More shawl pics

I took my shawl to knitting guild last night and Gene took some pics for me.



Blocking this shawl was a bit of a fiasco, but it turned out just fine. I ended up pinning it out and then steaming it, because the first time I went to unpin it, it snapped back about 4" along a 10" section and I didn't want that.

Luckily my steamer heats up relatively quickly, so I steamed it and let it sit while we ate dinner, then frantically unpinned and off I went to guild.

There was *no way* I was going to not show it off at knitting guild. :-)

You can see bigger photos here, as well as some other of my fiber-y stuff.

DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!

Yes, I *am* excited x eleventy.

That's because this is finally finished:




According to my projects page on Ravelry, I started it on February 17 of 2008. Two years this shawl took me, and there were times I literally fell asleep while knitting it.

The last round had 96 21-stitch repeats (decreased down from 25-stitch repeats in the rounds before), and they were taking me between an hour and a half and two hours to do, so I'm incredibly thrilled that this project is OVER.



On the quilting front, I got this little quilt pieced from some blocks I had put together a long time ago:


I'll put some borders and stuff on it to make it big enough for a nice-sized throw, and then I'll donate it to Quilts of Valor most likely since I'm really, really not into red, white, and blue.

At the upper left you can see a couple of my Storm At Sea blocks. That's all I've gotten pieced so far, but I'm almost finished cutting the background fabrics. I don't know if I'll have it done by June for the quilt show but I'm sure going to try!

That's all for now. I just had to show off a bit. :-)

Gillian's broken arm

Just as life was calming down a little bit, Gillian broke her arm!

It's not serious and she's not in pain unless she twists it, luckily.

She was jumping out of the swing and landed on her hands and knees and her left radius broke. Her friend Isabel was over at the time and I think she was a bit freaked out, poor kid. Gilly was *very* freaked out because she couldn't feel her arm for a few minutes and it was a little sore.

Here are the x-ray pics:


I added some arrows:


But as you can see she's not too bothered.



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Greg has been working in the garden quite a bit!

Last week most of the plants in the "mini greenhouse" had come up:

They're now mostly in the ground!

Ryan was helping, too:


Here are the tomatoes:


And this isn't something we're growing on purpose, but I thought it was pretty:


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I got a new skin from DecalGirl for my reader, since the overuse of the unsharp mask was really bugging me (yeah, I know, I'm PICKY).

Here's the old skin still on the Reader, and the new skin:

I was asked why I chose the Sony Reader, and I had a whole bunch of reasons that I chose it over the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Amazon Kindle.

The big reason was the touch screen, which I absolutely LOVE. I can turn pages with a flick of my finger, but the big deal to me is that I can write on the screen and make notes. I've loaded some knitting patterns onto it, and it's awesome to be able to write directly on the pattern.

I tried out the Nook and I did not like it when I used it at the store. It was completely non-intuitive, and if *I* can't figure it out within about 5 minutes of playing with it, I'm not going to bother buying it. (Wow, that sounds really egoistical, but I can almost always figure out things pretty quickly.)

Another factor was that the battery is replaceable on the Sony Touch. Hopefully the battery will last a really, really long time, but it's nice to know it can be replaced.

The Touch doesn't have any wireless capabilities which doesn't bother me at all. I plug in my device to the computer to move files around, which is fine with me. The only thing I don't like is that it didn't come with a wall-plug charger, and I'll probably acquire one in the near future. I've heard that they charge faster and hold the charge longer when one uses a wall-plug charger, but I haven't verified that.

Another reason I went with the Touch is the file types it uses, as well as its compatibility with the library system. Now if only our library system would work out a decent way to search the ebooks, I'd be thrilled. (There's no way I've found to search other than "ebook" so you get everything. No way to search by author, etc. Blech. )

The Amazon Kindle was my second choice, but I'm thrilled with my Sony Touch!

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I haven't gotten any knitting done that I can share (doing some gift knitting for various people) so hopefully in a few months I'll be showing off some projects.

I'm excited because there's a new fiber festival coming up on May 2, and then Fiber Christmas will be in July again. I'm thinking about teaching two classes, possibly three, depending on how Greg feels about it since he'd need to be home with the kids on those days.

That's all from around here! I hope you all have had a great weekend.