I love my family

Today, I got to see my sister and her husband. They live 3 hours away, and with the very busy lives everyone leads, we don’t get to see one another anywhere near as often as we’d like.
However, today we got to meet up for lunch and hang out at Chapters and have coffee and visit and just be together. It was great.
My brother in law is <this close> to completing his Masters degree. He is a superb teacher of English as a Second Language, and after working hard to get his Bachelor’s degree (after many delays and challenges), he signed up for a distance learning Master’s program and has been writing papers and participating in Skype meetings pretty much every day for the last couple of years. We are so proud of the hard work he’s done!
In celebration, I needed to knit something for him. I dug through my stash of handspun yarn and found all the lonely and lost bits that were waiting to become … something. I plied all the random singles, then dyed everything navy so that it all looked like it went together, then I cast on for a lap blanket.

I just kept on knitting until I was out of yarn, and ended up with a blanket the perfect size for putting on your lap or over your shoulders while you read.

So, even though the Official Finish Line hasn’t quite been crossed, I was able to deliver this today. I am so happy to be able to knit for the people I love.
And I’ll get to do more of it, too – my sister’s birthday is coming up and as I didn’t have time to finish anything before we met up today, she was simply handed a couple of balls of yarn and asked to tell me what to make. After looking through a bunch of knitting books at Chapters, it became apparent that I’ll be making a long and narrow rectangular scarf out of this:

… which may constitute regifting, as quite a lot of the fibre this is spun from was a gift from my sister and her husband *last year* on my birthday!
I think it’s okay though.
I’ve tried three different patterns so far, and finally settled on a very simple, very plain lacy scarf. The yarn can speak for itself, and doesn’t seem to want a complicated design: something lofty, to take advantage of the fuzzy softness of the yarn, and nothing complicated, as the patterns would disappear anyway.
It’ll be a good project to alternate with the Mary Maxim contest entries that are my focus for the next six weeks – they have to be done and in Ontario by mid-June!