"Various levels of un-success"

The title of this post is a quote written by my new and amazing friend Kate.  She coined this term in an email a few weeks ago and I thought it was so fitting and clever, that I jotted it down in hopes to have a chance to use it. (She's brilliant, and she's online too.  You should see for yourself... here.)  August has been - and will likely continue to be - yielding various levels of un-success on the creative front.  It's good, these interruptions, in the sense that we had/have planned weekend visits to see family, house guests and work travel; but it's putting a serious dent in my ability to  generate good blog fodder.

My smaller and less creative victory of late included making it home from the East cost after two cancelled flights, one additional, unplanned night away, and three failed attempts at catching standby flights.  (Nothing makes home more appealing than a total inability to get back to it.)  My long awaited flight landed me at home a mere 45 minutes before the house guests arrived.  So the normal tidying and cleaning went on in parallel to their first couple days in residence. Thankfully my better half did all the essential stuff...

I did manage to finish two books while I was on the road.  (These were our book club picks for this month and last.)  The first was the "Tiger's Wife".  It was different but good; I found it to be thought provoking.  It was an interesting look at how community history morphs into epic lore over the passage of years and generations. I recommend it. The second book called "Look Again" was also good, but more in a quick and satisfying mystery-mind-candy kind of way.  It was the perfect fast paced read for trying to kill those slow minutes between my standby times.

Since I've been home, I've been working on turning that swatch idea into the first pass at the prototype for that child's sweater.  More Quince and Co. Chicadee in Lupine... isn't it lovely? It's working, I think... and I'm loving the charting... (sharp pencils and graph paper what could be better?)

Prototype in "Lupine"

So in the next week or two I hope to share with you more knitting, and maybe week four of Pages and Paint.  I haven't totally dropped the ball on that, but it's been abandoned momentarily.  More soon...