Not mine though.

But it’s so much cuter than mine would have been, I don’t think you’ll mind:

This is Daisy.

This is Daisy with my coworker (and fellow conference traveller) Heather and the soon to be introduced Charlotte Jane.

A close-up shot. The sweater is knit in Rowan Handknit Cotton, so it’s washable, because the only thing a new mother ought to have to handwash is her baby.

Adorable buttons bought at Webs.

I survived our conference and am now recuperating at my folks’. On the agenda? Knitting, hanging with the family (and a belated birthday celebration), a visit to the Basketball Hall of Fame, and a trip south to see my uncle. I bet I feel fully refreshed by the time I head home Wednesday.

Three Beautiful Things (the Boston version):

1. The view from our room on the twenty-sixth floor of the hotel is impressive. I can see the Charles River from my pillow and the Citgo sign at Fenway park if I walk to the window. Makes waking up almost bearable.

2. My birthday fell during our conference and for the first time ever I was unable to take the day off. But my friends made sure I felt loved with text messages and voicemail and phone calls and blog comments. My friend Suzanne had treats delivered to my room, and Sam and Alexis shared their Valentine’s Day dinner with us. I felt quite loved.

3. I had a dilly of a time getting the stitch count right for my new shawl. At last after four restarts, I end up with the right number and can move on past the third row.

I should not take photos.

Oh, I’m not a bad photographer. Admittedly, I occasionally cut someone’s head off or give them vampire eyes, but generally I understand the major idea — put something in frame and capture it (usually in focus) — and can execute it reasonably well. Every once in a while, I’m even somewhat gifted with framing a shot.

But I am a bad uploader. Shots sit on my camera for days. Then they sit on the computer for a while longer. Then they’re loaded into Flickr, but I have to annotate them. And then I have to write the post to accompany them. If I left out the photos, we could skip straight to that last item.

Because I’ve been diligent about bringing my camera with me, I’m behind on my blogging. (Those of you who have been peeking at my Flickr account and have already followed the goings-on in my life, shhhh! You’re probably bored already. Go ahead and click one of those links to the right and see what some other bloggers are up to.)

Which means that some of the topics covered in this week’s posts will be a little old. But, to reassure my folks, this does at least mean that there will be posts. Let’s not quibble about how long ago I did the things in them.

Today’s topic? The Sept. 20 Yarn Harlot talk in Arlington, Virginia. (more…)

When I got home yesterday evening from swimming the four blocks from the Metro to my door, I decided it was a perfect time to finish knitting the baby sock I’m working on. I spun up an episode of CraftLit (I’m behind a bit, because I like to save them until I knitting to listen to them), pulled out the knitting, and cranked away.

At eight, I switched on the tv because there was a new episode of Miss Marple on PBS. (I find I don’t watch a lot of tv these days, but I really do dig certain PBS shows, particularly British mysteries.) Knitting while watching a character knitting… What could be better?

The culprit was outed and I turned my full attention back to the sock, eager to see if I was at the toe decreases yet. I was! But, lo! What was that back several inches, in the midst of the lace?

I had screwed up the pattern.

All of a sudden, what should have been an eight lane highway veered off on one side as if a mysterious exit ramp had magically appeared.

I had a vague recollection that I may have discovered myself a stitch short at one point, decided that I had accidentally decreased on the previous row, and blissfully did a lazy fix of increasing a stitch because it was easier than pulling my attention away from Miss Marple’s keen eye for detail. Ah, the irony!

(I would like to note here that I have the utmost respect for those knitters who, when discovering a mistake in their knitting, pull out the camera before pulling out the stitches. I find myself so frustrated in those moments that I can’t even envision taking the time and energy to document my own stupidity. Or maybe it’s to shame the knitting into better behavior, like a Thai police officer in a Hello Kitty armband?)

