I'm a coward.

After the Great Purge of projects on Wednesday night, I was a little irritated (okay, I was flaming mad and the husbeast was muttering about hiding from me at one point), and I didn't do any knitting for a day or two. Mostly because I was afraid to touch the Tax Sweater, but also because with no projects, I was suddenly free to pick something new to start, and I hadn't planned on that until at least June. It was pleasant to spend a day or two going "I could knit Innsvinget.. or do a fractal something... or some lace..." Of course I didn't start anything elaborate, but it was nice to toy with the ideas, even if they were totally irrational. In the end, I chickened out.

I started this, which is the Christmas scarf with the marled alpaca. It's a little redder in the photo than to the naked eye, but otherwise, with my hand stuck in the photo, you get a good idea for scale. It's way too subtle for my taste (I'm the person who thinks pink and orange look great together), but then it's not going to be my scarf. It's going to someone who wears a lot of earth tones and is rather shy, (or at least, not outrageously obnoxious, like me), so it should suit her. I'm using the Elizabeth Zimmerman scarf pattern from, I think, Knitting Without Tears. (To paraphrase: Cast on a likely number of stitches, and knit until you can't stand it any more.) It's fifty stitches of K1, P1 rib. It looks like a floor board right now, so it BETTER soften up when it's washed.

I also started this. It's a bad picture of an adaptation of a Booga Bag (I'm making it a little bigger, with some stranded color, and a different yarn, but it's definitely the same construction method as the Booga Bag.) It's hopefully going to go to my friend who had wanted the purple Farmer's Market bag before I killed it in the washing machine. We'd agreed on some green shade or other (I was thinking Project Spectrum, it IS May), but once I started rustling through my stash, it turned out I had a lot more blue. So blue it is. It better survive the felting process, is all I've got to say. (The husbeast won't fit under the bed.) Oh, and that swatch I marked off on the Farmer's Market bag? I cut that hunk out before I threw the bag away, and measured: it's a quarter inch (about half a centimeter) thick. Insane.

In other news, the baby and the cat are fighting for supremacy of the 'bouncy chair', as it is called here. It's a kind of hammock-deal on a wire frame, and when the baby moves, it bounces her up and down (my foot has also been known to sneak over there and bounce her up and down a bit). She loves it, but the weight limit on the chair is around twenty pounds, and she's about there, so it's looking like it will eventually belong to the cat. (I'd give it to another baby to use, but a lot of the attatched equipment is broken - we really did use this thing to death.) That should give the cat a nice thrill of victory.

We are also ready for our next power outage. I intend to knit my way through it, by the blinding light of our new camp lantern. We had some storm cells move through the other day and another power outage was likely, so we slipped on out and picked it up. The power outage never happened, but we're ready, by golly. (The National Weather Service says that Charleston is overdue for a direct hit by a hurricane, and my house is ten feet above sea level. I think I need more than a lantern, but it's a good start.) As I was proofreading this, the computer chirped; I had notice of a tornado alert, one county away. I love living in the south in the summer. Hah.

Oh, and I'm plotting what to do with all that yarn that I bought for the Poppies Sweater That Wasn't. I've had several outragous ideas, and I think I'm going to go with one. Hopefully there will be enough left over I can STILL knit a Tomten Jacket for the baby with the rest. That's a photo of one to the left; think cotton stripes instead, and you've got an idea. (Photo from here.)

Happy what's-left-of-the-weekend!