Hey guys, sorry about my recent absence. Since there isn't much knitting to tell you about, I'll tell you about the dog instead. We named her Bindi because the spot on her forehead mimics the placement of a bindi jewel, though everyone who asks her name says "Oh, like the Crocodile Hunter's daughter! Bindi the Jungle Girl!" I've just started smiling and saying "Yep!" She's a 15-18 month old Staffordshire terrier mix, and we adopted her from a local shelter. We suspect she's lived with a family before because she was already housetrained and is very well behaved. She's dying to meet the cats, but they're still a little suspicious of this new creature in their house. She's calm and affectionate (which is exactly what we wanted in a dog) but has shown some signs of dog aggression (which is kind of scary) so right now I'm limiting her exposure until after my appointment with a behaviorist at the SPCA on Tuesday.

The main reason I'm not knitting or blogging is because my computer and crafts are both upstairs, and the dog has been confined to downstairs until now. (We were not allowed to bathe her until her spay incision healed, and she smelled really bad. We only wanted her to be able to stink up the bottom half the house instead of the whole thing.) We boarded her this weekend for our trip to Austin (company Xmas party) and they are giving her a bath Monday morning before we pick her up. Hooray! I think I'm going to knit her a little triangle-bandana tonight so she'll have something to wear until I can decide what dog sweater I should make her.

Here's a bunch of pictures of her at my Flickr account.

I have a good reason not to be knitting and blogging... new puppy!!

Here are the finished squiggles. The aran-style ornaments are on semi-permanent hold until I see what the tree looks like with what we have. Hobby Lobby had ornaments 50% off this week, so we stocked up on turquoise and gold.

I have still made zero headway with Adam about the tree. I've got half a mind to set it up blocking his side of the bed, so that moving it to the living room will seem like a great compromise.

Here's an update on my scribbling progress. I was having trouble getting started because I couldn't find the "perfect" skein of handspun to use. I kept going through all the items in my store and none of them seemed quite right. Then I started pawing through my drawers and found this old skein that I had bought from Fun With Yarn and knitted into a square for no apparent reason. (I think I may have been intending to back it with fabric and make it a throw pillow cover, but my cats eat wool, so it wouldn't have been a very smart project for me.) I realized that the square matched perfectly with the 5 mini-tester balls that I had been using for my swatches.

The left half of my brain is annoyed that the scarf edges are uneven, but the right half is telling me that a freeform project like this is supposed to be organic and not have straight lines.

The picture above is approximately 2 hours' work. At this rate, I may have it finished in time to post the instructions at the beginning of next week. I couldn't resist the gratuitous inclusion of Hedwig in the picture, who was angry about having to sleep on the couch instead of my lap. I always have to shoo her away when I'm working with yarn or she'll swallow half the project as soon as I look away. (She tried to take a bite of the scarf seconds after this picture was taken.)

Yesterday + Today = These 3 skeins and 2 dyed rovings:

It was a long hard road, but I have finally perfected the art of dyeing roving without felting it. Most of the standard methods are too much hassle for me, such as the plastic-wrap-and-a-steamer method. (Are you @#$%&!ing kidding me? This method involves covering your entire work area with plastic wrap like Dexter Morgan, painting the dye on, wrapping up the rovings in plastic and rolling them into leaky jelly rolls, and steaming them in a pot. Then you take them out and find that all the colors have bled together and everything is mushy brown, including your granite countertops that the dye leaked on. No thank you.)

I heard about the magic of dyeing braided roving and I am totally hooked. It takes a little longer for the dye to soak all the way through to the inside part, but it makes for very interesting color patterns. I plan to start selling roving in the store very soon now that I'm armed with this awesome new skill.

I dyed this yarn today to commemorate the election results. Thankfully, Barack Obama has an easy-to-spin logo. (I'm not sure what I would have been able to come up with if McCain had won. Maybe a brunette skein tied in a French knot like Sarah Palin's hair?)

When I bought this yarn, the color called to me; it's much brighter in real life than in the scan. I thought I was buying Malabrigo, but it turns out I grabbed Manos instead. No matter, it's the silk blend so it's still really soft and drapey. This scarf came to life because I needed something to do instead of paying attention to Max Payne. I got almost the whole thing knitted in the movie, mostly because it was 5 hours long. (Okay, maybe not, but it sure felt like it.)

It was a really easy, mindless project. Just 17 stitches makes a narrow stockinette strip, then the drop stitches widen it significantly. I'm going to find some ribbons to weave through the drop stitch spaces and make the ends scrappy with fabric somehow.