Baskets!

Ooh, when I came home today from picking Jamie up from preschool there was this huge box waiting outside for me...

Pretty soon afterwards I had an explosion of color all over my stairs!

That's not even all of them! I love these baskets - they are so beautiful and I can think of so many uses for them which is why I decided to sell them along with my other knitting-related things... Obviously I need to spend some time shaping them (they were all squooshed for shipping) before taking pics of each one. My friends get first dibs, so if you see one you've just gotta have, I'll set it aside for you. The large round baskets with one handle will be $26, the small baskets will be $14, and the two-handled market baskets will be $30. 

I haven't had much time to work on the Swallowtail shawl. I'm spinning some beautiful blue merino and silk combo right now, and I'm starting a 2nd fingerless mitt tonight:

I was browsing Ravelry when I came across this cool design - it said the "Handsprings" pattern was free to those who wanted to test knit it and that it was based upon the Spring Forward socks on Knitty. I thought, sure, why not? So I dug around in my stash and found this Knitpicks yarn that I had hand-dyed at the Valley Spinners meeting awhile back. I really like how this is turning out! There are so many patterns I want to knit right now... I have several pairs of fingerless mitts in my queue including Laura's pretty angora ones, and several scarves as well. It must be the winter drive to knit something warm... speaking of which, I just bought this adorable print from Tollipop on Etsy. 

One crazy thing that happened this week is that our washing machine broke down... Anyone who has any children knows that this could have become a laundry disaster of catastrophic proportions in a matter of a few days... Considering I spend much of my time at home working on laundry it was kind of nice to have a bit of a break while the little LED beeped at me and flashed Err20 (whatever that means,) but it was also sort of horrifying to know that the little door had locked the current load in, and that the clothes were soaking in dirty water that would not drain. Fortunately I have the sort of neighbors that would kindly let me come over with sopping wet, dirty clothes (after we had pried the door open and sucked up most of the excess water with a shop-vac) and wash them in their washer while Phil figured out what to do. After all, anything that involves using a shop-vac and lifting heavy appliances to clean out the filter in our household is a man's job... especially if there is the promise of banana bread being made and underwear being washed to sweeten the bargain.  (It also helped to inform him that would likely cost us a couple of hundred dollars to have someone come out and look at it - who buys that silly maintenance plan anyway?!) The next day he invited Luis from work over and they took the washer apart, extracted the offending sock that was blocking the filter, put it back together, and it was back in business. Phew! 

Then Phil attempted to explain to Luis in engineer terms how my spinning wheel worked. 

Isn't that cute? Guys tend to be quite fascinated by these things. Luis was intrigued by my preference for using "archaic technology."