Wow… It’s been awhile.

Well I got so busy with work that I really wasn’t paying attention to my knitting or this blog.  :[   Well there have been some changes since I last wrote.  First of all, I don’t work at the Campus Center anymore.  I had applied for Teach for America at the same time but didn’t find out until January that I had been accepted and placed in Hawaii.  I had to make the tough decision to leave the Campus Center and follow my heart.  I’m really excited about teaching next year.  I will be going to Atlanta for the institute in June and then school starts at the end of July.  I can’t believe how quickly its coming up!

A was just home for his R&R two weeks ago.  It was so nice to have him home, but I just wanted to hold on to him and not let him go.  Saying goodbye was only marginally easier this time because we are more than halfway through this deployment.  We had a lot of fun though and made the most of the time we had, eating at all our favorite restaurants, going to the beach and relaxing.

I’ve actually been a busy little knitting bee lately.  I finally hunkered down and decided that no matter what I was going to finish the Minimalist Cardigan I had started so long ago (and restarted, and restarted, and restarted, etc.).  I’ve made so much progress in the last few weeks, all I have left is the sleeves and then putting it all together.  Having a knitting group to go to has really helped too.  I’ve made some amazing friends who are also military wives and they have really motivated me to keep up with them in my knitting and actually complete more projects.  Also, they are really amazing women and I really appreciate the support they give me.

Just a few days ago I started working on the Shetland Triangle.  I can’t believe how quickly its coming along.  Literally, I’ve been working on it for maybe four days and I am already on the eighth repeat.  Its quite simple and the pattern is very easy to memorize.  The only thing is that it doesn’t seem to be getting very large very quickly.  I will probably end up adding repeats.  I’ve never done a shawl, though, so I don’t know how to judge how much larger the shawl will get with blocking.  I suppose I will just have to guess.

I’m also working on something for my wedding in October.  Its a surprise, though so I can’t blog about it yet.  Its coming along very well too and I think its going to be a really gorgeous addition to my wedding attire.

Employment!

Woohoo!  I officially have a job!  I am the new Operations Coordinator at the Campus Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  Wow, that’s a long title.  Basically I run the Meeting and Events Services office, so I make sure that events are planned and executed properly.  Although really right now I don’t have all that responsibility.  But I will eventually.  The campus center is an interesting place so far.  I have already been exposed to more Hawaii culture in the last two weeks, than I have in the whole time I’ve been here so far.  I’m looking forward to being more immersed in real Hawaii rather than the touristy things I’ve seen so far.  I love learning about new places and new people.  :]

This week at work hasn’t been great, I’ve been doing inventory, which is not fun.  But I really like the job and the people so far.  I feel a lot less like a fish out of water than I thought I would.  Anyway, here are some pictures I took the other day of the campus center:

Christmas Care Package!

Yay!  My hubby got his care package today.  I sent him a box of Christmas nuts, Peppermint bark from William-Sonoma, homemade Christmas cookies, fake snow, a handmade ‘Our First Christmas’ ornament, a string of lights, a hand-knit Christmas stocking and a hand-knit mini Christmas tree.  I think it was a very good Christmas care package, and he said he really liked it and it was like getting Christmas in a box, which is what I was going for.  It made me just a little bit sad because it reminded me that we don’t get to spend the holidays together.  I’m going back to Michigan for Christmas, but I’m alone for Thanksgiving.  I don’t think I’m even going to get to eat turkey.  Its just hard to spend your first holidays as husband and wife apart from each other.  It’s going to be rough this year.

Anyway, I wanted to show off the stocking and the Christmas tree, so here goes:

The stocking is the Falling Snow Stocking pattern.  It’s pretty straight forward, its basically just a very large sock.  I had to alter the pattern a bit because my yarn was the wrong weight and I went down on the needle size because of that.  I also doubled the stitches for Austin’s stockings because I was replacing snowflakes in the second row with letters for the name.  This ended up being a bit much, which is why the stocking looks a bit large.   I decided I liked it though.  For mine I only added a quarter more stitches so its a bit more reasonably sized (and also still in progress).  So essentially Austin’s is the ‘Daddy’ stocking and mine is the ‘Mommy’ stocking.  Eventually, we’ll also have kids ones that will also be smaller.  I may also end up redoing Austin’s eventually, but he said it was cute and I told him that it has to be that big because that’s how much I love him.  🙂

The Christmas tree is this Fun Fur pattern.  It is pretty easy too, you just keep increasing stitches until its as wide and as tall as you want.  I only messed up on two things, I didn’t catch that you are supposed to use the normal yarn with the fun fur yarn right away.  I also had trouble in the very first rows because there were only five stitches and it was hard to keep the orientation correct.  You really can’t see or count stitches as you go along either, but it also hides mistakes so its not a big deal.  It’s a very quick knit.

