Everything's gone mad!

No knitting in, like, forever. That's what grad school will do to you. The nerve!

After a break of a month or so, I picked up my Violets By The River shawl the other day and did a couple more iterations of the (very simple) pattern. I'm probably about halfway through the main body of the shawl, though the edging is pretty substantial. I'm taking notes for someone in a colloquium I'm doing, so what would otherwise be prime knitting time isn't happening then (though it's no bother). I'm still trying to find my comfort zone, figuring out places to hang out between classes and the like, and when to check e-mail and when to read and when to do all that good stuff, so it's been a while.

Happily, I've loaded up my TiVO with some good stuff, so I'll at least have some quality fodder for watching TV while knitting. In addition, it turns out that a couple of my new friends from class are knitters too, so I'll probably get together with them every so often and have something other to talk about than just "OMG, what's the difference between inter-item and item-total validity?"

Yep, it's just that fun.

BUT!

I know this is a cop-out since, hey, I actually have it and am not using it, but still. I BOUGHT A NEW CAMERA. It is very tiny indeed, and my camera geek friends are mildly jealous of it but helped me make a great choice. It's a Canon PowerShot SD850. This blog will not be quite as boring anymore. Really!

Of course, I have nothing but half-finished FOs to show. There are a couple of car trips coming up, though, so I will hopefully get some good time in on those.

In other news, I took a trip to the WI Sheep and Wool Festival. It was awesome, and I bought some patterns and a wonderful Merging Colors mitered scarf kit in the Cape Cod colorway (yeah, big surprise -- blue and green again), as well as some blue and green (OKAY OKAY I have a problem) soysilk for TChemGrrl to spin for me. Yay! Of course, now I can't FIND my patterns, but as I live in a very small apartment, I'm sure they'll turn up. One, in particular, should be just gorgeous; it's a long stole with a simple pattern in the middle and nice ends. It could be very luxurious indeed. I want 1200 yards of some sort of silk or sheeny something-something in a fingering weight with tone on tone coloring; I'm thinking something nice and deep and jewel-y. I was thinking of the American Beauty colorway of Tilli Tomas Pure and Simple (you can't see, but it has some more wine-y and ruby tones mixed in), but
HELLO, that's like 80 bucks, and right now my loyalty card money is over at the Sow's Ear, not Lakeside (where they carry TT). Still, if Sow's Ear gets a new shipment of Handmaiden Sea Silk (I was thinking of Midnight), I might just be forced to go with that. Boy, wouldn't that be tough?

Finally, I would just like to say that I have purchased non-blue and green yarn recently, so there. I got some Malabrigo Laceweight in some kind of magenta-with-a-little-green colorway, which I'm planning to use for the Flared Lace Smoke Ring... someday.

No, really, I'll totally get to it. After the three baby sweaters in my queue...