Home Stretch!

I'm just over halfway through the edging on the shawl - 33 34 of 61 repeats completed - and it should block out to a very nice size once it's finished. You can see in this the border pattern I worked out. Very simple, as I've said before, but I think that it will work well to visually accentuate the draping of the shawl. And, of course, Ray's dye job is just gorgeous. This is my biggest lace project to date - my first really and truly proper lace project, actually - and I've been quite pleased at how it's gone. I expect I should have a finished and blocked shawl to share by next week sometime.

In other news, there was a package from Carol waiting for me when I got home. Because her Black Bunny Fibers shop is so popular and because I'm usually asleep when she updates her inventory, I pretty much never manage to get there before she's completely wiped out. I managed to be awake and remember her latest update about an hour after she posted it, though, so there were still a couple items left and I ordered a skein of sock yarn that I knew was going to push the envelope for me a bit colorwise but was too nice to pass up. She e-mailed me the other day and let me know she'd slipped a little something extra in the package. Turns out it was a lot of something extra!



I know this is really out of focus, but it's late and I'm not up to doing any more retakes. The skein on the left is the one I ordered, in colorway "Margarita"; next is a skein in colorway "Selma-la-la" (Care to share the provenance of that name, Carol?); then a little bundle of merino roving that immediately made me think of fresh peaches and citrus. I'm calling the colorway "Fuzzy Navel". The colors are all really lovely, as is to be expected. Thanks, sweetie!

I'm not certain if they'll end up being for me, particularly since yellows and oranges generally make me look jaundiced if I wear them (This complexional feature, I think, is why people have asked me if I'm mixed race in the past), but I'm looking forward to playing with them and seeing what happens. The sock yarns may make a fun dubbelmössa type stocking cap, or maybe socks (or mittens, or hats) for my sister's girls, who are much fairer than their uncle. I may try spinning up the roving and test plying with some natural brown merino I've got, when I actually get around to sitting down and spinning again. I need to do some serious work on using up stash. My first order of business after finishing this shawl, though, is to finish those socks I started from the yarn I got from Scout.

Requiem

We got word from Brian last week that there had been an IED explosion near the base where he's stationed in Afghanistan. One guardsman stationed at the base, Sgt. Charles R Browning was killed in the explosion, and a few others were wounded.