Now I just have to do the Christmas ornament patterns I got from knit picks.  🙂

Random Fun Wedding Things

I’ve completely neglected sharing some fun and exciting wedding stuff.  We picked a date!  October 17th, 2010 (barring any major changes to Austin’s deployment schedule).  We also picked a venue.  I’m very excited, because its very casual and fun and has a great outdoor space which was important to me.  It’s a very cool old barn in Ann Arbor called Cobblestone Farm.  Everything about it was perfect.  It’s casual, its affordable, its beautiful, and if Austin gets extended for some reason, they will let us change the date with no financial penalties.  I think I’m actually more excited for taking pictures with the barn and the grounds than I am for the actual wedding part of the whole thing.  🙂  It really is gorgeous.  And honestly, aside from actually booking and choosing everything else, we have decided on practically all of the details.  I’m surprised at how easy-going of a bride I ended up being.  I got so into wedding planning that I even made one of those wedding websites on theknot.com.  It is here if anyone is interested.  I even went all crazy and registered for things one day.  Austin hasn’t had time to go over them yet, though so they aren’t final.  It was fun, though.  We totally need nice stuff for our apartment.  I’m still using the dishes my oldest sister bought when she first had a house in Ann Arbor.  That was the fall of 2000.  They are in pretty good shape, but I want dishes that didn’t come in a box from Meijer.

I do miss Meijer, though.  There are no grocery stores like that here, where there is a huge grocery section and then a practically everything else you need section.  This has always been my hierarchy for stores like that: Meijer>Target (targets in MI don’t have groceries)>Kmart>Walmart.  I hate Walmart.  Sadly, I have to shop there now because it is the closest random things you need store to where we live.  I have to drive like twenty minutes to get to Target.  I still go like once a week, I just have to plan it for when I’m going somewhere else at the same time.  Ok, enough random tangent.

The other thing I did was buy a wedding dress.  That was daunting, but its very nice to have out of the way.  I won’t tell you what the dress is, for obvious reasons.  But it is gorgeous and looks amazing on me.  I am in love with it.  Also, the store I went to, B’Ellagance Bridal, totally rocked because I got a military discount.  That’s right, a military discount on my wedding dress.  And 10% on a wedding dress is nothing to sniff at.  Finally, the army did something absolutely 100% awesome for me.  I was actually shocked at the other stores I went to in Honolulu.  I had done some dress shopping on my trip to the mainland back in September with two of my friends and also with my mother at several different stores.  I had good experiences at all of them except David’s Bridal.  I don’t mind the dresses there, they are really quite nice, but I do not like the service.  Maybe its just that one in Saginaw, but its too much like a bride factory for me.  They rush you, they are attentive in a way that puts pressure on you, instead of actually serving you, and they force you to try on a tiara whether you like it or not.  No joke, they did it to my sister and to me, like three years apart.  Anyway, the two dress shops I went to in Honolulu, Princess Brides and Bella Wedding Boutique, both had sample dresses in mostly sizes four and six.  Anyone who has shopped for a wedding dress knows that they run small, so in a world where the average woman is a size eight or ten, why would you carry dresses that most people can’t even try on?  It was really frustrating.  At Bella Wedding Boutique they had one dress that was what I was looking for and could actually try on.  Why did I even go there?  It was ridiculous.  B’Ellagance, on the other hand, had a lot of dresses to choose from, decent prices, and sizes that were accessible for most women.  And the woman running the shop was incredibly helpful and attentive to me.  It was just such a great atmosphere.   I highly recommend it.

Well those are my wedding updates for now.  I can’t believe its less than a year away now!  It’s a bit odd to be married and be planning a wedding, I feel very self-conscious when people look at my wedding ring and I have to explain.   It’s not uncommon in military marriages, though, so at least I’m not alone.

