spaazlicious

Been doing a little knitting. I tried to put this button in my sidebar, but it messed up the webrings text menus (somehow, and I wasted a half hour tweaking it so I'm stumped what made such a difference to them that suddenly their texts were three times their font size and centered when I hadn't changed a thing within their code. I'm going to have to break down and buy a "HTML for Dummies" book because I find this blogdabbling endlessly fascinating and frustrating. I want to have a cool, pretty blog like JenLa's. ;)) Anyway, I'm currently working on a big dog critter cozy for the:

in some LionBrand Homespun I bought when I was first learning how to knit, for baby blankets and a cozy for my grandmother. It's a little late to knit a hospital bed snuggly for my grandmother, and all the babies we know are now rough 'n' tumble toddlers so I guess we'll have to wait for the next spawning season amongst our circle of friends to make baby blankets. And I don't feel like holding these skeins in my stash that long. These critter-cuddler blankets are really a quick way to use up that "WTF Was I Thinking?!" stash yarn. I remember reading somewhere that animals with handmade blankets in their kennels have higher/faster adoption rates than those without. How shallow is the human race, now really?

I tried to wind a ball of Nandia Cashmere's silk/cashmere laceweight from the skein yesterday. Talk about WTF moments; who skeined this stuff? I wound perhaps 50 yards in a half hour before accidently breaking the yarn trying to undo a knot. The yarn weaves in and out on itself within the skein, not cool with an 800yd laceweight skein.

I'll be honest, I have those "I have the best husband in the world" moments all the time. But the other day was a big one for that, as he put down his PS2 controller [and he was playing a brand-new game, too] to help me wind up this mondo-hank, a pound of mohair-silk boucle in parrot/crayonbox colourway my mother-in-law bought me as part of an early birthday present (another reason I have the best husband in the world is because he has pretty cool parents)It is spread across our coffee table (okay, it's a wire dog crate with a woven doormat from Nicaragua on top but we put our feet and cereal bowls on it, so we call it a coffee table) and my shoes (new! comfy!) are there for scale.:


The colours really pop when it's in its skein ball:


Not so much when it's in a center pull ball(about a half hour later]:


Yeah, that's right, I gots big, fuzzy balls. What of it?

I'm going to make a cardigan with it, though I'm waffling, maybe my three readers can help:
Thinking crayonbox colourway, worsted weight bouclé, roughly 1200 yds (it's okay, I'm pretty small, it should be enough for something simple)
which style do you prefer?
OR

The Mandarin Faux cardigan would be without the center panel and with buttons, but I kind of dig the StarTrekkiness of the collar.

Since I've posted that pic here, of the model in the MF Cardigan, was anyone else as creeped out by her as I was? She is so skinny and her hair so thin, she looks like she's losing it to anorexia. Or chemo. Not funny, but this model really bothered me--I don't like to flip the pages of a knitting magazine and be sidetracked by worrying and an overwhelming urge to mail frozen homemade chicken soup to a complete stranger. I was glad to see my favourite model was back in the newest IK. The one who modeled the Dolman Updated sweater. Yep, I guess I need another hobby if I'm worrying and keeping track of things like that...