The End of an Era

With graduation only 2 weeks away I thought I should take some time and blog, you know, before its all over. After all I did start this blog in order to take some of the stress away from my social work education...and now its almost finished. Which, by the way, is extremely exciting!

I really only have to finish my final practicum hours and write a paper for my elective class. I've presented my research and my committee signed off and told me that I passed! So I am at the end and nervous about the next step. Now the real work starts.

Anyhow, I thought I should make a final and awesome entry as a "student" because in just the blink of an eye I will be back in the realms of those who have "real" jobs. Not that I am ending the blog or anything. I will probably need it more in the next steps of life. Now I have to put all that stuff I was reading and writing into practice, which should prove much more challenging.

As you may have surmised, I haven't been working this semester or rather, I haven't been making any money. This situation has been a bit of a shock to my system, in particular, to the system of my yarn addiction. The system being: I see yarn, I buy yarn. It has forced me to go into the BASKET and find some yarn that I already have.

And what do you know? I have lots of yarn worth knitting and some that was almost completely knit into wearable garments. This first item was going to be finished for my wedding last June. It wasn't. But the main piece has just been sitting in my room for the last year. I decided to pick it up and finish it about a week ago. It was so close to being done I wonder why I didn't just do it last year.

Here is where I left things about a year and a half ago:

The results took me only a few hours to finish. I really like this design. It was my first time doing anything like this so the pattern kind of confused me, just because I wasn't sure of the way it would come together. Well, this is a very simple and easy construction. Basically, knit a rectangle to your measurements, knit some lace border, fold the rectangle in half, sew the edges of the rectangles about half way up and sew the lace border around and put it on.

Well, that might sound complicated but its really not.

The Lacy Hug Me Tight from Knit 2 Together, one of my favorite pattern books.

Some lace detail, my first time with lace. There are a lot of mistakes but its pretty hard to tell.

The next item was a frogged piece from some yarn that Nate and Michelle gave me two Christmases ago. I was trying to knit my first sweater and it was just not working. I think that either I was flawed or the pattern was flawed. I haven't done any further research with this but let's say the pattern was flawed.

I found a pattern that I reaaallllly liked and decided to frog the first sweater and make it into something more interesting. Here is my progress so far:

Here I have the back, left front, and the right front almost finished. This project is making me nervous for a couple of reasons. The first is, it is knitting up so quickly that I think I must be doing something wrong. I started this just 8 days ago and I'm almost done with the main pieces. Second, I don't think I have enough yarn to finish it. Yeah, I know I probably should've made sure I had enough but I just decided to go for it. Third, I can't seem to find this yarn in the U.S. anymore, which I guess isn't that big of a deal but I really like how it is progressing and don't want to wait for any extra yarn to be shipped from London. The end result should look like this. Which is interesting and wearable at the same time just like most of Norah's patterns. She is great.

I was going to keep going and tell you all about our Opening Day Weekend and about all the new plants we bought at the UW Greenhouse but I've lost some steam so I'll leave you with these tidbits:

This isn't my knitting project but I was around during the whole process so I hope you enjoy Dan's Ernie Sweater. Doesn't it look great?

Our first cactus garden. Ouch! The outcome was worth the pain. I can't take credit for the idea of putting 10 cacti together but I can take credit for re-potting this one. It was a very time consuming and delicate process. Definitely worth trying.