Productive Weekending

Though it went by too quickly, as it always does, the weekend was a good one. We all caught up on sleep after a not-so-great last week, the sun was out, and we had few things on our schedule, which provided us all with some time to rest and recharge. My mother came home on Saturday afternoon (she's staying a few weeks to get my parents' taxes ready and then will fly back to Florida with us girls in a few weeks), so we had dinner with her on Saturday. And of course there was a lot of knitting. Take at look at my Shifty!

It took me a good hour and a half yesterday to complete the tubular bind-off on the hem, but it was so worth it! I ended up knitting only an inch and a half of the ribbing at the bottom, partly because I wanted to ensure that I saved enough of that skein of yarn for the sleeves and partly because I felt that the body was long enough (and I tried it on to make sure and can confirm that fact!). After I finished the hem, I wove in all my ends on the body before I started the first sleeve. If you look closely, you'll see that I have both sleeves on needles; I'm going to work the sleeves concurrently so that I can be sure they match and that they match the sequence of where I used each skein of yarn in the body as closely as possible. On the first sleeve, I've finished up using my first contrast color and have a handful of rounds remaining on the first background color. When I finish those and join in my second background color, I'll pause on the first sleeve and start the second. It's not an especially fast process, but the rounds are certainly much shorter on the sleeves compared to the body, so I think they will move quickly.

I know I've said it was a good weekend, but of course it was hard to watch the news about what's happening in Ukraine. My grandfather came to the United States from Kyiv more than a century ago, back when it was still part of Russian (and still under the rule of the czar), but we still feel a family connection. It is encouraging to see so much support around the world for the Ukrainian people, and we're hoping that cooler heads and wiser minds will prevail.