And on to the good, creative stuff. I'll pop in a picture now and again over the next week. (Have to charge up my camera - the battery doesn't hold a charge when it's not being used).

The biggest thing I finished was Clapotis. I used a dk-weight wool from the stash for mine. I'm not sure if that affected how the stitches "laddered" but I do know it got to be kind of a pain to get them to all run down neatly - the yarn wanted to hang onto itself and not drop.

I also knit a pair of "just simple" socks (all stockinette except for the ribbing) using Opal Crocodile - I think it's #9 in the Croc 3 line - it's got a dark green background and pastel pink, yellow, peach, and blue bits throughout it. It didn't really "croc" but it still made attractive socks.

And the last knit thing I actually finished was Pasha. I made mine out of Wool-Ease, because it was what was on hand.

I also began Morehouse Merino's "Knit Purl Scarf" . I really recommend Morehouse's wool; it feels great - it's "springy" and soft and feels "real" in the way that the more rustic-spun wools do.

I also started a pair of the Feather and Fan socks from the Socks^3 book, but didn't get all that far on them. And I picked a bit at the Canal du Midi socks but didn't get a lot done on THEM. And I didn't work on the Hiawatha shawl at all. I found I needed mostly simple stuff to work on, repetitive stuff, while I was processing all that was going on.

I will say I could really recognize the comfort of knitting - the way it calmed me down and let me go, if not exactly to another place, to a place where I felt I had a little more control over things. I think that's part of it for me, with knitting and sewing and quilting and cooking - they're predictable, if you follow the "rules" you get a fairly consistent product and you don't get blindsided by bad surprises.

As I said, I'll pop in pictures of the different things over the next week. I do have one thing I can't put up a picture of - at least not yet. I pieced a quilt top over break (a very simple one, and a twin-bed size, but a quilt top nonetheless.). I found some Paddington Bear Christmas fabric I bought several years ago up there (as I remember, it was on a great sale after Christmas) and had never done anything with. So I sat down with a calculator and figured out what it would take to make a quilt of it - it was the first time I actually calculated "this is how much fabric these pieces will take" and "this is how much I'd need to do this" which was actually kind of exciting - the power of it. (Which was also how I learned I wouldn't have enough for a fullsized top with the idea I had). I did a very simple design: four-patch blocks of two of the fabrics (a green background, showing Paddingtons packed together, all of them wearning green dufflecoats. It was the largest-scale print, the Paddingtons were perhaps 2 1/2" tall. And a red background with small [1"] Paddingtons wearing pajamas with holly on them.) I alternated those with the medium-scale print that had a white background and Paddington wearing his familiar blue duffel coat and yellow hat and doing things like hanging stockings and wrapping gifts. It worked up to be quite an effective quilt, I think partly because of the small-medium-large scales of the fabrics used. In the end, I put a 4" wide border on it of a yellow stripe fabric to tie it all together. And I even have the backing - one of the quilt shops I went to had the perfect thing, and on sale, too - a red and green candy-cane stripe.

So it's ready to go, and my mom said her name was coming up soon on the list at church to have a quilt go in, but she hadn't anything ready, so she said my quilt could go in. So I expect that perhaps by this summer it will be done, maybe even earlier.