I’m Knitting As Fast As I Can

It’s Friday and I still haven’t found time to cobble together a blog post for this week.  But since 3 other bloggers have essentially done all the work for me, I’ll just piggyback on their posts.

Saturday, Margene, Eliza, Cheryl and I sewed up some adorable project bags.  I stumbled on the pattern several weeks ago and got it into my head that I simply had to make one.  I was able to complete three, notwithstanding the fact that I have: (1) a barely functioning sewing machine and (2) the sewing skills of a toddler.

The task was considerably easier on Saturday since I was able to use Cheryl’s fully functioning sewing machine and Margene’s razor sharp rotary cutter.  Cheryl blogged about our lovely day here.

Sunday was Margene’s 60th birthday.  For several months I’ve been planning, designing, and knitting a secret shawl to celebrate her day.  Back in December, I showed her a shawl prototype I had knit and she loved it.  Trouble was, I had lost both the handwritten charts and my notes.  But after she’d hounded me several times, I decided to recreate the pattern and knit a shawl from it for her birthday.  Kim kindly supplied me with the perfect (and I mean perfect) yarn.

Here’s the result:

I think Margene liked it.  She has some action photos of the shawl on her blog.

The pattern is currently available from Kim as a kit.  I’m  re-re-working it for sock weight yarn and it should be available as a stand-alone pattern in a few weeks.  Should be good for all those lovely skeins of sock yarn that are too precious to use for socks.  At least that’s the plan.

Well, I chose to head south, of course.  And, I have to say, it’s been nice to breathe relatively clean air the last two days.  Look, you can actually see the sky!

For those of you who asked, during the winter Salt Lake City often experiences something called a temperature inversion.  Basically, for reasons I don’t fully understand, the air near the ground becomes cooler than the air above. (The temperature is actually higher at the ski resorts than it is in the valley.) This traps pollution near the valley floor and it doesn’t clear out until we get a storm. Because we haven’t had a storm in weeks, the Salt Lake Valley is filled with polluted air that’s just sitting over the entire city. Yuck.

I live above the valley, near the foothills, and I usually escape the worst of the gunk. But the layer of smog has been rising rapidly and it finally overtook my house. So I escaped to the land of casinos and shopping.

But even where there’s sun and air, a girl can still enjoy knitting a thrummed mitten.

What do you think . . .

Should I head east . . . or . . . south?

At this point, I’d head north to Alaska if it meant finding breathable air.