A piece!

I have produced blog fodder, in the form of the back of a sweater. Go, me. I actually finished this on Tuesday night, but I've been busy since then, so this is the first chance I've gotten to pin the back out and see how it looks. Meanwhile, though, I cast on for the left front side, and am almost to the armhole bind off, so that's going very quickly.
I only lightly steam blocked it to relax it a bit before pinning it out. Once I have the whole thing put together, I'll steam block it a bit more rigorously. (You can see I'm using those lovely blocking boards; they make life so much easier!) I took it out to the front patio to get some fresh air. I think that the colors are showing up truer here than in my earlier pictures.
I adore the colors of this yarn. Chris truly outdid herself, truly; I think she must be a mind-reader, since I don't think I was very clear about what I was looking for, but she nailed it on the head anyway. And these subtle color shifts work so beautifully with Anne's pattern; look at the corrugation above the waist, it's so much fun to watch the pattern emerging as I knit. Mmm...
It's so tempting to just sit down and plug away at this instead of doing anything else, because I'm dying to wear it. Thank goodness the weather has warmed up a little these last couple of days, or I don't think I could resist.
The Douglas irises love the new warmth. So does Tilly.
I rather wish it weren't so gorgeous, as I'm trapped inside working on a paper. The good news is that I (finally!) feel like I'm getting to a break-through point, that place where I have some kind of story arc going, and I can start putting data and analyses and references in the places where they belong. Until I have that order set in my mind, everything feels like a jumbled mess, but now that it's there, I think I can start getting somewhere (because 20 pages of single-spaced notes just doesn't feel like anything somehow, until it has a sense of order).

On a completely different note, my knitting research project is going to get underway imminently; I'll have a lot more to say about it very soon. I have a small grant to pay for things like an online survey site subscription, my new Marantz digital recorder has arrived in the mail (dudes, this thing is so full of features it's scary; I don't come with this many features), and I have my Institutional Review Board's approval to work with Human Subjects (that would be you all). It's time to get this show on the road.