Beauty Inside and Outside

Here’s my exchange from Quince and Co, waiting for me when we got back, along with a sweet note in return from whoever handled my order.  This bird-egg blue is just perfect in so many ways.

Ingrid is like me, and loves having her head rubbed.  This morning as she was falling asleep, I think she was trying to pet her own head.  In hind sight, I see she may have been trying to remove that large hair of mine that fell on her face.  At any rate, it didn’t wake her up.

Here’s a project almost ready for my tech editor, and then some testers.  I’ll be calling for testers in a week or so in my Ravelry group if anyone is interested in that.  There have been some errors in 2 of my patterns I released last year even though I had them professionally tech edited.  Although they were really minor, it is worse than a pebble in your shoe, and so I’m going back to having my patterns tested before released, not just edited.  It will me a delay in the release, but if it means I don’t have to deal with the horror of errata, I’m on board.

 Oh, and here’s another design I’m playing around with.  The ivory colored sweater above just needs pockets and a collar, but I needed to let my brain rest on that project for a week or so while I made some decisions on exactly how I should execute those 2 things.  While my brain was resting on that project, it had to work on this one.  Now this one will be benched as I finish up the ivory one.  I really, really can’t wait to get back to this pink one, though. It’s turning out exactly like my sketch on my 2nd try only, and I’m getting giddy about it.  I have been taking that class on pattern grading, and I’m learning lots about writing out a pattern by numbers only before even casting them on for added accuracy.  This sweater is my first attempt at that, and I only got the numbers wrong the first time because I added a wrong number in one beginning equation and had to go back and fix it.  Now that it’s fixed, it’s working like clockwork and I’m super happy with this new spreadsheet version of designing that I’m trying out.  It’s going to be much more efficient!

 I promised some outside beauty too, and so here’s our rose garden.  It’s sleeping peacefully, don’t you think?

 Here’s our driveway, with Lena.  For all you Downton Abby fans, you should settle down.  Just because you see a dog from behind doesn’t mean the best show ever is about to start.  It’s just more of this blog.

 The drifts in the yard are so pretty, and some of them come up to my shoulders!  I love a good snow like this!  Winter is hard, but it’s harder with no snow.  If you’re going to live in a cold place, it should at least have snow so you can at least have all the winter sports and play!

Here’s the snow coming up to Lena’s back.  She’s our “little” black lab/German shepherd.  Again…Downton is not starting.