Monday evening, I finally sat down and sewed in the ends on the doily. I blocked it that night only to realize as I was going to bed that I hadn’t measured to make sure the measurements were the same all the way around. The doily wasn’t circular is was oval, I hadn’t been careful about it since my blocking board is rectangular and I just wanted it to be blocked. So Tuesday morning, I woke up and reblocked the doily. It was just a matter of giving it another soak in the sink and repinning it on our bed. Tuesday evening, I came home and it was dry and very beautiful. Immediately, I put it on our coffee table and every time I see it, it strikes me how beautiful it really is. It turned out much larger than I expected (over 22 inches in diameter) and it looks very lovely on the coffee table. Erin was right once it was blocked, I completely fell in love with it again. I really wish the photos did it more justice. I’m not the world’s best photographer and I’m sure more seasoned photographers could take some amazing photos of this doily.

It’s definitely spring around here and I’m really enjoying it. The magnolia trees are blooming and the daffodils are all around. My favorite part of spring hasn’t appeared yet, but I know it’s just a matter of a few weeks before all of the wonderful tulips are blooming all over town.

With spring also comes my desire for springy colors to wear and yesterday I started my Chelsea bag that I bought fabric for on Saturday. The exterior is almost finished. One more seam around the top and I’ll be able to turn it right-side out. Then it’s a matter of working on the reverseable inside, which I will probably have finished by Saturday, I can only hope.

This weekend L and S from my knitting group and I all took a fabulous field trip to Chicago. Our main reason was to visit a quilt store and Vogue Fabrics in Evanston. We added a stop at Loopy Yarns to the itinerary at the last minute.

We had a fabulous time with lots of girl talk on the way up and back, and lots of great shopping and wonderful Indian food while we were there.

Our first stop was Loopy Yarns. It was great to see my friend and owner Vicki again. I made a small purchase of some lovely Fleece Artist fiber and some sock reinforcement thread while there.

While we were at Loopy Yarns, we found out about a fairly new quilt store called Quiltology in Lincoln Park that opened. What a wonderful store. Walking in I felt an overwhelming sense of colors, all of the fabrics were so beautiful. All of those beautiful fabrics were mighty inspiring, so much so that I couldn’t resist some of them. One fabric in particular was exactly what I’d been looking for for a skirt I’ve wanted to make. I discovered and am in love with Amy Butler‘s fabrics, they’re all so beautiful.

I also bought a pack fat quarters to make this cute Chelsea Bag from Amy Butler. Last night, I was so excited about the bag that I cut out the main pieces and will cut out the interfacing tonight.

We then went to lunch at a wonderful Indian restaurant. The food was so wonderful and I think we all stuffed ourselves nearly silly. Then we headed up to Vogue Fabrics in Evanston for some more fabric shopping. I was on a mission to find some fabric that I could make bedroom curtains out of. I had something in mind and after some wandering around found the perfect fabric. About five years ago, I painted my bedroom dresser and nightstands red, which has made it all the more complicated to find something that looks nice.

After some tea, we hopped on the expressway and headed home. What an absolute blast we had. I think more field trips are in our future.

With March being lace month for my knitting almanac, I’ve completely plunged into the ideas and fun of knitting lace. I’m considering it my most successful month so far of my knitting almanac and I don’t see the excitement waning any time soon.

I finished the cob-web doily last Thursday. The experience of finishing it was a bit more traumatic than I had planned. When I started, I thought, “this will be a wonderful project and I’ll learn something new.” What I hadn’t planned on was learning how to deal with stress when the end of the ball comes much quicker than expected. I was about half way through the leaf edging and realized that I only had about 10 yards of yarn left. Fortunately after a break from it for several hours (and several failed attempts at trying to reach the yarn store two minutes before it closed), I figured out that I probably would get the yardage that I needed by ripping out the last two rows and also ripping out my swatch. There were a tense few hours of knitting and praying that the yarn would get me through all of the leaves. It did and I ended up with about three yards to spare. After I finished it, I was so traumatized by the whole experience that I put it in my knitting basket and haven’t touched it since. The idea of sewing in the ends and blocking it hasn’t appealed to me in the slightest in the last few days. This weekend, I’m planning on biting the bullet and just making myself do it. Funny how the days of the blog being an incentive to finish things has become a thing of the past, at least recently.

