Fishtail lace mitten in progress

    My fishtail lace mitten is in progress!  I finished to the last row before decreasing stitches toward finger-tip part.  There are total 48 stitches, and these stitches will be decreased to 6 stitches by Knit two stitches together (K2tog).  You can decrease by Slip-slip-knit (SSK), too.  K2tog usually creates right-slant stitches and SSK creates left-slant ones.  The yarn that I am using is Canopy fingering by The Fibre Company.  This is very soft and smooth yarn!  I've already started thinking of trying other colors of this line.   At the store that I purchased this yarn, I saw they had more colors.  My recent favorite color is light blue-green ...sometimes it is called 'seafoam.'  I was imagining of making this mittens with the color.  It is not a 'warm' color but it would look beautiful!   It is like eating an ice cream on a cold day! (=Cold-day ice cream tastes more delicious!)  Seeing beautiful color would make me feel warm!

This is how I spend the year end!

   Merry Christmas to you all!  It has become a warm Christmas day!  Stores are closed and people are having a good quiet time with their families.  I have nowhere to go and I have nothing to do.... I decided to start making a new mitten pattern. I 
bought a skein of yarn as a Christmas gift for myself!  I found a cute yarn shop on the way to North Hills Art Center where I needed to deliver my show items.  The store name is Dyed In The Wool.  (3458 Babcock Boulevard, Pittsburgh,  PA 15237 Phone:412-364-0310, www.ditwpa.com)  I had heard of this store, but I didn't have a chance to visit there until then.  There were two nice ladies in the store (I guess they were owners of the store), sitting and busy working on knitting!  They generously let me touch yarns on their shelves, and I enjoyed their collection of yarns and their colors.  It was very difficult for me to pick one skein of yarn from their huge collection, but I was able to 'meet' my kind of yarn in the end.  The yarn that I bought was called Canopy fingering by The Fibre Company.   I worked this much in the picture, and I really like this yarn.  It has a nice and smooth texture and shimmer!  I am looking forward to seeing my finished work soon!  I will post the progress of my mitten making!  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

Tinking?

   I usually start a day with a nice cup of coffee, but I couldn't make one this morning.  I was too tired to do the morning ritual because I didn't have enough sleep last night. (I was watching TV until late at night!)  After I made breakfast for my son and sent him to school, I looked around for something to wake me up.  I thought it would be "knitting," and I started working on an ordered item from one of my customers.  I worked two rows in stockinette stitch, and I found out that I needed to increase a couple of stitches on the second row. Since I couldn't give an imperfect item to my customer, I had to unravel the entire row!  This was not something that I wanted to do first thing in the morning.  I grabbed my yarn ball and needles to start my good day.  But my morning was started with "unraveling," and it caused me to feel much less than successful!  I needed another option to wake me up fully and that option had to make me feel better.  So, I picked up a knitting book which was sitting right in front of me on my desk.  I like reading stories about knitting techniques.  I started turning the pages, and one word on the page drew my attention.  This word was "tinking."  It was explained with a picture of unraveled stitches.  The explanation went like this;  "Knitters affectionately call the unknitting of stitches "tinking," since the word "knit" spelled backward is "tink." ( Book "Knit it!--Learn The Basics and Knit 22 Beautiful Project" (c) Melissa Leapman , Publisher - Chronicle Books.)  "Tinking" hit the nail on the head for me, and I felt really good after learning this new word.  Learning this new word, "tink," had the same effect on me as a strong cup of coffee - it woke me up!