My shawl or scarf of the day is something new.

and accidental.  But it is also warm.  Our extreme cold warning is finally over and we are back to regular winter cold with a forecast for warmer than average.  Even though it has warmed, I feel chilly. This ribbed piece is made from Custom Woollen Mills Mulespinner two ply, which is the warmest wool I have found in all my wooly travels.

I have spent the whole weekend waiting. I get through weekends the rest of the year with F1 to watch or at least look forward to, but these dark winter days of F1 off season, I got nothing.  If I can't knit, it is very hard.  This weekend was very hard.

On Friday  I finished knitting the back of the conversion of my sampler shawl.  I sewed up the seams (very short seams) and decided to put a ribbing all around the bottom so that the finishing was the same for the entire piece.  I had live stitches on the back and stitches I had to pull out on the cast off edge (it looked wavy and awful), so I decided to start from live stitches all the way around.

After releasing live stitches on the cast on edge and setting up a garter ridge foundation row, I started to knit a twisted stitch ribbing all the way around the bottom of this soon to be sweater.

Somewhere between that garter stitch foundation round and the end of the first row of twisted stitches, I felt my thumb tingle.  Not my working hand thumb but my not generally used for active knitting thumb.  It doesn't usually move as I knit but it does support the needle in my left hand, and the weight of all of this added to the gauge of this twisted stitch made it unhappy. It also gets used a bit differently as I knit twisted stitches back and forth, rather than the ease of knitting twisted stitches in the round.  I wouldn't say it is injured just yet, but it is aggravated.  I decided to give it a couple days of rest.

I knit a few rounds on this second set of double stranded monster socks, but that is it for the weekend.  A few in this instance was less than 9 rounds and that was all the knitting for the last two days.  I am going to rest my hands again today.

I spent a lot of time reading.  I spent a lot of time dreaming of how I would use the colourwork patterns in the first book and which mittens I would make from the second, and what project to do from the third.

I read over several patterns in this book.  Every time I knit a bit of brioche, I want more.  I have a plan for that sweet blue yarn that Marcus and Cassie gave me for my birthday, to do some sampling of two colour brioche stitches and maybe some of the wonderful patterns that are out there.  That always makes me want to pull out this book and read over the patterns. And wish that the patterns were written to be knit in the round and from the top down rather than pieced, as they are.  I think about what I would love to knit immediately, a sweater, in one colour, using some really lovely Elann Sierra Aran.  I cannot see why I can't knit at least a plain sweater, my way, once I really understand the increases and decreases. To practise on a sampler type project from this pretty yarn sounds like a great idea to me.

I'm in limbo on my blanket till the yarn comes.  I ordered from the source, Yarnspirations, because my closest store doesn't have any in stock right now.  One way or another there would be driving involved.  If I drive to the city to find it, that ends up costing the environment more than my mail order.  Mail was coming anyway.

And that is what is up in the world of me today.  It is errand day, groceries to be more precise.  We have all kinds of food here and wouldn't starve but there are no veggies.  There is no flour, no rice, no baking powder, no sugar, no eggs, no diversity because we are all out of the basics.  So a busy day and warm enough now that it is time to go.