let there be light...

And the sun shines again! wooo hooo! And just in time for a driving adventure to the Carter Family Fold this afternoon. Janette Carter (daughter of country music icons A.P. and Sara Carter) passed away last weekend, and they are having a memorial service of sorts this weekend. I'm heading down with some filmmakers from Appalshop to watch/help them document it. Really, I'm just so excited to get out of the house and on the road.

It also seemed like a good time to take some progress shots.

This one is a little shadowy... oh well. I really wanted to finish this last night. I just couldn't do it. I was so tired and my neck still hurt from Wednesday and I just threw in the towel and decided to lie on the couch and watch Ice Diaries instead. I'm on a mission to just get through these socks so I can get on to some other stuff. I'm never promising so many people socks for Christmas again. But... that's not to say I'm not enjoying it. Look at that color!
I really like the way the green/pink pooled. It gives it a neat shadowy effect. More importantly, my mom loves it... I never would have thought. I initially picked out much more muted colors for her -- mauves and greys and pale, heathered greens. But she saw me knitting this one before Christmas and fell in love.

I'm on the verge of making a knitpicks order for yarn to make the Hourglass sweater for my friend Melissa. My friends and I don't really do birthday presents... we do "no occasion presents" -- when you see something for someone that you think they would like, you buy it and gift it, even if it is eight months after your birthday. But Melissa just turned 27 on the 24th and this year, I felt like I wanted to give her something. Meliss is one of those people who truly appreciate handknitted things. Every time I've given her something, she has ooohed and aaaahed and worn it until it can be worn no more. It makes me want to knit more things for her. And the hourglass sweater is totally her style, especially the slight flash-dance tendencies of the neckline (Melissa loves flashdance. I found out over New Years that she knows all the words to the flashdance song. She is the only person I know who knows them). Making this sweater for her also solves my recent dillema -- I want to knit sweaters all the time, but I have too many of my own. Now I can have the satisfaction of knitting the sweater and the satisfaction of giving a very nice gift to someone else. I'm pretty excited about it and I think I'm going to make this project my "during the Olympics" knit. Lots of stst, knitting in the round (I've never knit a sweater not in the round... maybe that should be my next project)... it should be a pretty easy in-front-of-the-tv knit.

To close... every day when I walk to my mailbox, I wish I had my camera to take a picture of the McClure river, which runs through my backyard. It doesn't matter if it is sunny or cloudy, raining or snowing, it always looks beautiful. Today, I remembered.

My camera is definitely freaking out a bit because of all the light... I didn't notice until now how saturated this photo is around the tree line. The sky is really a deep cerulean today... oh well. Another shot of the hillside:

Same saturation problems, but you get the idea... (that's my driveway in the foreground). It's so amazing here... even in the dead of winter, it's beautiful.