KNITTING WITHOUT DOG HAIR IS NOT AN OPTION

I drove to work this morning through snow flurries... Hello, weather gods? Are you on the wrong page of your calendar? It's three days until March! I was totally stunned when I left for work this morning. Not that I mind driving in that kind of weather, but other people freak out.

And all you dear people can stop teasing me now about not blogging. Here I am - with updates and pictures. Sorry this has been such a deserted place lately, but I just have so much going at work that I feel like turning into a couch potato when I come home, and all I want to do is to be a veggie, watch movies with Hubby dearest, snuggle with the dogs (who have been very bratty lately...) and knit. Yes, the knitting is still going on.

So let's back up.

You remember, don't you, that I'm the one who hates-Hates-HATES seaming and sometimes goes out of my way to rewrite patterns so I DON'T have to seam. Well, I made a knitted item for Hubby for Valentine's Day. I sure hope he feels the love because I had to sew 17 (!) pieces together to give him ............... drum roll please! A turtle!

I was racking my brain about what to give him for Valentine's Day and then this light went off in my head. Hubby has a huge turtle collection. I could knit him a turtle. YAY! I think he totally likes it - at least that's what his face said when he opened the gift box. We can't agree on whether it's a he or a she. I named him Valentino, but Hubby says that the shells of male turtles aren't rounded on the bottom. Leave it to the female turtle to have a belly...

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it probably took just as long to assemble the turtle as it took to knit all the pieces.

Right after Valentine's Day, I hopped in the car, picked up Phyllis, and we drove up to North Carolina, to the annual knitting retreat of the Atlanta Knitting Guild. Phyllis was a great travel companion, and she gave me some beautiful sock yarn and wonderful soap. Thanks Phyllis! She actually picked two sock yarns I have not knitted with before - Opal and Cherry Tree Hill:

And as you can see, the Opal sock yarn is already almost half gone. As you can guess I had to start socks with it. More later...

The only picture I took at the retreat - because "what happens at The Mountain stays at The Mountain" - was of the cake. Linda, our own baker, delivered this gorgeous baby:

Looks yummy, doesn't?

At the retreat, I worked mostly on two big projects. My alpaca sweater and the baby blanket and I made good progress. Sitting around for almost three days with knitting as your only activity sure helps. ;-)

I finished the first sleeve of the alpaca sweater. LOVE IT!!! I decided to put a classic 2 x 2 ribbing on the edges. My goal is to finish the sweater within the next two weeks. We'll see.

More and more sheep are appearing on the blanket:

I just love that you can pull the sheep ears. :-)

The pattern knits up pretty nicely. I'm almost done. I need one more row of sheep and the border. The recipient is due in June - I guess I'll finish in time. When Hubby and I are in Germany in May, I think we'll visit our friends and I can give them the blanket.

The guys went shopping during the retreat and Doug brought me back another ball of sock yarn. Thanks Doug!!!

It is also Opal - another special edition - based on a Hundertwasser print called "Wartende Häuser" which translates to "waiting buildings":

The ball band has a pattern for sideways knitted socks, hmmmmm... But I don't want to seam a sock. That's the only reason that keeps me from doing this at the moment, and 10,000 other things...

Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser was an Austrian painter, and sculptor. By the end of the 20th century, he was arguably the best-known contemporary Austrian artist, though he was always controversial. Hundertwasser's original, unruly, sometimes shocking artistic vision expressed itself in pictorial art, environmentalism, philosophy, and design of facades, postage stamps, flags, and clothing (among other areas). The common themes in his work are a rejection of the straight line, bright colours, organic forms, a reconciliation of humans with nature, and a strong individualism. Hundertwasser was also known for his performance art, in which he would, for instance, appear in public in the nude promoting an ecologically friendly flush-less toilet.

Thanks, but no thanks...

I actually visited the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, Austria, in the late '90s.

This building is a low-income apartment block in Vienna, features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

This is what it looks like:

That's it for the moment. I have more but you'll have to wait a little bit. My lunch break is over. Stay tuned. :-)