Vines and Eleanor and Jumper and Duets, Oh My!

Hello, everyone! This week, I shipped off the Duet hats/cowls to my mother-in-law, but not before I took a picture:

Aren't they pretty? Yeah, I added little tassels to the ends of the I-cord on the pink hat. I thought it added a cute touch. With those done, I was able to turn to the Eleanor cowl and make some serious progress:

The yarn is so soft that I'm not minding the fact that I have to concentrate hard and count constantly - this is NOT company knitting. With that in mind, last evening, I cast on the Braided Vines cowl and was able to keep up my end of the conversation at the coffee shop this morning.

Yes, I am aware that my next yarn purchase should be on the green/yellow/orange side of the color wheel. I so hope that my nieces like these darling little neckwarmers!

This afternoon, as I was ripping apart the jumper that I showed last week, I realized that the skirt of the jumper was in pretty good shape and, with a lining and a waistband, would get me a nice spring/summer skirt. There was so much excess fabric in the skirt that I'll be able to have a button-front skirt and use the excess fabric for the waistband.

I was able to pull out some appropriate lining fabric from the stash, so I'll be working on the rehabbed skirt over the next couple of weeks.

In between the various projects, I have read a couple of books recently. This weekend I finished Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's All Wound Up, which I purchased at my local bookshop (at Stephanie's request on her blog). Just remember, if we don't support them, they'll go away. Back to the book: knitting humor is a pretty narrow part of the humor spectrum, but Stephanie mines it well. There is an incident in the book that had me standing outside Hubby's office (while waiting for him to finish for the day) and chuckling, chortling, giggling, etc. He looked askance when I announced that the drive home would include a dramatic reading. I was less than a page into the story when he let loose with the first chuckle. We were nearly home by the time I finished the story, and we were both laughing so hard that I think it may have counted as distracted driving.

The book I read before that was a book I happened to scoop up on my last dash through the dying Borders Book Store, The English is Coming by Leslie Dunton-Downer. This is an entertaining look at the history of the English language, the current state of it as a global language, and some speculation about its future directions. I find myself hearing the language differently and paying attention to how the folks around me (many of whom speak it as a second or third language) speak it.

Now, for the cute kitty pictures of the week. First, I decided to reorganize my bureau, and a certain Brat Cat got curious about an empty drawer.

In the afternoon, as I was knitting along, a flag floated by

and a few minutes later Baby Boy was looking for attention:

Tell me you would have kept on knitting and not have given some serious cuddles....