved them and proudly gave them to his classmates and several teachers at his school.

Okay, so it's been very cold here lately -- high on Saturday was negative 2 degrees F. And, the Packers lost in overtime last night. Very sad. And again, everybody wondering whether or not Brett Favre will return for another season..... The snow we had today was just beautiful, however, and I'm going to enjoy the evening knitting in my chilly house (thermostat currently set to 64 degrees F)...but it's knitting, and it keeps me warm in many ways.

I think I'm rambling, so I'd better get going on cleaning up the kitchen. More soon!
Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)