Done, and almost done

Well, the knitting part of the shawl is done, and it has been blocked.  Tonight I weave the ends in, and then it can go to my friend in time to take it up to Berkeley for her daughter's graduation this weekend.  Whew!

I really love the fact that, when laid out, this shawl makes a circle.

Isn't it fun?  And not only is it in ocean colors, but there are waves.

They're almost the same shape as the edges of the water as we walked along the beach (during that lovely low tide during the super moon) last weekend.

 The Pediboo yarn drapes beautifully, and gives this shawl a weight that, along with the shape, helps it to stay in place.  This is the second time I've knitted this one, and I'm not tired of it yet, which is saying something (since I rarely knit the same pattern multiple times).  I guess that means I'd recommend it.

I have also finished the first sleeve on Vitamin D (no pictures, because sleeve pictures aren't particularly inspiring), and will pick up the stitches for the second sleeve tonight.  That went fast, so with luck, I'll be blocking that sweater this weekend.  Maybe (just maybe), I'll even be able to finish and block it on Friday, so I can wear it on Saturday (which is when we're doing most of our Mother's Day stuff - read: going to Cirque du Soleil, because they're in town and the timing was too good to pass up).

Last night was my last night class of the semester (once every two years I teach an evening class), and tomorrow I'll teach my last sections of my other class.  And then it's on to grading.  My evening class is the field methods class that I've talked about in the past, where a patient guinea pig speaker of a language that none of us knows comes to class every week so that we can ask her to say things in that language.  Then it's the job of the students to analyse that data to discover the grammatical rules of the language.  This semester, it was Tigrina, a Semitic language spoken by millions of people in Eritrea and Ethiopia.  The speaker was fabulously patient with us, and the students did an amazing job.  It's hard when this class ends, because it's such an intense experience; I miss seeing everybody each week.  (As an aside, I spent nearly two years trying to convince our budget committee that when I said I needed money to pay a language speaker in order to teach this class, I was not talking about needing a guest speaker in my class - "But we'd all like to have guest speakers" was the chorus - until I finally turned to the faculty member from Psych and said, "You get lab rats.  I need a lab rat.  Except language lives in the brains of humans, so I need a human brain.  With a mouth attached."  That did it.)

And tomorrow night I teach the second half of my spindling class, where we talk about plying, the whys and wherefores.  So after tomorrow night, things really will have wound down.  At least, all of these things will have wound down - the To Do list that I've been putting off for quite some time now still lurks, menacingly, in the background.  So one set of things is done, or almost done (hence the post title), but then more will start.