Party, School, Sweater, Socks, Spinning...

Another week or so has gone by in the blink of the eye, and I once again have more than a lot to report.

Starting with the birthday party - we had it at Edinborough Park, the place with the giant play structure. We arrived that morning about half an hour before the start of the party, so we let the girls loose to play. I was barely able to get them to sit still long enough for a single picture before Julie ran off to disappear into the maze.




Twenty minutes later she reappeared, wildly happy and drenched in sweat - just in time to greet our guests and do a whirlwind pizza-cake and ice cream - presents portion of the party.





And then they all ran off to run wild in the play structure for the next hour and a half. It was a great time, but it took us all a couple days to recover and there were SO many gifts to bring home and sort through. I need to start on the thank-you notes.

Julie was mostly invisible off inside the park, but Sophie was small enough to track, and I got some good pictures of her and our friends. She and H. spent quite a while climbing in the little kids' area and sliding together.



At one point, a bunch of our other friends appeared on the other side of this net wall, and we got to socialize with them for a bit.



This was just cute. I tried to get a picture of when Sophie and two of our little friends who are about the same age were all in there together, but it was too much of a tangled mess to get a clear shot. They were all laughing, though.



Julie re-emerged every once in a while with her cousin Katelyn, only to run off again before I could get a half-decent shot. There they go...



I finally convinced them to come out and have another juice box - look at Julie's hair! It looked like she had just taken a bath or something, but no, that was the result of running around non-stop in the quite-warm building.



Moving on, Sophie started pre-school this week. She seems to love it so far. Her best friend H is in her class, plus a couple kids from here ECFE class last year. She had no problem saying goodbye to me when it was time for the parents to leave. My baby! Ah, she is growing up all too quickly.



My monster blue diamond sweater is still creeping along, but at least it's finally reaching a milestone. The arms are finished, the body is finished up to the underarms...



And then I got the whole mess joined together...



There are a couple little problems - ones that I've been aware of for a while, but which I'm choosing not to worry about as I've already invested more time and effort in this thing than I care to think about, and they are ones I can live with. Somehow when I started the sleeves, I managed to mangle the colorway a bit, so the sleeves don't exactly match the fronts. Whatever. The other problem, though, is that right after the join there are going to be two pink diamonds on either side of the join, and that's going to look a little wonky.

Still, to fix the problem I'd have to re-knit the sleeves entirely. Something there is no way in hell I plan to do. As it is, it should be plenty wearable - in a preppy kindergarten teacher gone wild sort of fashion. Thank the gods that this knitting trip is almost over. I'm sick of it and ready to move on to knitting up some homespun.

And speaking of homespun, I filled up another three bobbins with my Ashland Bay silk/wool blend...



And then I plied it up to make a total of five skeins of this yarn so far. It's yummy.



I probably have plenty there already to make a sweater, but there is this much more wool waiting to be spun...



My plan is to go ahead and spin it all up, then weigh and count yardage for each skein and try to use the ones that are closest in yards per gram so that hopefully the gauge will work out as consistent as possible. I had a nice conversation with Detta a couple weeks ago, and she was all worried that I would end up with inconsistent yarn since I'm not using a sample card to compare with as I work. She's probably right, but I want to test my theory that I have a somewhat intuitive ability to judge yarn thickness. And I figure the fact that I'm making three-ply helps to balance out the thickness issues somewhat. We'll see.

Oh, look! I finished another pair of boring self-striping socks.



I like this colorway quite a bit, and I think these socks will get lots of wear this Fall even though the stripes are unmatched between the two - totally uncharacteristic for me alas.

I've got another pair going now - this is some medium-weight Socks That Rock, so it's knitting up like lightning. The one on the right is what I got done during the Knitters' Guild meeting on Tuesday night. I can't wait to finish these either, because the colors are absolutely delicious and these socks are going to be pure squishy joy on my feet.



And that's it, more or less. See you next week, or hopefully sooner!