Three times in three days??

Hi.
Yup, me again.
Really? What is going on here, Maggie? Three posts in as many days?

Well. It might have something to do with the fact my husband and two of my children (aged 18 son, aged 16 daughter- yep- the one who just spent a month off the grid backpacking in Wyoming, that one)-- anyway, that those three are in Guatemala City on a missions trip.

Now, mostly this is great: I can knit freely; fling my closet contents all over the place to figure out what really needs to be in there, or not; spread my stash around without fear of that face my husband gets when he sees its extent; overdose on Fixer Upper (my secret obsession); read without that nagging sense of the mess waiting for me in the kitchen/laundry room/refrigerator-- whatever.

But also, since this town is pretty quiet in the summer, I can get wicked bored ... OK, maybe lonely-- perhaps that is why my dog dragged cardboard under the dining room table to gnaw on-- boredom/loneliness?  She's an Australian Shepherd and misses everybody.

Who, me?  I have no idea who tore up all this cardboard...

Speaking of the 16 year old daughter, here she is.  She only had two days before she left for Guatemala and the hard physical work they do there-- so we tried to have a lot of her favorite foods.  Wolfing down her favorite- sushi- first dinner after the rigors of NOLS and the Wind River Mountains. 

We've got some attitude going here.  

OK, so. Knitting.

I have a confession.  I realized why I had gotten impatient with my Pelerine (don't worry, we have patched things up: I apologized and she graciously forgave me- and I am back to a happy smiling relationship with her, knitting away cheerily and, weirdly, she seems to be getting closer to done-ness way faster. Wonder of wonders...)

-- yes, a digression-- 

Anyway, I had apparently internally promised myself that until Pelerine was done I couldn't work on anything else (really didn't want to find her flung in a corner next July) *and* that when she was done it was back to working on my Alaska cardigan.  He is in my bag, bleating sadly as I haven't touched him since Camp. I miss him...

Working on Alaska is what I really want to be doing right now, or mostly so-- so I had turned Pelerine into a big nasty roadblock in my mind.  Silly me.  Fixed that bad attitude right up.

Aaaand.... Did you notice that "or mostly so" back there?  Yeah, I did get a bit of cool yarn at Camp:

Knit Circus gradient dyed Opulence yarn, and even though there is only 10% cashmere,
you can really feel it. Lovely stuff.  "What Happens At Knit Night" is the colourway.  It
wants to be a shawl, I can hear it howling.  It needs to quiet down and let me knit, though...  

Knit Circus was one of the vendors at Market Day; I fell in love with their gradient dyed yarns.  Lovely stuff.  

While I love lace (I still do, yes) sometimes it is nice to keep things just a little more simple and slip into that zen of watching gorgeous colors develop on my needles-- for example in my Fair Isle, but also in fun shaped shawls that let the yarn do most of the talking.

Here, Poppy- a wonderful fellow camper- is modeling a shawl ("Close to You") which was knit in the colourway I bought.  I didn't even really consider the yarn until I saw how it worked up in this little shawl and, ba bing, it was in my hand.

So, yeah, that might be making some noise at me.