Wow… its been awhile

Sorry I have been slacking on blogging lately.  I have actually been knitting like crazy though (one of the few good side effects of still not having a job), I just can’t post pictures for most of my projects because they are Christmas presents.  Two of them are on their way to my DH in Iraq, hopefully to be received by him at the end of the week (packages have been taking about a week so far) and then I can post pictures of those.  Maybe if I’m nice I can even get him to take some pictures of them in his CHU.  🙂

All in all, I have completed six Christmas present knit projects.  I’m very proud of myself.  I have at least three more I am hopeful of finishing in time.  I realized that its going to be ten times easier to wrap and then mail my presents to the mainland, so I have to get them done a bit sooner than would normally be necessary.  Although I can always keep going and carry a few with me on the plane.   I can post one project because I’m sure the recipient doesn’t read my blog.  It’s a chullo hat for my brother-in-law.  He mentioned wanting one quite awhile ago and I just got around to knitting it now.  Hopefully he still wants/likes it.  :]  This is the pattern I used.  It wasn’t too hard, but as the writer of the pattern states in the beginning, its not incredibly well written.   It’s not bad, I just found it unclear at several points, and my missing details because of this lack of clarity meant that I had to frog this about four times.  Twice all the way back to the ear flaps, one of those after practically completeing the entire thing.  It should be a quick knit, but it wasn’t for me.  Despite all of my troubles, I think it turned out pretty well.  It’s much better than the swell hat that I knit so long ago, so at least I learned from those mistakes.  🙂  Enough yammering, here are some pics, the first one shows a bit of the lining:

One thing I really don’t like about hat patterns is that I haven’t found one yet that satisfactorily gives instructions on sewing a lining into them.  That was what messed swell up so much.  I did a better job with this one so I will give a brief description in case someone else wants to try my method:

I laid the hat on the fabric, cutting around the shape of the hat laid on it’s side with about two inches of give all around.  I then used that cutout as a pattern for the second cutout.  I then flipped the hat inside out and stuffed it with some plastic bags so that it was relatively similar to being on someone’s head.  I shaped the lining between the two pieces starting from the bottom, making sure that the entire bottom edge would be smooth.  I used pins to hold it in place and worked from the bottom up on either side, meeting in the middle.  I did this ensuring the entire time that the fabric around the bottom edge and the sides of the hat would be relatively smooth with no bunching where the hat directly touches your head.

When I got to the top, I folded the fabric over on itself three times on either side so that there would be relatively equal bunching in the center of the top of the hat.  I pinned the bunches themselves down and then pinned the two sides of bunching together in the same manner as the sides.  Then it was just a basic stitch up the sides and through the middle.  I did two different strands of thread, working from the bottom on each side and going over the middle twice.  Since the fabric there was so thick, I wanted to make sure that the stitches would hold, so going over it twice seemed like a good idea.  I then trimmed off as much of the excess fabric as I could, getting as close to the stitches as possible without cutting into them.

Next, I flipped the hat the right way and put the lining into the hat with the stitched edges touching the hat and thus not showing.  I pinned it into place all around, starting at the crown and working my way down, trying to keep the smoothness all around.  When I got to the bottom, I folded the edge under and pinned the bottom edge in place all around.  I then stitched all around using what I guess would be called a hemming stitch or maybe an oversewing stitch. (I’m not up on my stitch vocabulary)  Anyway, I first came through only the lining fabric from in between the hat and the fabric into the interior of the hat so that the thread knot would be hidden, I then reached over the hem of the lining and through the inside of the hat, back through the lining fabric to the interior of the hat.  I did this all the way around so that no stitching would show up on the outside of the hat, like it did in my last hat.

So that’s it basically, maybe this will help some other clueless fool like myself not to mess up like I did the first time.  :]

In other life news, as previously mentioned, I am still unemployed.  It’s quite depressing.  I do have some prospects though.  I applied to a position at the University of Hawaii campus center (kind of like the Michigan Union, but much more modern in style) about a month and a half ago and as of two weeks ago I was one of two they were considering for the position.  They were still checking references and apparently it was slow-going because I have not heard from them since.  The other hopeful thing on the horizon is my Teach for America interview.  I had a phone interview last weekend and found out yesterday that I moved on to a final, day-long interview on December 1.  I’m quite nervous for the lesson I have to plan and then teach, but I feel pretty well prepared for the rest of the interview.  Its really nerve racking to go through this process because I have such a huge desire to do Teach for America that I’m really kind of going crazy about it.  I really want to teach, and will pursue it one way or another, but this would be such an awesome way to start.  Unfortunately for me, I not only have to be accepted into TFA, but I also have to be placed in Hawaii on Oahu since I can’t move (thank you US Army).  Just cross your fingers for me.  I won’t find out until January 21.  I’m going to go crazy until then, even more crazy than I already am!  :]

