Fist, a shot of both finished green socks.

I used flash so the color is wonky, but it does show the texture of the pattern pretty well:



And I started a second pair, out of royal blue JaWool. These are going to be part of my mom's Christmas present. (She doesn't read the blog, so I know it's okay to post here)



It's good for things to get back to normal. I pulled into the church parking lot a little before 5:30 and saw my co-worker's van there. And I breathed a sigh of relief and said a little prayer of thanks. Because not only did it mean she was there to help me, but also that her father was improving (in fact, he is - he can drive again and although his stamina for walking's not great, he managed to go grocery shopping with her). Even better, starting next week we will have two additional assistants. We had about 15 kids. They were well-behaved and seemed to receive the lesson well. After the lesson, the older ones went out to play football, and the younger ones stayed in under my supervision and played board games.

I had sort of been dreading the situation - didn't know what was likely to happen but it all turned out well. It gave me a real lift to feel like things were back to the way they had been.

After youth group, I felt like doing something different so I went home and pulled out the set of pillowcases I had been embroidering on (and had not worked on for a long, long time) and did some on them. I'm getting interested in embroidery again - one of my last purchases before my 'moratorium' on spending lots of money on myself were some cotton dish towels and sets of transfers from Sublime Stitching and they came this week. I've not decided totally what I'm going to do yet - I have two towels (and it should be easy enough to get more if I want; I think Wal-mart carries similar ones). I think I want to do one with the Chinatown designs I bought in the corners, and maybe do one with the cat designs and give it to my folks as part of their Christmas present. I don't know. I think the designs would look really cool on clothing, but I've done embroidery on t-shirts and it is Not Fun. So maybe sometime I'll get a chambray shirt or a white cotton workshirt and iron on a bunch of the designs and embroider them.

I was also thinking if I wanted to "go my own way" and find other designs to use, a really cool resource for me would be my New Britton and Brown Illustrated Flora (which I went to great effort and no small expense to find a set of; they're in high demand because they are one of the best resources for plant identification. Dover publications has a reprint of the "old" Britton and Brown, but it's nowhere near as good in terms of identification or pictures. (And some of the common names used are, shall we say, politically incorrect). This version was updated by Henry Allen Gleason, one of the finest systematists I think we've had in this country.). Or any of the USDA botanical publications that have line drawings of plants in them - I could photocopy the line drawings and either pencil-trace or use a dressmaker's carbon to transfer them to whatever I wanted to embroider.

I think it would be cool to have a shirt or a pillow with butterfly milkweed (one of the species I study) on it, or to give my mom a towel with various goldenrods (one of the genera she has studied) or evening primrose (she was an assistant on a genetics project working with that species) on it. And I like the idea of it being botanically correct and complex in design. I might have to blow the pictures up a little so I could capture all the fine detail.

Or prairie grasses. A lot of the prairie grasses are really beautiful when their seed-heads are developing.

I remember years ago being at the ESA meetings and seeing a couple of grad students who had apparently had their study organisms tatooed on them - one had (IIRC) the American Crow (with the scientific name tattooed under it), the other had some small plant in the Compositae - maybe one of the Boltonias. I mean, that's cool and all, but it's a little more hardcore than what I could do. (And besides, I'm primarily a community ecologist and it would be way painful to have a prairie tattooed on your shoulders - which is where these women had their tattoos)