Random Tuesday

In honor of Becca and her fledgling yarn company, this blog entry will be Random Tuesday after my favorite colorway at Froebe Fibers.

I asked Miss Six to pick a number between one and ten -- she is a marvelous random number generator -- and she picked fourteen. See? Totally random. As her second choice, she picked seven. So here are seven random things for a Tuesday night.

1. The Red Heart Afghan a/k/a Dead Fart Crapghan is hooking right along. I finished a skein of that insanely bright and hideous yarn, and decided to measure. It's 52" measured along the left side, and 56" along the right. That is one whopping gauge glitch. Told you I suck at crocheting.

2. I'm doing the equivalent of short rowing to try to even out both sides of the blanket. I'll crochet to about the midpoint, then turn and crochet back. I'll intersperse these half rows with a few regular rows. It should be more or less invisible. Especially given that anyone who stares directly into this crapghan will have his retinas burned to a crisp. That tends to hide a lot of sins.

3. To celebrate finishing a skein of Dead Fart, I cast on the sleeves for my husband. The pattern uses short row shaping to create these nifty little sleeve points over the back of the hand. I am so digging this. But I've only knit four or five rows total, so there's still plenty of time to grow jaded. (Ha! As if that were possible! I heart Silver Creek yarn!)

4. Miss Six, our very own mermaid, lost a tooth. She says this makes her scary face even scarier.



















I think she might be right about that one. Sure scares me.

5. This is the view from my home office window. If my slush pile gets too big, I can't open the interior shutters and enjoy the view of my little courtyard. Which is darn good motivation to keep the slush pile low.
















6. If you take a closer look at the right side of that picture, you'll see this:

And now you know why my window is ajar. That 6-foot lilac hedge is perfuming my entire house. Love it. They grow under the spare bedroom window, which is also cranked wide open.




7. I finished the Marie Antoinette book. Good stuff, and a truly random read. Someone handed it to me in Houston as I was awaiting my airport ride, and it was someone other than the author. Usually, at publishing conferences, the reverse is true. I stuffed it in my carryon because my other baggage was already locked. Good thing I did. There was far too much turbulence on that flight to risk any knitting, and I devoured half the book before the plane touched down. If you enjoy historical fiction, this one is definitely worth snagging from the Border's 3-for-2 table. The author manages to paint a sympathetic picture of Marie Antoinette while still demonstrating how this woman became a lightning rod for French discontent. Clever, clever author.

There you have it. Random Tuesday, times seven.