I did some great work on my latest pinwheel blanket yesterday — and I’m really excited to finish this because I can’t wait to send it off to the newlyweds I have in mind. (There are, in fact, three recently married friends of mine who are also sometime-readers of this blog. They know they’ll be getting something hand-knit, so I feel like it is okay to share this stuff. If I kept my wedding-gift-knitting secret, I’d have nothing to share on the blog! If you’re reading right now, this may or may not be for you! There. Now we’ve got some suspense.)

Now, on to the simple rib blues. Ever get those? When all of a sudden you feel like something is taking forever, and you just need to finish it now? That’s how I felt yesterday. I was catching up on Stash and Burn, and realizing that I haven’t done very much Rooster knitting, so I picked up my Lilac Wine cowl. During the semester, this was exactly the kind of knitting I needed — soothing and satisfying. But last night, I needed to finish it. Maybe it has to do with the fact that it is summer, and I’ve got fewer things (okay, right now I have one huge dissertation-shaped thing) on my plate, but all of sudden I was so sick of this ribbing! I had been planning to knit until I ran out of yarn, but I looked at my never-ending ball of Fleece Artist Merino and decided that I couldn’t wait that long.

So I slipped my cowl over my head, needles and all, and took a look in the mirror.

And I decided that it was big enough. So I went back to the pattern to look at the instructions for the tubular bind off, only to discover that it is super tedious: four set-up rows, and then kitchenering all the way around the 180 stitches of this cowl. Nope. Not happening. So I looked at some other projects on ravelry, and decided to do Jenny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off instead.

And now it is blocking on the dining room table. It feels so good to have this off the needles. I’ll post FO pictures once it is dry.

Unrelated, but here’s what I ate for dinner the other night: a spinach and arugula salad with beets and carrots, all from the farm, plus a fried egg. Yum.

And then there’s this guy. This is the face he gave me when I tried to convince him to get off the couch and go outside before bed last night.

And here are his ears, flopping in the wind. Sweet, sweet dog. Happy Wednesday!