So I ripped back to the gusset decreases to fix my mistake. My frame of mind was not helped by the fact that Cascade Sassy Stripes is not a particularly fun yarn to work with. It is splitty and it tears far too easily. Add to that that I was having difficulty figuring out where I lost the YOs as I attempted to put the yarn back on the needles, and you have a sprite on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I mean, I already talk to my knitting; it wouldn’t take much to push me over the edge…

Luckily, Rudi came to my rescue with a bowl of chili and a bag of lime-flavored chips. He put in FOUR of the hot peppers from our garden, so for half an hour all I could pay attention to was that my mouth was on fire! By the time I returned to the sock, I could once again focus on the pattern and figure out how to make it work.

Rudi headed off to bed a little while later as I sat knitting in my rocking chair. I plugged my headphones into the iPod and then promptly dozed off. I awoke at 2:30, knitting in my lap, dishes unwashed, contacts still in, and ready for the night to be over…

How was your evening?

Silly people!

It seems that I have difficulty reading and knitting at the same time. I mean above and beyond the normal reading and knitting simultaneously. But I find that if I’m on a reading kick, my knitting suffers and vice versa.

And then when I do finish a project, I don’t take a photo.

But, today, I have a finished object — a pair of them, in fact! — complete with photos!

These are a pair of footies I made out of a single ball of Cascade Fixation. This is my first contribution to the Summer of Socks Knit-along that I joined back in June.

I made up a pattern in June to make a similar pair for Mum and decided after I was done that I absolutely needed a pair for myself. I had a single ball of Fixation in this colorway of teal, blue, and purples — some of my favorite colors — and knew immediately this was the yarn I was looking for.

Clearly, I like color:

(Please pardon the mud on my sneakers. This was the pair I was wearing during the rain storm Shelley and I got stuck in last Friday, and I haven’t cleaned them yet. But they do give you a feel for my wardrobe, don’t they?)

I’m wearing them today and absolutely love them, particularly the eye of partridge heel. It makes such a pretty design! There are definitely more pairs of these footies in my future.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be spending this weekend as weekends are meant to be spent — lazing.

I’m hoping to start the weekend off right with some friends tonight at a free jazz concert in the sculpture garden outside the National Gallery of Art.

Tomorrow morning, I will get up and go for a bike ride. I signed up for the third round of Runagogo! and fully intend to meet the 100 mile goal (over the course of 3 months) this time. Plus, I’ve been drinking a lot of sweet beverages and eating a lot of ice cream lately and it would behoove me to get moving. In a similar vein, I may try to get in some laps at the local community pool when I head over to the garden.

Speaking of which, I need to do some planting. The peas are done for the season and I see no reason to let the string lattice go to waste. So I’m going to plant some more beans there. Rudi’s mom has also suggested that we cut back the catnip and maybe the sage, so that will be another task. We might have some ripe peppers to harvest in addition to the broccoli and lettuce, so I’m excited about that.

I’m about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I don’t find it unreasonable to expect to be done with it by Sunday night. That gives me five days to plow through the penultimate book before the new one comes out at midnight on Friday night. We’ll be attending a launch party at Politics & Prose and are currently contemplating costumes. That robe I bought for grad school is going to come in handy again, methinks…

I’ll also be knitting. I’m nearly done with my first pair of socks for the Summer of Socks, in a lovely colorway of Cascade Fixation. I just have to finish the gusset decreases and the foot and I’ll be able to wear them with my pink Keds.

And I have to go buy some cotton/linen/hemp/nonstretchy fiber for a market bag. That’s the project I’m supposed to be working on right now for the Tour de France Knit-along. However, a week into the race, I’m still in London while the other riders race toward the Alps. Tant pis! But Bastille Day does seem like a good time to catch up, so I will play some Les Nubians albums and the soundtrack to Les Miserables and get to work.

Finally, the farmers’ market, is, as always, on my weekend agenda. The market folks warn this may be the final week for cherries and apricots, so I’ll need to pick some of those up, as well as more blueberries and tomatoes and beans and …