Must Have Cardigan -- Finished!

Greetings, and Dear Cynthia,

First, the pattern for the Fish hat is located here. I know that a lot of you searched and found it on your own; I meant to link to it within my previous blog post, but forgot...

So, how do you keep track of all the babies in your family? I hope they know how fortunate they are to have you and your dedication to keep them warm with your knitting. What nice gifts! Your hemlock blanket is beautiful!!! And, I can't believe how quickly you made it! (Warp speed!)

It put me to shame, with my project of almost five months: Must Have Cardigan! HOWEVER -- BIG NEWS! I'm thrilled to say, I **have** a Must Have Cardigan, that is all sewn together, and completely wearable:I finished sewing this together yesterday, and had to purchase two sets of buttons (forgot to bring the sweater when I purchased the first set, and didn't like how they looked once I got them home -- so saving them for my next sweater -- for which they will be perfect). The sleeves are a bit tight for my liking, having maybe zero inches of ease, though overall I'm very happy with the sweater and I might wear it every day for a while.

And so, I've made two cabled sweaters back to back during the past ten months, and so now, miles of stockinette actually sounds appealing to me, especially since my school semester started again today, and there's only so much thinking I can do while knitting when I am also concentrating on 17 credits...so my next project will be a simple stockinette cardigan which will utilize the extra set of buttons I bought (as mentioned in preceding paragraph).

I've been thinking about goals, and I have to say I really appreciate the philosophy of Nik, who commented on my last post that she is setting realistic goals, "such as promising to keep my house messy." **EXCELLENT** Me too! I wish I'd thought of that!

Ahem, yes, that's going to be my approach to knitting this year. Last year, I got through ten out of twelve of my "Mission Possible 2008" projects, and then I started grad school, so I feel good about getting as far as I did, but a similar approach for me this year just screams lunacy.

Anyway, I also started a sock:This is Trekking something or other, and it appears that it may not have a "pattern repeat," which is good news for me, because if it did, I'd feel compelled to make both socks match, and I appreciate the implied "permission" this yarn gives me to have each sock be unique from the other... The yarn appears to consist of a couple of plies, each spatially dyed with various colors which are spun together randomly.

Christmas was a whirlwind, but really nice. My parents put all of the **slides** (some of our readers might not even know what those are) from when my siblings and I were little onto a DVD for each of us, and that is one of the nicest gifts ever. Some of them I've never even seen, because realistically, how often did anybody actually get out the slide projector to sit around and view slides? Anyway, that was one of my favorite gifts this year.

I'm also enjoying a cookbook my mom got me which has given me lots of good, quick, simple ideas for healthy meals: It's perfect for *where I am* currently with trying to continue to improve my diet -- lots of fresh ingredients, lower saturated fats, less sugar, lots of veggies -- I've become a big fan of goat cheese -- something I probably wouldn't have said two years ago...but it's yummy! Of course, since today I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things, we're having Trader Joe's fish sticks for dinner...

So, I guess that's the big news.

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)