I had planned to start a small lace shawl but another project seemed to stick in my mind and demand to be worked on. My new project is a bit of an adventure into the unknown. In the current issue of Interweave Knits, they feature Joan McGowan-Michael, who designs knitted lingerie, so I thought it might be fun to try out the lace nightie.

Almost immediately after finishing the doily, I cast-on for the nightie. I take that back, I was already casting on for this project before I finished the doily. I’ve made quite a bit of progress on it in the short time that I’ve been working on it. Friday was the first day that I truly worked on it and the Cotton Glace that I’m using is practically knitting itself. This is definitely a spoil-yourself project.

And finally on this first day of Spring, I noticed that there are truly signs of spring just outside our apartment door. (The little flowers are really purple but they show up blue in the photo.) We survived yet another winter.

I’ve always loved doilies. There is something so sweet about them but for a long time they were just impractical and seemed a bit old ladyish, the last thing you want to seem when you’re 23. When I learned to crochet in 1996, I made several doilies thinking how wonderful it would be to have them around my house. Unfortunately, they didn’t really go with my decorating and clutter, and again I didn’t want to appear old ladyish at 23. In the last few years, my interest and love of doilies has been rekindled, especially after I found one of my first doilies in a box. Then I received A Gathering of Lace by Meg Swanson from my sister for Christmas and I decided I had to make the lovely little lace doily in the book.

Thursday while I was home, I started the lace doily, yesterday and this morning, I’ve been making quite a bit of progress on it. I’ve also remembered why lace can be so comforting and frustrating all at once. I love the rhythm of knitting lace but then I hate the frustration when you realize that four rows back you completely screwed up and must rip out. Thank goodness for lifelines because I would have driven myself nuts yesterday unknitting four rows on double-pointed needles. Lace seems so perfect for these last few days. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the snow is melting and spring may finally be here, although I’m not going to hold my breath.

If all goes well, I should have a new lace doily by the middle of next week for my coffee table.

What do you do when you have a day off? When you know you are having a group over for dinner in a few days? Certainly, you don’t clean, oh know, you start a new project that’s going to take hours longer than expected and will make you question your own sanity.

Monday was one of my days off and since my hands were bothering me from knitting on the Go With the Flow socks, I decided to do a bit of sewing instead. I worked on about five napkins and then decided around 4pm that I could make curtains for the kitchen by Wednesday. Of course, none of the cleaning that I had planned to do that day was done, I thought I can do it on Wednesday since I had to work all day Tuesday and have all day Wednesday off. No problem. Um, yeah. So I trek on over to Target to get the curtain rods and some Stitch Witchery (amazing stuff, I might add) at the fabric store. I get home only to realize that I’ve bought the wrong curtain rod because it wouldn’t fit over the blinds in the kitchen. After dinner, I went back to Target, exchanged the curtain rods for others and came home. About 8pm, I’m finally able to start these ingenious curtains that I’m just going to quickly sew. Two and a half hours later, I’m seriously tired and disappointed how little I feel like I accomplished. I did manage to sew the side seams and the top seams for the longer curtains.

In the few hours I had before I went to work on Tuesday, I worked on the over-the-sink curtains. I figured in the time between getting home at 9:45pm and going to bed, I could surely make some progress on the curtains, which didn’t really happen.

Yesterday morning, I got up early and thought, “I’m going to accomplish everything I need to do and be completely ready for the knitting group at 6.” I had the whole day planned and times I was going to do everything. My first order of business was to finish the curtains, I figured I could finish them by about 10:30am, which ended up being 11:45am putting me behind schedule. Once they were done, I was so proud of them, they looked fabulous and I could show off my great stitching to the knitting group at dinner. From noon to 6pm, I was going non-stop, including those inconvenient things like eat lunch and shower. My sanity was wearing a bit thin. Fortunately, my friend L showed up early as I was finishing up the dishes about 5:55pm and really helped me out. I hadn’t even started cooking at 5:55, except for the rice and everyone was going to be showing up any minute. I’d planned to make something easy and triple the recipe, which worked but I wasn’t ready when they all arrived. L juiced tons of lemons for me, which was a huge help. The group went well, everyone enjoyed dinner (lemon mustard pinto beans) and even complimented me on the curtains. Several couldn’t believe I started them on Monday evening, frankly I couldn’t either. I think I may have finally learned my lesson once and for all (yeah, right).

