Here's the Lace Arrow Sachet (scroll down to link to pattern) done in fingering weight pink wool yarn with a 4 stitch I-cord tie. I'm going to have to find some loosely woven fabric to wrap the lavender in before I fill it but it should do the trick. I may come up with a smaller sachet pattern of my own if I have time this week.

Last month I was working on an herb article and I had to buy lavender flowers. I bought a huge amount so I thought I'd knit up a few sachets to stuff with lavender and stick in the dresser drawers and in the yarn stash. Trader Joe's even sells nifty little dryer bags full of lavender. I'm either going to make up a pattern or use THIS one. Probably both since I have so much lavender.

Thanks so much for the comments about Bosco the cat. He is much better today and here is a better photo than yesterday's.



Here is a photo from when we adopted him as a kitten 12 years ago. He was such a runt!

My Himalayan cat Bosco is very ill. (photo above with Peaches) A month ago we took him to the vet and said he was acting strangely by sleeping in the bathtub and licking the brick floors. He'd also lost weight even though he was eating more than usual. The vet could find nothing wrong.

He went again today as he's lost even more weight and having some hind leg stiffness. I'd done some reading and thought it might be diabetes. The vet ruled that out but thinks it may be a brain tumor or his liver. We have to wait for the blood test results. For some reason he started howling and became kind of paralyzed when I went to take him out of the carrier. He seems more alert now and I'm hand-feeding him every few hours.

I really hope they can figure out what is wrong quickly and treat it. At times like this I suppose the best thing to do is be optimistic. In the meantime, I'm trying to get some knitting done. Fortunately I'm at the easy part of Liivi's socks.

Linda's blog has inspired me to do a better job of storing color cards. I need to order a few new ones for yarns I work with a lot like Wool of the Andes and Peruvian Highland wool.

I do have some pretty cool color cards though. Check it out:

These are the Alice Starmore/Virtual Yarns color cards. I believe they are no longer produced and are probably going for a zillion dollars on Ebay. The four cards show yarn colors inspired by Sea and Shoreline, Birds, Moor and Mountain, and Summer Isle.

Lisa has produced a beautiful Pi Shawl. Now we need her to start blogging again more often.

I'm always trying to get better scans of the process of working in yarn ends at the end of a stranded color knitting project.

The first thing I do is move each yarn tail in the direction it came from (on either side of the row join).




Now I start doing reverse duplicate stitch on the back of the work. I always make sure to pull the yarn tail in the OPPOSITE direction it was coming from to help match up the joins on the right side of the work and get rid of any holes.

Reverse duplicate stitch on the back of stockinette is two diagonal actions with a tapestry needle threaded with the yarn end. Each diagonal action catches two purl bumps and as you go along the row you go through each purl bump twice which makes it virtually impossible for yarn ends to work their way loose.

Here is the second action. It is hard to show this properly because the various yarn floats at the back of the work get in the way. I just weave around and over them as I can but I suspect you could make this process completely invisible if you meticulously did reverse duplicate stitch UNDER all the floats.

You really don't have to do this for very many stitches as it does an excellent job of securing the yarn ends. I generally cut the yarn tails pretty close to the work as I'm confident they won't work their way loose.

Voila! You're done. There are some sections where you can see the yarn tail diagonally crosses some yarn floats but the actual reverse duplicate stitch isn't noticeable. Even better, it isn't noticeable from the right side of the work.

Theresa has done a great job of using both a photograph and some computer magic to show reverse duplicate stitch on stockinette HERE.

Inspired by the Tharp book, I decided to put photos of most of the items I've knitted in the past 7 years online at a free photo hosting service. If you go to http://photobucket.com/albums/e181/nanetteblanchard you can see 20 photos of hats, 32 of mittens and gloves, 48 of socks (2 pages), 19 of sweaters and 30 of my designs. It was definitely interesting to see everything I have knit together like that. I had no idea I'd knitted so many things of my own design and I saw clearly how much I really like bright colors.

In doing this experiment I also realized I had knit a 9th project from the Estonian book. I completely forgot I had knit Liidia's gloves. I have no clue what happened to them.

Here are the colors I'm using for Liivi's socks from Folk Knitting in Estonia. I'm making mine shorter without the calf shaping but I still think they're going to be pretty nice.

I'm currently reading an interesting book called The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life by choreographer Twyla Tharp. She includes many interesting creativity exercises and questions for your journal (she calls it your creative autobiography).

She includes some interesting info about Mozart. She doesn't believe in "natural" genius and points out that Mozart was schooled by his musician father from an early age. Mozart's hands were deformed by the time he was 28 because of excessive practicing and writing with a quill pen. So although creativity and inspiration may be considered spontaneous or a special gift from the heavens, there is still a lot of hard work, preparation, and routine that goes along with it.