Monkey see, monkey do.

Being that we are looking for a house, I have also started looking into home furnishings and decorations. In the inaugural issue of ca home+design, I saw some paintings in a featured house I liked and my mother suggested I paint my own. A normal person might scoff at such a suggestion. But as a person who knits her own socks and sweaters, and forged her own wedding band, this was a great idea!

In this case I wanted instant gratification, so I went to my local Michael's and picked up some supplies:

The kids wanted to join me in my painting endeavors, so I let them get some acrylics and brushes as well:

This was Bub's portrait of me:

And this was Princess' uh. . . yeah. Her painting actually looked very cool in an abstract, modern-art type of way before she blended it all together:

This was my finished painting:

No, I didn't actually paint this while the kids were painting, I was too busy managing them and their paint. Also, I found myself wondering why I didn't just get them tubes of watercolors that would have been so much easier to clean up, but Bub tried very hard to stay clean and the mess wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. They want to paint again.

One other thing I wanted to add was that with the exception of the tube of white, I didn't actually use any of those paints or brushes in the picture. I ended up buying some big tubes of primary colors from another store and using those. Not that you can tell from the picture or anything.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right

So I was getting to the waist in the body of my Owls sweater, but something just wasn't right. It was the short rows that raised the back. They poufed out, making it look like I was either a hunchback, or that I had vestigial wings I was trying to hide. I tried wet-blocking it (but is there dry-blocking I don't know about?) which seemed to make it flat, but a few hours after trying it on, it popped back out. So we went riiiiiiiip.

All the way back to the ribbing of the collar. I decided to try something different. Little clusters of short rows. I did two sets before I started the cables for the owls, and then another two sets afterwards. This is the result:

 So hopefully that's enough. I haven't been knitting much on this recently, since I've been working on Christmas knitting and it's been too hot to work on a sweater, but I still hope to get this done soon.

Why are we so. . .?

Did anyone else see this yesterday? A blogger made a map with Google's autofill suggestions for every state. It kind of reminds me of this old article about what people like by race and gender (at least according to profiles at OkCupid). There seems to be an uneasy line between truth and stereotypes (I totally fall into the dating site's racial stereotype #3, for instance) and for the map, at least, it's interesting to see how other people see your state.