I've got a love/hate relationship with my sewing machine: I love to use it, and it loves to turn out projects that look like a fourth grader was set loose with crazy glue and a doobie. I rarely am successful, in other words, with my sewing projects. However, a while back, I was able to make curtains for my kitchen:

And ever since then, I've been itching to do something fun. While I'm supposed to be working on my Ravelympics project (and I am! I promise!), my attention has been snagged by something else.

I intend for those fabric combinations to become extremely simple quilts for my kids; the University of Texas for my son, and the blue/brown combination for my daughter. And by simple, I literally mean that I'm going to cut a 60" x 45" panel from each bolt, slap some quilting batting between them, and then quilt diagonal lines across them in a contrasting thread color. Then, I'll use the solid colors to attempt to bind the quilts. On the surface, this seems like it will be easy, but just like anything else - I know better. I'm sure I'll learn a lot, and the kids will end up with useable blankets at the end of it, and the sewing bug will be out of my system for a while. 

But first: finishing up the sweater. I'm 18 repeats down the body, and only two skeins of yarn down so far. I'm think that I will need somewhere around 25 repeats to make it as long as I want it to be, and I've also got the arms to do, so I could possibly break into the fourth skein to finish this thing. But it looks like I'm on target to finish on the deadline!

As of 9:23 this morning, my accounting class is complete. I managed a B for that one, and an A for Statistics. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that they are both over, behind me, and I can move on to bigger and better things.

Like the Ravelympics.

That's a picture of the progress I made in the first three days of the sweater challenge - day four only added two rows (the eyelet row and the row after), so I didn't take another picture. This yarn is the bomb diggity; when it first arrived, I was underwhelmed by the colors, but man, it sure showed me up in the knitting. It's a reddish-purple overall, but there are streaks of blue and some golden browns and such that are carried along with the rest of the yarn, and the garter stitch does wonders to show that off. Two more rows and I pull it all off onto waste yarn and start the sleeves.

What, you don't do the sleeves of your sweaters before you knit the body? I can't be the only person who does that! There's just something about getting the sleeves knit first that makes me feel like I've taken a huge chunk out of a project like this. Even when I'm in the middle of knitting hell, going down the body of the sweater, I can look up and see that once I'm done with that part, I'm done. I don't get as discouraged as I would if I had to then go back and knit the damn sleeves after I've slogged through an entire sweater body. I'm not great with big projects when it comes to knitting; I tend to stick with small things, like socks, I think it's because I have a very short attention span. Socks almost push me to my limit at times.

I'm hoping to get started on one sleeve tonight - if I can do a sleeve in two nights, I think that I might, maybe, possibly pull this off.

Eight days.

That's all I have left in the semester, eight days. Two tests, a homework assignment, a lab and the third (and final) part of a class project, and I'm done with this summer semester. I cannot tell you what has made this semester, these particular classes, so difficult and ridiculous; but trust me when I say that this has most likely been the worst semester I've ever had.

I'm fortunate in the fact that my family has worked rather well to ensure that I've got the time that I need to get things done. As an adult, with a full time job, two kids and a husband, it is not easy to carve out time to study and do homework, but the children have obligingly agreed to sleep on a mostly regular schedule, and they have grudgingly agreed to take naps on the weekends. Mike takes them whenever I really need him to, and in doing all of this, I have managed to worm my way through the past 11 weeks.

Pray for me. The first final is tomorrow.

 I started this thing forever and a day ago; I began, decided to go up a needle size, ripped, and started again. The yarn was won in a contest; when I saw it, I knew that I had to do something gorgeous with it, something that put it somewhere that wasn't my feet. And the Woodland Shawl pattern fit the bill perfectly: easily memorized, portable, and perfect with the yarn. Speaking of the yarn, it is Fearless Fibers Superwash Merino Sock Yarn in Sublime, the perfect balance of gold, red, brown and greens. Fantastic for something called a "Woodland Shawl".

And that makes yet another finished object. If I keep this up, folks will start to get the wrong impression about me.