Hello all night owls

So, I thought I was doing well against the insomnia of the summer when I got sleepy at 11:30. I fell deeply asleep by midnight, but I am wide awake now, only two hours later.

Anyway, going with the flow. Hope to get more sleep in a few hours, I have a date with my Godson at 1 p.m. :-} Perhaps I can use the time to catch up on blogging before trying some warm milk?

I have been struggling with some future designs, instead of working on some I already have (mostly) sketched out. Bad designer, no biscuit.

One of the newer, queue-jumping designs I have the yarn for, bought on our own dime, so that I will not have a deadline to completing it. Lovely stuff, too, Comfy in bulky, a cotton acrylic blend. Yep, I said acrylic. I can honestly say this is the very first acrylic blend that still feels 100% natural to my touch. It also comes in sport and fingering weights. I've heard it makes fabulous socks! It is 75% softest Pima Cotton, and 25% acrylic.

Anyway, the Comfy Bulky is slated for a sweater in toddler sizes, but I have been stuck on what stitch pattern to use. I know I want stranded work, but nothing seemed right, until yesterday. Yesterday I was looking through some of my favorite middle eastern/Turkish sock pattern books and found again a photo that arrested me the first time I saw it. It will be PERFECT for the sweater, I think.

I hope finding a piece of the toddler sweater puzzle will let me return to the designs that are ahead of it, that DO have deadlines of sorts :-} I need to choose a bordering design for the Withig Cowl, and I want to do it soon! I have a few ideas, but I have some sort of knitter's stage fright, or fear of commitment. I guess that's what swatches are for, eh?

I love finding stitch patterns in unexpected places, or just from cultures other than those most familiar to me. I saw a hat (see blurry photo above) a few weeks back and fell in love with some of it's designs. It wasn't in a book or on a website, but when watching TV. The hat was being worn by a Peruvian Shaman, and I had Oscar go backward and forward until I could get a few photographs of it. (he is SO patient with me!) I shared the photo with LynnH, as I know she also loves this stuff.

Who knows what design will spring from the happenstance of seeing that image on TV that day? All I know is I keep going back and looking at it, and it is taking a fairly high level of discipline to keep focused on the Stellaria shawl, the Withig cowl, and the Withig shawl (poor neglected children).