Review Sweet Shawlettes by Jean Moss

I wanted to like this book, but it has too many flaws for me. -All the patterns use Rowan yarn. If a book is very specific about yarn, I expect that to be part of the title. -I don't think a scarf or cowl is a shawlette. A shoulder wrap that turns into a cowl is fine, but a cowl is different than a shawl. -Charts are pretty good, but I hate charts. These patterns aren't also written out. -Some of these patterns take 6 or 8 balls of yarn. That's not small to me. At $21.95 this is a borrow from the library type of book, not a purchase!

Penguin Sweaters

I was on Cute Overload this morning, showing TL some photos of dog costumes. He hadn't seen the site before (not surprisingly). While there, I saw this photo of a penguin wearing a little sweater. At first, I thought "How cute! How weird is that?" "Why would anyone do that?"

When I clicked over to The Yarn Kitchen blog, to look at the pattern, I realized it's a charitable work. These poor little penguins have been effected by the oil spill in New Zealand; and the sweaters are to help them stay warm and prevent them from eating oil, too. You can read all about it on the blog post.

According to Cute Overload, they have enough sweaters for now. I went back and read the CL article after seeing the Yarn Kitchen post. The image above is from the Cute Ovcrload site

New phone New Blogger app

Well, we decided that since M's schedule had changed so much that he couldn't pick up TurtleLad every day that TL would have to start riding the bus and then walk 2 miles from the bus stop to home. It was a hard thing for me to be Okay with, but he is in middle school. So, because he'd worked hard all summer to earn his 1st mp3 player, we decided to 'upgrade' his reward to a phone (which does play music). Naturally, this decision caused TL's parents to research the best phones and balance it with the budget, etc. This caused us to gauge these new phones against our Really Old phones -- I mean our plans had expired over a year ago -- and we found our phones wanting. The result? Not surprisingly, we have 3 new (refurbished) smart phones at our house. YAY! I just downloaded a Bloogger app, so I should be able to post more knitting stuff. At least there's a chance I will be able to post on-the-fly from the phone.

Bamboo Dishcloth

So Rick and I went to some garage sales last month, and I got a fabulous knitting guide from the 1960s with 900 stitch patterns. I have been experimenting with using them to make dishcloths. This one turned out well, so I will post the pattern here.

I used Sugar and Cream Cotton yarn, color? I never save the ball bands!
Size 8 needles--use 1 size larger than you usually use

Cast on 36

Rows 1-3 Knit all

Row 4 Knit 3, *yo, K2, pass YO over the K2* repeat ** until 3 stitches left, end Knit 3

Row 5 Knit 3, purl all to last 3, end Knit 3

Repeat Rows 4 & 5 until the cloth is your desired length.

End with 3 rows Knit, then cast off loosely.

The picture is right off the needles, so you can see that blocking some will help. This is a pretty thick cloth with some texture for scrubbing.