Knitting,spinning dogs, and life

This is my puppy, Bailey Marie, a blue merle sheltie. As you can probably see, one of her eyes is blue. Isn't she beautiful?! She's 7 moths old now and I don't know what life would be like without her :) She's everything I always wanted in a dog- loyal to a fault, (she ran alongside my dad's truck tonight when she saw that I was in the back) sweet and loving, affectionate and very happy. Pets make life all that much better! Oh, and Bailey enjoys my spinning as well ;)



As I mentioned in my last post, I am a member of Dogster. I have thoroughly enjoyed that and they just recently sent me an email informing me that I had a special offer from Shutterfly, who has recently teamed up with Dogster. Anyway, they gave me a free 8.5" x 11", 20 page photo book for free since I have been a member with Dosgter since before June of this year. I have been working on compiling all my photos of Bailey and arranging them in this book. They give you all different kinds of backgrounds, layouts, and options to add text and captions. It's so awesome! So, I am almost done with it and I just have a few more pics to add...I will keep you updated on this (although it is probably not exciting to anyone but me, lol).

Today was my sister, Kelsey's ninth birthday and we all had a very good time. We have a family tradition that the birthday girl (or boy) gets to choose their birthday dinner. Kelsey chose sauteed vegetables and fresh corn. We had a dessert of oreo pie and ice cream :)


My knitting projects are frustrating me right now. I am about 3/4 of the way done with my shapely tank, but I ran out of yarn. So off we go to Hobby Lobby to get some more, and, of course, the dye lot was a teeny bit off. My brilliant mother gave me the idea to change the pattern of the top half of my tank to disguise the yarn color change, and it IS working! The only drawback is that I am doing a seed stitch now, and that takes me about twice as long to knit, lol. Anyway, I am STILL working on that and I am so ready to be done with it. I mentioned before about the pair of Christmas socks I also have on the needles, but to be perfectly honest, I still haven't officially casted on for those. Tuesday night, at our knitting group, I did a gauge swatch. Then I realized that I should've done my swatch in the round...so I took it all out and started again. About 1/3 of the way through that swatch, I realized that my needles weren't the same size so I was totally throwing my gauge off. Since then, I have found the other pair of size 2 needles, but haven't had the heart to start again. :) I am also working on finding that magical measurement of the intended foot x stitches ratio and that's slowing down my motivation as well. Tomorrow, I WILL tackle that!

I am almost done with my Tour De Fleece-fleece :) I have been faithful to spin each day and I am very proud of myself! I am using a double treadle Lendrum wheel and it spins like a dream. Of course, I already had this bit of purple merino about halfway spun up before I started this, so I guess it doesn't really count. I will be starting something new soon and I am excited about that! I have been inspired by Peggy and my other knitting friends to branch out, break free, and otherwise cast all bonds of one-project-at-a-time-itis aside and have more than one project going at a time! You would be proud of me ladies! (and my mom, who has started to at least think about it, lol)