Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and generous praise for the Fishtrap Aran. I’m working up a post on the technical details for those of you who wanted to know more about the finishing process.

In the mean time, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. Whose bright idea was it to kick Daylight Savings three weeks up the calendar? I think I get to pin this one on the Republican party, no? Dadgummit, it was just getting easier to decant myself out of bed at 6:20 because it wasn’t pitch dark anymore.

Happily, thoughtful Mr. Garter thought to put some fresh undies in the dryer for me long before dawn when he got up to drive Cousin Ewa to the airport. Clean laundry eases the pain of forced reentry into waking life considerably. It’s been Cousin Central chez Garter this past week as the whole clan assembled to remember Mr. G’s Great Uncle Wilbur, who passed away in January. Last night we had cousins festooning both spare mattresses and the couch, and we all stayed up much too late in gales of laughter over family quirks and anecdotes. Uncle Wilbur painstakingly recorded his entire life on typewriter, along with helpful chapters of advice directed at his descendents. “Who Am I Going to Marry?” was a particular favorite (take note, ladies: a career at a newspaper — or, one assumes, any career at all — may signal “marriage is not a priority”, and your suitors may turn elsewhere), as were his ruminations on the benefits of child labor and a wholly speculative account of his parents’ courtship. I give you this sage and somber observation:

“A pitchfork is a terrible thing to run across in a haystack.”

I don’t believe that adage came from the courtship chapter, but it may have. I was laughing too hard to make a proper citation.

I feel as though I’ve run across just such a nettlesome pitchfork in the freelance work I do in my non-knitting life. A project for my father-in-law has eaten far more of the past two months than I ever intended to give it, and it’s become an obstacle to a lot of the work I’ve wanted to do with patterns and with this blog. I had hoped that by now I’d have a snazzy page full of projects for you to download, because the ideas keep coming and I’m only lacking the hours it takes to write up sound patterns and knit up samples. John made me think about what we take from the online knitting community and what we give back, and now I’m feeling obligated to do my bit. Unfortunately, the freelance beast has managed to coincide with a final exam and another deadline I’m hoping to meet, but I hope that April will bring some new life to Blue Garter. Stay tuned. And watch out for pitchforks.