Inspirations and Updates

First off, I would like to thank The Student Knitter for the pretty niddy-noddy she made and I won in her recent giveaway. I've skeined up the spinning from my first bag of roving!

Thanks to this wonderful tool, I now know that I have about 290 yards of yarn - any suggestions for patterns I could make from this?

I haven't shown the Helix socks in a while. I was so thrilled when I got to the heels in mid-July, thinking I'd be able to work the legs during the quilt show. No, the heels took longer than expected, and then when I started working the second heel, I realized that I had not understood the instructions on the first heel and had screwed them up. All through the second heel, I kept telling myself it wasn't that big a deal. When I got the second heel done, and it was SO much better than the first heel, I knew what I needed to do. So, I slid the second heel over to the inactive side of the needles and spent the quilt show unpicking the entire first heel. Mid-Sunday afternoon, I was finally at the point where I could restart it. People kept asking during the show, "What are you making? That looks really interesting." Well, actually, I'm unmaking.... Then, we had lots of sun on our vacation (I am NOT complaining!!) and my prescription sunglasses are only good for distance viewing, so I really couldn't knit in the car. So, with all of that, here's the current picture:

On the road, we listened to an audio version of Robert Merry's A Country of Vast Design, about the presidency of James K. Polk. It was an utterly fascinating window into American politics in the first half of the 19th century. So many people seemed to spring out of the pages and into real life. John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay all come alive in this book; however, the most vivid character is James Buchanan, the clever conniving political hack who served as Polk's secretary of state and went on to become one of the two worst presidents in our nation's history. If you have a chance to listen to or read this book, do so.

Also, I wanted to show a couple of pictures I thought I would be able to use for future quilts. The first is a detail from buildings I saw at both Fort Michilimackinac and Fort Wilkins.

I loved the way those triangles fit together.

The other picture is from a staircase leading to a lighthouse tower at Whitefish Point. We weren't allowed to go into the tower, but I was able to take this picture.

Wouldn't that be an INTERESTING quilt - I'm thinking complementary colors - orange and blue, magenta and forest green..... mmmmm!!!!