Procrastination has been my middle name practically since birth and I never anticipate anything, like sweeping the kitchen floor, taking as long as it really does. As I’ve learned in the last four months, sewing projects especially take much longer than I expect them to. You’d think I’d learn. Although ever since I made the log cabin blanket last year, my interest in sewing has increased and a small interest in quilting has been sparked. Having SK as a friend, who sews a lot, helps too.

Is it any wonder why I woke up this morning with a splitting headache? After noon, I felt better and I did manage to get some knitting done. I swatched for a doily and then started it this afternoon. It’s lace month and I had to start one of my lace projects.

First of all, thank you all for your wonderful comments and emails about my acceptance into library grad school. I’m so excited to start and see what the library world may have in store for us.

February was a very cold month, we had snow and more snow. We still have snow on the ground despite a few warmer (over 35°F) days this past week. I’m so happy March is finally here. February was a great month for reading and I read an amazing book that I’m recommending called Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I’d seen it at the library and had meant to read it but kept putting it off. This was a wonderful book and it’s on my personal top ten list now. When I was a child if there was one animal that I wanted to be, if I had to choose one, it was the elephant. Why? Because it was big, something I definitely wasn’t and it started with an E. Silly reasoning, I know but I was about 5 or 6 when I thought about this.

February had been designated sock month for my knitting almanac project but for some reason my excitement for socks just wasn’t there until about February 26. I did knit a pair of baby socks knit, Bryan’s alpaca scarf, a pair of fingerless gloves and made quite a bit of progress on Martha.

A former co-worker of mine is having a baby in a few weeks and when I received the invitation to the baby shower, I knew I had to knit her a pair of socks. I missed the shower because I had to work that day, but she loves the socks. These were experimental socks for me in that I decided to try the after-thought heel. I had started out with a short-row heel but had holes and decided that it was time to try the after-thought heel, which worked quite well.

During the cold of the last six or so weeks, I’d thought many times about knitting myself some fingerless gloves but didn’t wanted to buy any new yarn for them. Around Feburary 8, the idea hit me, spin some yarn from fiber that I received from Wendy, my secret pal back in July 2005. I started spinning it quite bulky and after two days of spinning and plying, I had about 45 yards plied. I wasn’t sure how far that would get me so I decided to just knit until I ran out of yarn. Fortunately, 44 yards got me quite far. February 16, I knit one of the gloves and on February 19, I knit just past half of the second one before I ran out of yarn. Immediately after I ran out of yarn, I sat down, spun and plied another 18 yards, which was plenty to finish the top of the second glove. (Pattern from Last Minute Knitted Gifts.) Of course, as soon as I finished them it started to warm up slightly but they’ve been perfect for those chilly mornings and evenings.

In the last five days my excitement about the Go With the Flow socks seems to have exploded. The idea of wearing them really appeals to me now (why they didn’t before I don’t know) and when I set a goal of knitting 20 rows a day, I’ve seen some amazing progress. Now I’m about 16 rows from the toe decreases on the second sock. Then I have the fun of ripping out the foot of the first sock and reknitting it. In wearing several pairs of my handknit socks recently, I’ve realized that those knit on the size 2 Addi’s aren’t wearing well on the bottom. So I’ve decided that the only solution I have is to rip out the feet and reknit the bottom of the socks on size 1 Knit Picks circulars, while knitting the top of the instep on the Addi’s. I’m fine with this, especially since it means that I won’t worry about wearing my socks out as quickly and having to repair them sooner than later.

March is lace month, here are my planned knitting almanac projects:

• I’m planning to graft together the two pieces of the lace sampler scarf that I’ve already knitted. Easy-peasy lace project to finish.
• Finish the Go With the Flow socks.
• Swatch and knit the lace doily from A Gathering of Lace by Meg Swanson
• Swatch for the shawl to be knitted in April
• Knit more swatches for the Walker Treasury Project