Lately, Sheldon’s had plenty of opportunities to show off his new sense of style by tagging along with members of our staff when they travel. He’s been to Alaska, California, and even as far as China and Japan! He’s really racking up the frequent flyer miles and making a lot of new friends! I think he’s picked up some germs along the way too. I can sympathize, I always get sick when I travel.

Now that he’s back for awhile, we made a slideshow of his trip. See what he’s been up to here.
What’s the farthest your Sheldon has traveled? <

Apples to Apples is my favorite game of all time. For the past three years, my friends have come over to my house to celebrate my birthday by drinking apple cider, eating apple pie, and playing Apples to Apples.

This year, I decided to knit a special Apples to Apples hat to wear to my third annual apple party. I found this pattern for the Apple of My Eye baby hat on Ravelry, and I modified it to fit me by casting on 74 stitches instead of 66. I started it last Sunday, knit through a 2 hour roller derby league meeting Sunday night, worked on it at craft night last Tuesday, and I finished it Thursday night, just in time for the party Friday night.
Here I am modeling it in my kitchen before the guests arrived. Ignore the lump, that’s from my ponytail underneath!
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The leaves are turning beautiful colors outside our office, and this week we got to look at beautiful colors inside too! Believe it or not, we just had our yarn color picking meeting for next fall. Yep, we pick colors that early. I can’t give away what exactly we did, but I can tell you that we didn’t discontinue very many colors, and we did add a lot.
This photo shows the boards we get from our manufacturers with color samples. So many choices! We mainly choose from these boards, but sometimes they don’t quite have the color we’re going for, and then we choose from a variety of other sources.
And here’s a photo of Kelley pondering what colors to add to my favorite yarn line, Palette. Palette is just getting better and better with …

A couple weeks ago, Kelley and I talked about the joy, the wonder, the magic of blocking lace (podcast 69), so I thought I’d share my finished lace project and include the dreadful before picture too. This is the Juno Regina pattern by Miriam Felton from knitty.com in the Sterling color of Gloss Lace.

Lace blocking wires hard at work. They make blocking lace so easy compared to pinning every inch.

Here’s the lace while it was still on the needles. Big difference, huh? <

I’ve been saving up this one until it was seasonally appropriate!

When the Spring 08 issue of Knitty came out, I got all excited about the Tempest sweater. I picked out my colors, swatched, blogged, and knit myself into a frenzy. I should have carried the colors up between stripes, a lesson I learned the hard way as I wove in about 3,000 yarn ends.

I have a bad habit of finishing sweaters to the 99% point and then leaving them to languish without buttons for ages. Even though I knit it up pretty quickly, this sweater fell to the same fate and I stuffed it in a corner of my craft room for about a month before finally picking up some appropriately-sized wooden buttons.

Here’s the part of my story that’ll make a knitter’s …