Well I will post all of my Christmas projects after the holidays (my family is celebrating over New Year’s since my sister has to work on Christmas, so it won’t be right away.  I am seriously looking forward to jetting off to Michigan, landing in a land of snow and being handed a winter coat from my parents so I don’t freeze.  I don’t even know what I will wear, I left all of my winter clothes at my parents house.  Maybe they can bring me a sweater too.  🙂

I also bought some gorgeous yarn from a cute little yarn shop in Kaneohe the other day.  I hope to make the Featherweight Cardigan with it, although its not the right weight so it won’t look quite the same.   It’s a beautiful Ella Rae Bamboo Silk in Pewter and it is soo soo soft.  I am in love with it.   I’m not sure that I bought enough yarn, though, so I will probably have to choose another project.  I went to the store looking for a yarn for that project and fell in love with this one so I had to get it.  I just picked an arbitrary number of skeins, they didn’t have very many.  I wasn’t really thinking in specifics that day.  Oh well!

Summer Wrap Up . . .. . and Gone.

The last month has been busy.  I finished two pairs of booties for my niece and I will be bringing them to her in less than a week, which I am incredibly excited for.  I also finished one of my Christmas present knit projects, but I can’t share it here so that the recipient doesn’t see it early.  It is up on ravelry (tatortut is my handle) so if you have an account you can see it there.  It turned out marginally well.  Now I just have three Christmas knit projects left.  Two of them are small and one is maybe medium sized so I am hopeful on completing all three.  Also, maybe I will finally get around to finishing at least one piece of the minimalist cardigan I’ve been working on for ages.  I always get about three inches done and then set it down for so long that I forget where I am in the pattern repeat.  The yarn I picked is uneven so I can’t really read the pattern back to find my place.  I need a really good, steady method for reminding myself where I am so that I don’t have to continually frog the piece.  I think I have gotten to three inches about seven times now.  It’s incredibly annoying.

I also picked seascape back up.  It’s incredibly easier this time.  I still have to use lifelines and have frogged a few times, but all in all it is a much smoother lace effort this time around.  I’ve actually gotten off of the first chart and am slowly but surely making my way through the first repeat of the second chart.  I think the projects I’ve completed since starting seascape the first time have really given me the confidence I needed to be able to do lace comfortably.  I’m almost ready to call myself an intermediate knitter.  Woohoo!  Now I just need to get up the courage to go to an Aloha Knits meeting.

A and I have spent the last month fitting as many things into our weekends as possible.  We’ve gone to the beach numerous times, so many times that A was really sick of it in the end.  We have decided, however, that the beach in Kailua is the best beach on Oahu.  Some will argue for Waimea, which is a nice beach, but you have to get there at 8am to find a parking spot.  We’ve only successfully gone there once, and that was probably a fluke.  Kailua is better though.  The sand is that perfect powdered sugar sand, doesn’t get too hot.  The beach is also not far from the parking lot so you don’t have to walk endlessly with all of your beach things.  The water is shallow for a further distance too and the waves have never been too much to deal with.   Beyond that, Kailua has the best plate lunch we’ve had on the island.  You have to go inside Time Market to get it, but that steak is sooo good.  If we had it to do over again, we would probably live there instead of Mililani.  We also stayed for a few days around my birthday at the Hale Koa hotel.  It is a military recreation area at the end of Waikiki.  It is a decent hotel, the rooms aren’t anything fancy, but do you really go to Hawaii to stay in your room the whole time?  The beach there is one of the better Waikiki beaches because its a bit less crowded.  They also have stands where you can rent anything from surfboards, to kayaks, to a very strange water tricycle which is oddly popular.  We tried stand-up paddle boarding while we were there.  Its basically a longboard that you stand on and you paddle yourself around.  It’s oddly satisfying and I was actually pretty good at it.  I only fell once.  A fell a bit more than that.  I liked it so much that I was ready to go out and buy my own board so I could do it whenever I want, but A talked me down from it.  You have to be careful here or you will get too many hobbies.  For my birthday A bought me the most gorgeous bike in the whole world.  I’m not a huge biker and don’t know a lot about them, but it cost a pretty penny and the bike shop guy was talking it up.  It’s a vita sport from specialized and I love it.  It’s white and the seat is all fancy so that the blood flow in my butt is not all messed up and I don’t get all numb.  I don’t know how it works, but it does.  It’s a bit hard to find good places to bike here, though.  We tried biking through Waikiki to our new favorite hot dog place, Hank’s Haute Dogs, but I got freaked out when my bike wobbled and I almost fell into traffic.  We had to stick to the sidewalk after that.  I think with a helmet and some practice I’ll get used to the whole riding in traffic thing.  I was always annoyed with it in Ann Arbor and I think that’s preventing me from getting into it now.  I was a lot better when we biked on the north shore.  I just need to find a good route that isn’t super crowded with cars.  Maybe it will get better when all the tourists are gone too.  We also discovered a nice little hike on the east side of the island near Hananama Bay.  It’s called Makapu’u Point and its part of the Ka iwi shoreline.  Our hiking book says its a three mile loop and only part of it is paved.  We walked the paved part and never saw the other part so A doubts its existence.  However, I’ve found our hiking book to be quite reliable so I think we just didn’t look hard enough.  Anyway, its a pretty quick climb and takes you to the top of the easternmost part of the island and it has a great view.  Its apparently a good place to whale watch in the winter and we could even see Molokai, although barely.   We went snorkeling again at shark’s cove but still didn’t see a turtle.  However, there is a beach on the north shore very close to Haleiwa that almost always has several sea turtles very close to the shore.  There are rocks covered in seaweed or algae or something that the turtles eat so there are there a lot. We call it turtle beach and it often causes a backup in traffic along the north shore because it is so full of people and because of gawking.  We went there a few times and managed to get some close up pictures with our underwater camera.

