Carrots and sticks

Look! Something to combine 2 of my favorite pasttimes: food porn AND yarn porn!

Those 2 sandwiches and carrots are actually knitted items currently on display at the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. It is indeed a very pleasantly designed place, stocking not just their standard all-synthetics-all-the-time products, but the recently introduced "LB Collection" yarns -- upscale organic and/or natural fiber yarn lines such as cashmere.

I went there tonight to buy yarn for the Little Bubbles sweater I'm going to make for my friend Margaret's future son (or as I like to call him whilst he is as yet unnamed: XY).

See? Aren't they nice? The hank is one of their organic cotton yarns, while the skeins are from their cotton bamboo line. Not only are they all machine washable (natch, it is for a baby after all) but they're all incredibly soft. So okay, the organic cotton is technically hand wash, but I say... into the machine it goes!

And regarding Margaret, I am just giddy with delight: I have used American Airline frequent flyer miles to book tickets to visit her at the end of August! Woohoo!

It all started because her husband invited me to her baby shower sometime in August, whose date is still being negotiated. While all that was going on, it occurred to me that "Hey! I can just go visit her ANYWAY, regardless of when the shower is!" My chemo will be done (FINALLY) by late August, but my daily radiation treatments will not have started yet. Plus, I have (or rather, had) 169,000 miles on AA, so I can burn through 50,000 of those for round trip business class tickets without batting an eye. Yippee!

Yes, it took me a while, but I realized I needed something fun to look forward to, since I wouldn't exactly call my disability leave a VACATION, and I was otherwise trapped in place until after radiation ends in early October. (Cessation of chemo, while desirable, is not exactly an active "reward", but merely the ending of a round of biological punishment.) Since my boss has been generous enough to treat my endless disappearances for treatment and aftereffects as sick time and not vacation days, I still have 15 days awaiting me this year. Her exact words were, "No, you save your vacation to go somewhere fun after you finish all this [treatment stuff]." So hey, I'm taking her advice!

Speaking of upcoming Little Bubbles sweaters, here's my progress to date with my great-niece (grand-niece?) Lillian's birthday present. Although it looks different from the sample photos on the Knitpicks site, and I changed some of the instructions (in one case, accidentally, and in another, deliberately) it still looks pretty darn cute.

Along those lines, I hate dealing with buttons and buttonholes, so I am going to use a zipper instead. Besides, I happen to think their trim is a wee bit narrow to fit buttons in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I mean, would YOU want to deal with 1/4" buttons (should they even be available) while a garment was on a wriggling baby?

Working on this, I have already mentally starting revising the design/instructions for little XY's sweater to be more to MY liking. Heck, I might even try for the goofy hat in the kit, since the Lion yard adds up to over 1,000 yards, and the Knitpicks kit onlytotals around 500.

In fact, since I am knitting the 18-month size, I doubt there will even be enough Knitpicks Comfy Sport yarn left for a hat after I finish the sweater.

And finally, bringing the p*rn full circle to food, I give you a photo of the yummy Dean & Deluca cupcakes my friend Ellen brought over earlier this week: Banana, red velvet, marble, and blackout. The were all scrumptious, but the blackout cupcake even had pudding in the center. YUM!