Sorry for the lack of updating here the past few days, I've been all over hither and yon, and until today, I haven't had much of a chance to sit down with Zoe (the computer). So no updates. Though, I did drive a good thousand miles: I left Nashville, spent the better part of a week in Beloit doing some unpacking cleaning, spinning, and crucial summer unraveling. Then I came back down to St. Louis where I'm having some Old Home Times, before I get back to Beloit and it starts all over again.

Summer it seems makes people happy, or at least increases any latent tendency to be happy: it's sunny out, school's out, all we have to do is sit around and wait for the plants to grow. Which of course is a complete lie: our current interpretation of the agrarian calendar is so warped, but whatever, I'm happy, and that's good enough for me.

This is one of those TealArt posts that lingers open on my desktop for a long time and I come back to it a couple times a day, hoping to get something respectable. My computer's a bit full at the moment, I have a lot of things open in the "needs attention" category, and in some ways that's become somewhat daunting. Like, for instance, my inbox with 180 emails, many of which just need to be deleted, but I have a number of not particularly urgent replies that have been nagging at me for a while.

But I've been milling over writing projects and that's brought be back to the keyboard. So rock on. I posted a list of "to-do" things for the knitting book project, but it's nagging at me, and it's mostly in my head anyway, so I think that one gets deleted, and I'm just going to plow on.

Let me see if there's any other random tidbit that I can throw into this post: The knitting projects are all reasonably advanced but in a stage where the new-nes has worn off and the end is not yet in sight. In recent days and weeks I've grown quite excited about knitting socks, which I think I will be doing a lot more of in the coming days and months and the prospect of spinning all the yarn I knit with.

I really enjoy knitting sweaters, that's for sure, but I think I've reached a point where, there isn't a huge score of sweaters that I'm just dying to make. Sure there are a few. The one's I have cast on right now, plus a "peasant" version of Starmore's "Henry VIII" (two colors in natural gray heathered colors), one of the Dale of Norway olympic sweaters, and that's about it. There are other sweater's I'll make, for sure, I'm not saying that I'm running out of knitting, but I don't feel the same rabid experimentalism that I had a year or two ago. I also know what I have to do to get a sweater to work, and I have a foundation of 6 main design forms that can provide me with thousands of variations: enough for a life time. I also have more sweaters than I know what to do with... (and yes, I do plan to start giving my sweaters away more)

So I think I want to move on to knitting socks more, because I enjoy sock making and I haven't made enough, by a long shot. I need to increase my stash of sport weight yarn though. I'll be getting myself to a wheel soon to begin this, rest assured. Spinning my own yarn, allows me to knit with fibers that would other wise be completely out of my reach--and I'm talking about nice merinos and wool/silk blends here, not cashmere, or even really alpaca. I also think that, unless I commit to spinning my own yarn in a serious and consistent way, I would never get around to knitting what I spin, or spin nearly as much. I've begun the first sweater in this pursuit and the yarn is bulkier than I'd like, but the yarn is heavenly soft, and it's going quick, so I can't complain.

Ok. I'm done for real this time. Maybe I'll post about something less esoteric later. But then I have a co-conspirtor again, hopefully, so it doesn't just have to be to keep you happy. Ha!

Cheers, sam