Here are some pictures from the last month, including some of the booties

Two turtles passing each other at Turtle Beach

Hanging out at Turtle Beach

Snorkeling at Shark’s Cove

View from my paddle board

Check me out! Paddleboarding at Hale Koa

Mmmm… delicious shave ice

He’s not falling right now….

Kayaking on the north shore

Random Beach Scene

Wind surfers galore

Heading for the top

Taking a short breather

Looking towards Kailua from the easternmost point of the island

Whew! We made it to the top

Makapu’u Lighthouse

Check out the awesome picture I took

Me and my hot bike, love at first sight

North shore sunset

Typical Hawaii picture, palms at the beach during a sunset

Other than those highlights, we spent as much time together as possible because this weekend was when A was leaving for his deployment, although we didn’t know the exact day until a few days before he left.  After spending a painful three hours in a hangar surrounded by families whose children should not have been up at 3am, after hugging him and crying too many times, and after the fruits and vegetables beagle had checked all the bags, I had to hug my husband for the last time for at least seven months, maybe for a year and watch him walk to a bus and drive away to the air force base where a huge plane whisked him away to who knows where en route to Kuwait.  It was exactly as anything the army organizes can be expected to be, much longer than necessary with as much confusion as possible.  You’d think they’d have this stuff down by now, but no.  I was glad that there was at least someone there that I knew.  A wife of one of the soldiers in A’s troop, who was supposed to already have left last week (she’s in the army as well) but got left behind until this week was there, and having someone else to cry with really helped.  It’s been over twenty-four hours since they left and I still haven’t heard from him.  The phone rang earlier and I freaked out thinking it was him.  I hate not knowing when he will call, I can’t put the phone down.  I slept with it in my hand all night.  I’ve eaten too many cupcakes to admit to and haven’t slept for more than four hours at a time, although that’s as much to do with the cats as to the empty spot in our bed.  I’m just glad that I’m going to the mainland on Sunday, its giving me something to look forward to and I really need a hug from my mother.

Scuba!

We went scuba diving last weekend.  It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.  I was a bit nervous when we got to the dive shop but then I got even more nervous when I found out that we could die from lung over expansion injury.  I forget to breathe at first when we go snorkeling just because its weird to breathe underwater so I was afraid I would forget here.  I found out later that you really can’t forget to breathe, you have to think about it the whole time and its hard to think about anything besides that and your ears.

