Title? I need a title?

It's been a while, hasn't it? First, a quick update. Heike, who was chosen as the winner of my 2nd anniversary contest, will be receiving a Louet yarn dyeing kit. It contains 2 skeins of sock yarn, three colours of dye, and all the instructions to dye your own yarn. It will be going into the mail this week, when I can make it to the post office.

Now, on to other things. I made a purchase yesterday. I've been eyeing these little things for a while now, and this week I finally found one that is compatible with my ancient computer.

For those of you not familiar with these, it's a flash drive. In essence, it's a portable mini hard drive. This is the 1 gb size. The reason I had a difficult time finding one (not that I looked really hard) is that I'm still running Windows 98 on my computer. The majority of these flash drives require a minimum of Windows 2000. But now, I have one. I'll be using it primarily to transfer files back and forth from the store. It also contains ALL of my own patterns, as well as all the patterns I've downloaded from online. And I've barely touched it's memory capacity!

On to knitting... I have been knitting... honest, I have.

Here's one project I'm playing with. I bought Vivian Hoxbro's book, "Shadow Knitting". It's an intriguing technique, one I'd like to play with some more. In order to understand it a little better, I'm knitting this...

It doesn't have a lot of shadow patterning in it, but that's ok. I'll also try my hand at a smaller project from the same book. It just seems to have so much potential for fun knitting.

Then, there's this lovely piece of work... and it truly is. The picture, obviously, just does not give you the tactile experience that this shawl is.

The pattern is Fibertrends, Estonian Garden Shawl. The yarn I'm using is Garnstudio Drops 100% laceweight Alpaca. It's like knitting with a cloud and the shawl is so incredibly touchable and soft. I think it will become a favourite very quickly!

If you will recall, I'm also knitting the Estonian Garden Scarf as well, as a Mother's Day present. Remember this?

The pattern calls for 41 repeats of the little "heart" motif. Well, yesterday, I made it to the 41st repeat. Then, I looked at it. Carefully. And realized something had happened about 4 rows down that had created an overly large "hole". So, I tinked back to that point. Had it back on the needles and worked one row. Looked at it again. And discovered a dropped stitch about 8 rows down. AND it had created another, even larger hole.

There's nothing left to say about that scarf. The lime green "string" is my foundation chain for the provisional cast on. I'll be casting on again for this scarf another day.

For today, after I write out a pattern for one of the customers at the store (more on that project another day), I'll be working on John's sweater. He's been dropping hints all over the place and I suppose it's time I pick them up, don't you think?