Sick as DogS

I know I wrote the other day that I was as sick as a dog, but now I must restate that. It has become plural in more than one sense. Not only am I not the only sick dog in the family, but there are actually two viruses (or would that be viri?? tee hee) floating around at once in the same house! My poor daughter is the unlucky soul to have gotten them both at once. She's had an ear infection/cold for the past couple of days and has just this morning added on the stomach bug the rest of us have been enjoying for the past few days. She's just lying around pathetically moaning about one pain or another, completely zapped of energy by the fever. Poor thing. These are the times parents hate to be parents. It's so sad to feel helpless to do anything for a sick child. I guess I can feel lucky that my kids are not frequently sick.

All this hanging around with sick kids has given me plenty of knitting time, though. So, I should have advanced quite a bit on that cable baby blanket, right? Not right. Not that I needed another unfinished project lying around, but after all the new members of my stash came in, I had an itch to try out some of the that Knit Picks yarn. There were also some lovely shawl patterns in the Folk Shawls book my mom brought. What's a girl to do when faced with all this yummy new yarn and some nice new projects to try? Cast on, my dear, cast on. So, that's exactly what I did, and it's been worth it.

For the past couple of days, I've been slowly (or at least it seems slowly) working my way through the feather and fan shawl in the Folk Shawls book. There are actually two versions of this shawl - one triangular and the other rectangular. I'm working on the rectangular one, because I just can't see myself with a triangular shawl. Incidentally, it is not sheer chance that I should try to make a shawl just after having been sick. My wonderful, usually toasty alpaca sweater wasn't even enough to ward off the feverish chills I had, and being currently without shawl, I had to fold a cotton quilt (a beautiful one made by my very own mommy, by the way) into a triangle to warm myself. Convinced that I now need at least one, if not several shawls around the house, I've cast on for the feather and fan one. It's actually got a simple 18-stitch repeat that is foolproof since it's the same backwards and forwards (none of that mirror image stuff to trip me up). Those rectangular shawls are long suckers, aren't they? You never think about that until you cast on 390 stitches and continue to work that many row after endless row. I'm not too swift at knitting laceweight yarn, either, so I've only gotten an inch or two of the width of shawl knit so far. I just have to keep telling me that at almot 90 inches in length, I really have knit quite a bit. It just doesn't look like it.

So, which Knit Picks yarn did I select for this beauty? Well, I'll leave that tidbit for the next post, or there will be nothing to say in the picture's caption.