Anyway, we went out on a boat from Hawaii Kai and went over safety stuff on the way out.  I must say, our driver and instructor were very interesting.  The driver’s name was Grasshopper and our instructor was a combination of Robin Williams not on his meds and Phil Hartman.  They didn’t even take us somewhere to practice, we just put all of the gear on (which is heavy, but not that heavy) and jumped into the water.  We all sat on a rope anchored to the bottom and did skills tests while we got used to breathing with the regulator.  Like I said before, you really have to think about it, but you get used to it.  Then we slowly went down the rope, adjusting our ears along the way.  Once we got to the bottom we swam around a bit, but there wasn’t much to see on our first dive.  Our second dive was much more interesting.  I think the dive site was called Turtle Canyon but I don’t remember.  We saw two sea turtles and tons of fish.  There was also a little buddha statue on the bottom.  I was literally only a few feet away from sea turtles, it was awesome.  I love sea turtles and had been dying to see one up close since we got here. I think we are going to get certified eventually.  I want to do it now, but we might wait until A gets back.

Well here are some pictures – not taken by us, we just had a little reusable disposable camera type thing, but our instructor had a nice digital camera and he sold us the pictures afterwards.

First Socks Finally

I finally finished those socks I started six months ago the other day.  I must say, it was incredibly satisfying to get over second sock syndrome and get those done.  They aren’t my favorite, they are pretty boring, but I think I did a good job and I’m proud of them.  Now I am so ready for an exciting sock pattern, with a challenge.  I’m thinking about tackling this pair from knitty called Outside In.  They are very pretty and I have some pretty blue sock yarn that would be great for them.  That’s something I’m really trying to do, use up some of my stash.  I don’t have a job yet (argh) so I don’t want to go crazy buying all sorts of yarn I don’t need.  My exception to that rule is that I can make things for Madeline with new yarn.  🙂

While I’m on the subject, here are some new pictures of Madeline, along with my first socks.  Enjoy!

New life… new kitty!

Well so its been a few weeks now, and we’re starting to get settled.  The apartment is still a bit of a mess, but its more like we live here now, although we still don’t have a dining room table.  I always forget how much moving sucks until I have to do it again.  It’s awesome to have all of my stuff back, (especially my yarn!!) but I hate having to think about where we are going to put all of our stuff.  I never thought I’d say that I miss Willowtree in Ann Arbor, but I do miss the closets.  We have two, and it is not enough.  I need more places to hide things.

Anyway, back to the point of the post.  Yesterday, we took a trip to the Humane Society and picked out a new little buddy for Orbit.  The Humane Society here is a really nice place, all the animals live in little houses that are open air, so that’s nice for them.  I only have two complaints.  First, they are not very organized over there, we waited about twenty minutes long than we should have because their receptionists sort of sucked and didn’t notice our cat and one other cat waiting to go home with someone.  Also, they just walked off with about ten people waiting to be helped, for seemingly no reason and were gone at least ten minutes.  My second complaint is that they aren’t very thorough about who they allow to adpot animals.  All I had to do was give them my name, phone number and address.  When I adpoted Orbit I had to bring a copy of my lease so that they knew we could have a cat at our apartment.

Moving on, he’s a little orange tiger kitty and we named him Hilo.  I wanted to give him a Hawaiian name since he is Hawaiian, but none of the “names” I looked up worked.  Hilo is the name of a city, to which I’ve never been, since its on the big island.  I just liked the way it sounds, I think it goes well with Orbit.  As far as I know it doesn’t mean anything, but its cute.

Even though he’s supposed to be a buddy for Orbit, she doesn’t like him too much yet.  It hasn’t been 24 hours yet, though, so I’m hopeful.  Already today its a bit better.  Orbit has come out from hiding to observe Hilo and even came and slept on my lap for awhile, so she can’t be too mad at me.  We’ll see how it goes.

Well here are a few pictures of my new baby:

Danica Finally Done!

Woohoo!  I finished the Danica scarf I’ve been working on for what seems like forever.  I’m super excited to have another FO, but even more excited that I don’t have to knit this anymore.  It was fun at first and interesting since it was a bit different; but at the end it got seriously annoying.  I had to rush and cut the scarf a bit short so that it would be done before we left for Hawaii and I barely made it.  I took it to work and put it in the recipient’s folder at work about two hours before A and I left for St. Louis.  I’m a little bit peeved actually, because I haven’t heard anything from her about liking/appreciating it.  Whatever, though, I didn’t pay for the yarn so I guess its ok.

I will say that the pattern isn’t bad, its well written and easy to follow, I just think doing those tiny squares over and over and over again really sucks.  I will stay away from entrelac patterns in the future.  Here are some pictures of the finished product: