Knitting excitement!

My husband and I are horrible at keeping secrets from each other. Normally this is a great quality in a marriage, but it is sort of an achilles heel when it comes to gift giving occasions. I think that the time from gift purchase to spilling what the gift is is usually about three hours, even if the holiday is weeks away. My birthday is Saturday, but yesterday my husband told me he'd ordered me this blocking board. It shouldn't have been a huge surprise, because the other day when I was complaining about blocking and my pitiful lack of a blocking board, he said "So you'd rather have a blocking board than a swift?" I went on and on about how since I don't have a spinning wheel a swift would only be used when I buy skeined yarn but a blocking board could be used on almost every project, blah blah blah, in total oblivion that a blocking board would soon be mine.

As if that wasn't enough, my mother-in-law called this morning to tell me there was a gift certificate waiting for me at a Knitted Peace in Littleton. Being the yarn addict that I am (and getting a chance to go off my yarn diet, what was I supposed to do, not use it?!?!?) I headed down there today and some Noro Silk Garden sang its siren song to me. I'm going to be making this

out of this.



Okay, so the plastic doesn't make for the greatest photos. I'm just excited to have an entire bag of Noro.

For John's almost finished elephant jacket, I'm planning to use wood buttons as Kate suggested. Since I wont' be able to get those until tomorrow, I started another Phildar baby sweater.



It's knit in Aviso, a cotton/acrylic blend, and is turning out quite nicely. My stitch gauge is spot on, but my row gauge is way off. The pattern called for eighteen rows in the middle stripe color, but I don't think it's quite wide enough. I see ripping in my future...