OK, maybe it was a little longer than six months...

Hi!

Didja miss me?  More importantly, what did I miss?  Not much in both cases?  OK, fair enough.

I promise to catch you all up on the news (new job, growing kids, new house, same husband, etc), but there is a good reason for doing a Lazarus with a triple bypass on this blog.

I've been bitten.  (Thanks, Sonia).

Hard.

So hard, in fact, that I started scouting around for sock yarn scraps.

It wasn't long before I realised that I really haven't knitted many socks; certainly not enough to generate the amount of yarn I would need to complete this lovely quilt.

At about the same time, I was catching up on my overflowing Bloglines feed (only 3,526 posts to go) and read Jean's Knitting's post about how she has waaay too much wool and what should she do with it?

Talk about your two birds with one stone:  what did I have to lose?

So I emailed Jean and asked if she might (pretty please) have any scraps lying around?  Willing to pay fair price etc, etc.

Jean took to the idea like a knitter to a sale at a newly-opened yarn shop and before long emailed me to say that the parcel was on its way.

Today the parcel arrived.

And in addition to the bounty I was gleefully anticipating:

Was this:

Hmm?  What's that in the background?  You mean this?

That's a needlepoint cushion which my very clever Mum made for me while I was living in the UK.  It incorporates the official floral emblems of all the state of Australia.  Homesick?  Moi?

Anyway, back to Jean (or Lady Bountiful, as I now call her!).  This goes way beyond what I had asked for or even dreamed of.  That's three full skeins of hand-dyed sock yarn from The Yarn Yard.  Just beautiful.

Jean and I agreed that I would make a donation here in memory of her sister-in-law as "payment".  More than fair, I would say.

The big philosophical question is:  should I finish off the current blanket before diving into the Beekeeper?

The squares are about pot-holder-sized and the colours you see are pretty much what you would expect when photographing at night under fluorescent light.  No, I'm not at the office; this is the (current) lighting in my loungeroom.  

Cannot.  Wait.  To.  Replace.  It.

I was planning to use the dark grey as a sashing/border around and joining each square.  However, I can now see that I've used it in the outer circuit of at least two squares.  So I need to think about this one.

Too late to start "puffing" tonight on the Beekeeper; perhaps I'll just rewind some of my gifted yarn and dream a little dream.....