I knew I forgot something....

Did I forget to mention that I'm knitting a border around my blanket? Yeah, I did, and I do!

I don't want to have the whole blanket in my lap, when I'm tackling the border. I've decided to sew one stripe of squares, the whole length, which is 8 squares long. The blanket will be 5 squares wide.

I've got nearly 400 stitches to go back and forth on this border (one long side). Unfortunately I can't knit the design I would have liked, due to dwindling available yarn. Also, the design I DID knit was not what I wanted (not even second choice) either.

It went like this: I opened the Knitting Mosaic Book, where the "Bands" were located. There are black and white (or rather gray) pictures of the designs, followed by the charts. One sample picture has 13 designs on it. So, I opened to one page, looked at the picture, saw my second choice, counted down, looked up the design and started knitting. After the 4th row, there was this "Huh?" in my head, repeatedly, but I didn't get it. After the last row was knit, I looked at the design, and this time there was "WTF" in my head, it looked nothing like the design I'd chosen. I looked at the picture again, and NOW I read the small print beside it. I naturally counted from top to bottom to design 9, but for whatever reason, they counted from bottom up, which would have made the design I wanted to knit # 5. Was I going to rip out 26 rows of roughly 400 stitches? No way! Now I have to repeat the mistake on purpose on the other side. Of course the design is the ugliest on this page, but since you will not see the rest, it will be O.K. for everyone except for myself. But there's a good side too. Now I know how much yarn I'll need, and I will knit the top and bottom border (short side of the blanket) with my # 1 choice of designs. You'll see! So, I'm not only sewing squares, but also knitting, and this will take longer than I'd expected.

In the meantime I have to show you something, so you wont get bored. Look what I've got here. This is a metal box, painted somewhere in Russia (says so on the back). I've got it over 11 years ago, from someone from somewhere, don't remember. I've used it in my sewing days to keep the chalk for marking seams and so on. It's still in there.

I was looking for something else, when I saw it, and until a few days ago, I never really looked at the painting, it didn't mean anything until now. It shows two women spinning with bottom whirl drop spindles. Isn't that cool?

Ask and you shall receive, or something like that. I asked my son to please make me a WPI counting tool, and this is what he brought home for me. He's working in a wood workshop during the summer, until University starts up again. It's perfect. It sits in my hand so comfortably, I love it. He knew what I wanted to do with it, but he could not explain to his buddies, why one would want to wrap yarn around some piece of wood. People who have nothing to do with knitting or spinning, sure think that we are weird. ;o)

I haven't taken a lot of picture of the dogs lately. This one I made a couple of month ago. I like it. Biko looks a little like a Sphinx in this one. She was hoping to get a treat, for being good and letting me photograph her. ;o)