Dances With Yarn

Do not put sunblock on your eyelids to prevent them from burning -- it does not work. Second note to self -- do not attempt to knit after putting sunblock on your eyelids. I am not a "sweater". I do not sweat easily. When other people are complaining about the heat, I'm usually quite comfortable, which is frequently an issue between DH and myself. Everybody else in my house likes the thermostat set at about 5 degrees cooler than I do, so I'm usually freezing and bundled up in sweaters or blankets while everybody else is comfortable. HOWEVER.... on Saturday when I decided to soak up some of our South Texas rays and when the temps rose to the high 90's, I have to admit that I must have "glistened" a bit, and when I did, that's when things began to get ugly. I had this great idea that I would work on Glamaw's NBaT outside since the sun was shining and the thought of staying inside on such a beautiful day just wasn't working for me. So, I put on my bathing suit, put some sunblock on my already sunburned eyelids (from last week's outdoor "tanning" session), grabbed Glamaw's NBaT and headed outside. Things went well. For about 5 minutes. Then (evidently) I began to sweat a bit somewhere near my eyes. This led to the sunblock getting INTO my eyes, which led to my eyes watering because sunblock in the eyes STINGS! This led to me rubbing my eyes which not only got sunblock all over my hands (preventing any future successful knitting) but also removed ALL of the sunblock from my eyelids! So I was back at square one with no sunblock on my eyelids. Actually, I was worse off than square one since I now had slippery hands that could NOT hold onto knitting needles no matter how hard I tried. Lesson learned. I am now 50% done with Glamaw's NBaT and the back (plus one sleeve) is currently drying on the blocking board. I didn't get as far as I'd have liked this weekend, but will try to work on it as much as I can before I leave for Florida to see Glamaw on Wednesday. My goal was to get the back, both sleeves, and most of the front done before I left so that Glamaw could decide if she wanted a motif on the front or not. Since Glamaw sells Chanel Cosmetics at Saks, my original thought was to include the Coco Chanel logo on the front of her NBaT, but am now thinking that it might look more like a work uniform than a regular sweater. So we'll leave it up to Glamaw to make the final decision. I'll be doing good to get the front of the sweater cast on before I leave (am currently working on the second sleeve), so obviously I'm running a bit behind on my goal. No worries though, it will be done by mid July (at the latest!) when Glamaw comes back to Texas for a visit. My Loop-D-Loop book arrived from Amazon on Saturday. This is a really great book and (in my opinion) is well worth the twenty bucks that Amazon is charging for it. This book will be serving double duty for me, functioning not only as a pattern book, but also as a nice coffee table book as well. While not every pattern in the book is one that I can see myself wearing, I definitely will be making several of them in the near future. The book is just a nice change from almost every other knitting book out there, so expect different. I'm also really excited about Stefanie Japel's (AKA Glampyre) new "One Skein Wonder" shrug pattern. It's adorable and I've already bought, downloaded and printed the pattern. This one may just get started when I get home from Florida! Shrugs are still very popular here and since (as mentioned above) I am usually chilly, I think this one will come in very handy!