Kninja Knitter

Yesterday was both a rainy day and a Monday, and it was a rough one for me. I herniated a disc in my lower back some 25+ years ago, and stormy weather tends to cause flare-ups. We’ve had stormy weather for several days now, so my back is a hot mess.

This Monday did have some highlights, despite the twinges and throbbing in my lower back. I managed my standard Mark It Monday progress photos, which included an FO picture.

I didn’t make much progress on the shawl, but I did complete the lace section.

And I made it to the ribbing on my sock in yarn from London.

Lastly, I cast on a blanket to give me some large scale knitting using up more of my acrylic stash. This is the yarn that was my main color in the USA afghan I knit last year.

Monday was also very fun as both of my shipments from Ireland arrived! At Blarney Woollen Mills in County Cork, I had spent “too much” on souvenirs and yarn in order to get free shipping so I could save on VAT and also not have to risk going over weight on my suitcase for the flight home. I bought two sweater quantities of Aran yarn plus a couple yummy single skeins of fingering weight yarn.

Also arriving yesterday was my order from Springwools, as a dear friend gave me a gift certificate for my birthday which had to be spent online. I checked out the offerings on site and decided on another sweater quantity of Aran yarn (plus some labels for the sweaters I will be knitting up).

For those keeping track at home, I now have FOUR sweater quantities of yarn added to my stash. Three are Aran weight and one is fingering weight. I have definite plans for two of them:

I have a lot of winding to do plus some swatching, and then I can map out my knitting plans. I really want to use the Blarney yarn during the Pigskin Party this fall.

On Monday I caked up my yarn for the May socks in the Desert Vista Dyeworks challenge, so I will share that next week. I closed out the rough day with the weekly Gahanna Community Chorus rehearsal. We’re about a month away from our concert, Resound, and the music we’ll be performing is absolutely gorgeous! No matter how tired I am when I get there, the songs have a knack for energizing me beyond words. I’m sad that I won’t be able to join members of our choir when they take this repertoire to New York City, but I’ll cherish the event here in Columbus. Our program includes a song that we’ve commissioned to be written, and last night we sang through some of it. Just beautiful!

I have one last thing to share from the past week. I’ve been participating in the quarterly reading challenges through Kindle for some time. This quarter included a challenge to read the first book in a series. My preference is to borrow ebooks from the library, so I managed to get a copy of Inheritance: The Lost Bride Trilogy book one, and I finished it on Friday. I was rather frustrated to find that it ended essentially on a cliffhanger, and book two won’t be released until November. Still, I found the story to be riveting and entertaining. I’ll be looking for the sequel in Libby at the end of the year!

Knit on. 🧶