Aaaaaaaaaaah....

.....(as in a sigh of relief, not a scream). I finally got my computer back. It caught a little bit of a virus last week and had to be sent to rehab (aka Circuit City). I managed to sneak a little computer time to check all the blogs I read so I didn't go completely mad, but I drove my husband crazy with the constant whining about the computer not being there. I automatically walked into the computer room at home each day after work, only to see a painfully empty desk. When the comptuer finally came home on Saturday he called me at work to tell me he'd brought home the crack and he was sorry my pipe had been empty for so long. Yep, definitely addicted. I'm beginning to think I might be more addicted to knitting blogs than knitting itself. I'm going to try to cut back a little. Just a little. Maybe just a smidge. I learned something last week though. No computer=more progress on knitting stuff, cleaner house, more time spent with hubby. Hmm....food for thought.
Anyhoo, here's some of the stuff I accomplished this week. (Don't get too excited, no finished objects or anything.) In the pictures you saw of the DC Knit-out you may have noticed I was working on something I have not blogged about. It wasn't meant to be a secret or anything, I just hadn't mentioned it b/c I didn't have a picture of it. Now I have one: This is the tank and cardigan set from the latest Family Circle Easy Knitting. (In the magazine it was blue.) This is the first thing I've knit using stash yarn! Granted, this yarn had only been in my stash for about a month, but it was not purchased just for this set. I'll have to order more for the cardigan, but that's down the line. It's the Knitpicks' Shine Worsted yarn in salmon. (Project Spectrum-friendly).
While in DC I cast on for some hubby socks because I was bored with the tank top thingy. These are just going to be very basic 2x2 ribbing socks in Trekking XXL self striping yarn. I'm just using a pattern created from this book I have where you enter your guage and size you want the FO to be and it spits back a pattern at you. (Well, technically it's a book and it doesn't spit anything, but you get the point.....) On Wednesday I convinced my husband that Kool-aid dyeing is tons of fun and we created a mess together:
which turned into this: Each pot is a mixture of blue raspberry, lemonade, and lemon-lime Kool-aids. We had a lot of fun getting each one to be just right. If this knits up right it should gently transition from a brightish green to aqua then to blue and back. If I were to name this color it would be Seafoam. It reminds me of the way the ocean looked in Jamaica. I've been dreaming about Jamaica a lot lately, could be this rainy weather. This yarn is conveniently the colors for next month's Project Spectrum Sock Yarn Swap, but I can't decide if I want to part with it. It's so pretty!

Last, but not least, at work we have a volunteer committe of which I am co-captain. (Don't ask me how I got that position, it's still sort of a mystery to me.) Our first volunteer activity was to buy yarn. That's the kind of volunteering I can get into! Actually the yarn was to make chemo caps and preemie caps for local hospitals. We bought tons of cheap-o yarn and a few circular knitting looms at the local craft store to crank out the caps. We'll be meeting once a week to work on the caps and the project will keep going until we run out of yarn. So I decided since I've now officially formed a Target knitting club that we needed a banner of sorts, so I designed this: I'm going to make a small-ish wall hanging with red and white checkerboard, and the white checkerboards will feature the Target logo. Let me tell you, I used to think designing intarsia grids were a piece of cake and I was proved wrong. How hard could a few concentric circles be to graph? The answer? Pretty freaking time-consuming, but not that difficult. It took me about an hour to lay down the graph and then another 15 minute writing out the pattern. The knit itself is pretty quick, and I hope to have square #1 finsihed soon. In the meantime, does anyone have any recommendations for EASY hat patterns for very very novice knitters? I'm hoping to encourage my fledgling knitters to venture beyond the evil loom and try some needles, but I've not been able to find any hats that didn't involve DPN's and I don't want anyone to run the other way in fear. Preferrably a pattern that works only decreases because I think the concept of k2tog is much easier than increasing.

Hope all of you had a wonderful Easter and got lots of knitting time in!