I promise I will be good.

My dear cousin, the one who I may just have wished I could have been back when we were children, is pregnant with twins. Identical twin girls. I think they've been trying for a long time (I started the baby blanket for her in July 2005), and so this is all very happy and exciting.



But the Baby Dots blanket is not really something I want to be working on. I *love* how it looks - it's a slip stitch pattern, and so colorful and pretty and interestingly-textured. But every six rows you end up with two ends to weave in. And you knit with the yarn doubled, and you knit one side of the border with a different two balls of white than the white that you knit across. So that means you are always working with 4-6 balls of yarn.

Also, it releases cotton fuzzies that are trying to kill me. I've tried knitting with a bandanna tied around my face, but that leads to train robbery jokes (from Other - not in local coffee shops or anything) and makes it hard to breathe. I bought and switched to some Addi Turbos, which makes progress go faster but not really fast enough to make the fuzzies situation any better. I can only work on it in small increments.

So it's a pain to knit, progress leads inexorably toward a ends-sewing-in bonanza, involves lots of sneezing, and I have the irksome feeling that no matter how well I get the ends sewn in, over the course of many washings, they will come loose. Because you can't exactly weave green in behind the white, and there are a whole two rows of green to use and for some reason we aren't allowed to tie knots and so the whole thing feels futile.

I've got some knitpicks Crayon on the way, and plan to do a log cabin blanket for twin #2. If that goes well, and if I have grossly overestimated the amount of yarn I will need, there might just be two log cabin baby blankets for them.

Here's a Hedera in progress (and also my traveling knitting system) shot:



It's going well enough. I missed a yo here and there, but was able to figure out how to fudge it passably. I'm done with the gusset decreases, not yet close to the toe.

When we went to see Blades of Glory, I needed some simple stockinette to work on in the dark, so I cast on my new Meilenweit Mega Boots Stretch (color 703). I knit several inches on it, got home, and realized that, though it fit comfortably, it looked very stretched out. I had googled around to try to find out what size needles I should use and about how many stitches I should cast on - turns out 64 on size 1s is too small. The yarn looks a lot thicker than it is, I think, because the plies are pretty loosely wrapped around each other.

So I re-cast on 72 stitches onto size 1.5 needles. Once I get into the stockinette part, I will let you know how that goes.