winter storm watch

I hope, I hope, I hope we get snow. I have it all planned - get up and do several hours of holiday shopping, get groceries, eat lunch, walk with Karen, then go home and stay warm and cozy and busy with tree decorating and knitting for the rest of the weekend. Oh, and watch football on Sunday, preferably while sipping on some hot chocolate laced with a little amaretto after coming in from a walk in the cold weather.

My knitting progress yesterday consisted of many rows of 3 x 3 ribbing in black alpaca for the gift scarf, and a sock toe cast on and some increases. I was out and about most of the day and needed basically mindless knitting to work on. I had a very enjoyable lunch with Karen at our friend Beth's house. She has a beautiful house and always makes us feel very welcome. We had a nice chat, ate lunch, chatted and knitted, ate dessert, and chatted some more before we finally had to head off to other appointments. I knitted while waiting to see my doctor, then I knitted while waiting for my hair appointment and then I went to knit night at the LYS. I think I will be very happy to see that scarf finished.

I have been surfing blog land a lot lately and I keep running across shawls that I want to knit. I love shawls. I have quite a bit of lace weight yarn in my stash and I am anxious to use some of it, but I really want to finish up some of my current projects first. I used to have 10 or more projects going on a regular basis. Now I try to keep the number to about half that because I see such a difference in the finishing time. I am not a project driven knitter, but I do actually like to complete things on a regular basis, and that's been happening faster lately with fewer projects on the needles. Imagine that!

I ordered the yarn for my Donegal tweed sweater last night. I settled on the dark grey color. It won't be in for a while and that is actually a good thing. I will have time to finish up the lace hemp top and do a good job of swatching, charting, measuring and planning this project. I really want this to come out right, and though I am usually a "fly by the seat of my pants" kinda girl, this will have to be planned to come out right. When I want to get a break from cables, I will start a shawl, and hopefully with an easily memorized pattern so I can have a break from cable crossings and looking at charts. Don't get me wrong - I love cables. I just need more than one type of project to work on.

Stay warm and be safe if you have to drive in bad weather.