Lotsa squares

I have been knitting squares, and squares, and more squares. These are all for the Oliver's Blanket project on the Mason Dixon Knitting site.

First, All of them piled up waiting to be mailed:Next, pictures of them drying after washing them all (I couldn't mail them without washing them first!!)

Next, here are closeups of all of my special MasonDixon squares. Each is based on one of the patterns in their book, or on their website. We have:

The Ballband square:
The Moss Grid square:
The Big Dotty square:
The Log Cabin square:
The Tailgate square:
The Mitered Square square:
The Baby Genius square: (my own reversible version of the Baby Genius pattern)
And finally, the Nine Patch square:

Some of these took a little swatching and reknitting to get them the right size, but they are so cute, it is worth it. Some of them (like the Nine Patch square) are identical to the real pattern, just done on small needles with thin yarn. Others (like the Mitered Square square) are adaptations of the original. I suppose I could have knit with sewing thread on pins and made the original Mitered Square Blanket pattern turn out 4" in size, but even I'm not that crazy!

They are off in the mail today, just in the nick of time. I enjoyed making these, and was a little disappointed that I ran out of time before I used up every scrap of my leftover sock yarn. I mean, look at all of this:
There's enough there for at least two more solid squares. And all the little odd pieces left over could make at least one more square with about 2 or 3 rows worth of each color. And yes, that's another plain square, about 2/3 of the way done, that I started when I thought I had time for "Just one more" before I had to mail them.

What am I going to do with all my knitting time now?

ps Sorry about the crappy pictures. I could have done a little better, but I'M ON A DEADLINE HERE!!

Ramblings

I've been busy knitting, but have spent too much time on Ravelry so I haven't had time to post anything here.

The project of the moment is working on 4" squares to donate for the blanket mentioned on Mason Dixon . I am using up all of my leftover sock yarn. I started out by making the basic garter stitch square shown on the site, but then I came up with a great idea to make some extra special squares. I'm not going to say exactly what my idea was at the moment, but lets just say that I am pretty excited with my idea. I am planning on sending them in about a week before the deadline, unless I run out of yarn first. I am hoping that by sending them in a week early, I will still be able to get them there on time, even if I space out and forget for a couple of days. My usual thing to do is work on a project like this, and then forget to send it in until it is too late. I have lost $50 rebates because I forgot to mail in the rebate form until it was too late. But THIS time, I am going to do this. These squares are too perfect to not follow through for once.

In non-knitting news, I am not only registered for classes next semester, I have actually PAID for the classes!!! I wasn't able to attend classes at all this semester because all of my school money was used to go back home when my dad died. But this coming semester is all set. I am very excited.

Other exciting news involves my oldest daughter. She is a senior in high school and is taking classes like Anatomy, Chemistry, College writing, Pre-Calculus. She got her first report card for the year, and she has a perfect 4.0. She actually got a 100 in Anatomy. When we went to pick up report cards and talk with the teachers, one teacher shook my hand and told me he loved me. He said she was the model student that every teacher hopes to get. She is extremely excited. She is planning on becoming a Pediatric Neurologist. She sure has the drive needed for that. Daughter 2 is extremely intelligent and has been tested to have a very high IQ, but she doesn't fit in so easily in the school environment. She did a lot better than usual this year though. She was even only about .3 points away from being on the honor roll. That is a huge achievement for her. The main thing that hurt her was a low grade in Chemistry. All of her other grades were good, and she even got 3 B's and an A. Hopefully she'll get that chemistry grade up next semester, and she'll be on the honor roll for the first time ever.

Sorry this has been a long rambling post with no pictures. I wanted to get something on here to help get me excited about blogging again. Not that I've ever blogged very regularly, but I would really like to. I'll include here a picture of Jeffrey, our new baby boy. He is almost 6 months old, and we all love him to death. He is a Papillion.

This is when Jeffrey hid on the table away from the big bad carpet cleaner.

And a closeup.