I so should be doing housework right now.....

But it's a rainy, sleeping-in Sunday kind of morning, post-coffee & Baileys, pre-breakfast, and I don't feel like sweeping. Though I have got as far as putting some laundry in....whether it gets folded today remains to be seen!

Lots of knitting this week...some progress made on the Viking Sweater...much, much more to go! I've taken to knitting "publicly" in the staff room at lunch time, which hasn't led to as much mocking as I might have expected. Possibly brandishing the pointy sticks at the very beginning may have thwarted some of that.

(Though it's interesting, the perceptions people have. One colleague asked me how long it would take me to knit up a simple hat. I estimated a few hours; he asked me how much I would charge. I said, "You pay for the yarn, buy me a bottle of Baileys, and we'll call it even." He thought that was kind of pricy. If he brings it up again, I'll suggest that he pay me my regular hourly wage for the 5 or 6 hours of my time, as well as for my skill and knowledge. That may shut him up.)

Progress on the sweater:

Anyhoo. Friday night I was signed up for a Freeform Knitting class downtown...a bit of a gong show trying to get home, organized, fed, and back downtown, thanks to the appalling traffic, but I did get there, and only a few minutes late. I'd been talked into it (ha! my rubber arm twisted right out of shape!) by a fellow Raveller, and it was a lot of fun.

We built a colour wheel out of a table full of yarn:

Then sat down and started knitting random shapes into each other for three hours. I tried to go outside the blue box, and wasn't as happy as I could have been with my colours...but it was good to Take a Risk, such as it was. Plae's knitting was much more experimental and cool:

Mine was less impressive, but....But. I was there to play, and learn something new, and I did both. Here's my piece, such as it is:

I played with yarn-overs all on my own, for the first time. I picked up all kinds of stitches, knit random increases & decreases, tried different ways of joining yarn...played with short rows for something other than sock heels, which was totally cool...I don't know that this kind of patchwork knitting is for me, per se. But it was a good lesson in thinking outside the box and trusting what I know, as well as just feeling free to experiment, screw up, try again, and move on if it doesn't work out. And a lesson in how much I do know about knitting - more than I thought - and just how much more there is too learn - way more than I'd imagined! Within about 5 minutes of walking into the room, I felt totally over my head...and went into sponge mode, sucking it all up. Definitely a good way to spend a Friday evening!

Eep! I need to get going on breakfast...hoping I have a Granville Island date to finally get the dye for Tuscany...Gratuitous kitty cuteness, to close with: