I'm finally up to date on reading old Knitlist messages and they had an interesting discussion on knitting guilt. I never feel guilty for knitting fortunately. I have a relatively clean house (as clean as it can be with all these pets) and plenty of time that I'd prefer not to spend on housecleaning. I think the key to keeping a house clean with the minimum amount of work is to be organized and reduce clutter. I have friends with cluttered houses who spend hours and hours cleaning each week and I can never really tell. I purposely don't have a lot of furniture and decorative doodads and everything has a place. Of course moving a lot helps you get rid of stuff also.





DH wants to get me an Ott-Lite for my birthday and it is definitely about time because there are already many knitting tasks (like seaming) that I've given up doing at night. I'm off to look at all the different styles and see if I can find a sale somewhere. Here's a photo of the view I look at from my knitting spot on the couch. The Russian olives have leaves on them now finally.

Bunny Fun Felted Rabbit

I am a huge admirer of Katharine Hepburn's work. She always played intelligent, fearless women and Bringing Up Baby and Philadelphia Story are two of my favorite movies of all time. She will be greatly missed. I'm hoping they'll rerun some of her movies this week in her honor so I can knit while enjoying her talents all over again.




I have received word from Jackie at HeartstringFiberArts and Bev Galeskas at Fiber Trends that I can use their designs for my rabbit shelter knitting project (Jackie's Knitted Bunny from a square and Fiber Trend's Bunny Fun felted rabbit - photo above). I'm impressed with the nice responses I've gotten from the four designers of rabbit-themed patterns and how happy they were to let me knit some of them in honor of Flip the big black wonderbunny.

I also received a note from John & Hillary Benish at Alderson Hospitality House. Here it is verbatim: "Dear Nanette, Thank you so much for the donation of yarn and materials for the women at the prison. We know they will occupy idle hours, learn skills, and give back to the community. Gratefully, John & Hillary."

If you would like to donate yarn or magazines or patterns (any kind greatly needed including partial skeins of any fiber yarn) to be used by women prisoners to knit for various charities, please send it to The Prison Yarn Project, Alderson Hospitality House, P.O. Box 579, Alderson, WV 24910.

Norwegian Selbu Star Gloves

Every now and then a knitting project comes along that I really enjoy and that works out really well. These are the Norwegian Selbu Star gloves from Knitting in the Nordic Tradition by Vibeke Lind (page 112) done in Country Garden DK made for DH. They are my favorite FO of 2002. They are soft and warm and I really like the way they look on DH.



One of my pet peeves is the way glove patterns have all four fingers start on exactly the same row. I've never seen a hand that looks like that so I changed the pattern so that the gloves will be more anatomically correct. You can see that the pinky starts right at the end of the hand pattern but that I did extra rows of black to accommodate the other fingers.

What will be my favorite FO of 2003? So far it is St. Enda but the year isn't over. Could be Malin, could be something else I haven't even started yet. I'm finally past the ribbing on Malin and am really getting into it.