Where have I been?

Hi Folks! It has been a very busy time around here since my last post. My Mom had another fall. This one assisted by a 4 year old neighbor who leaped off the stairs and into her arms for a hug. Wasn't very funny at the time but in hindsight someone should have been there yelling "timber!". Mom went over backwards like a felled tree and wrenched the living daylights out of her back. Took a couple of days to convince her that she needed to go to the ER. The fact that she couldn't move at all and was in immense pain might have had something to do with it.

So after a day and a night in the ER zonked out on morphine and muscle relaxants she was transferred to a convalescent hospital for a week or so. Last year's fall put her in a convalescent hospital that was about 15 minutes away. This time it was waaay out of town, about 40 minutes. So DH and I took turns going to see her everyday. Got her home and tucked in last Wednesday and she is getting better every day.

Then my younger sister decided she needed to come down from Oregon on the train and stay with Mom for a few days. I guess she needed to see for herself that Mom didn't really have one foot in the grave and was as well off as I and Mom had been telling her. That visit went well enough and we loaded her back on the train tonight. Now, hopefully, life will begin to get back to some semblance of order. (Knock on wood!)

I received the next round robin to work on. Not sure yet what I am going to do, but I have a couple of ideas. Here is what it looks like now.



And for L&L here are some pics of the sleeve of a new shrug I am working on. In the first pic I thought I'd be clever and put the cuff over my lamp to show the "lace" off better. Not real successful in my opinion.



Here's one of the sleeve "laid out" so to speak.



The lace swirls around the sleeve because all of the decreases are done exactly the same, all in one direction. And the colors swirl around and climb up the sleeve. Gradually, every 16 rows, I am replacing some of the lace with stockinette, until there is no lace left. I've just changed to a larger needle and will knit the last of the sleeve and the back in plain stockinette. The next 2 pics show the gradual changes.



If you look closely you can see the stockinette beginning to be introduced.



And here you can see the stockinette is almost solid at the top. After another 20 or so rows of plain stockinette I will start knitting back and forth for the back. Wonder what the colors will do?

So there you have it. Love to have some comments on the sleeve so far. I am off to bed now and a deep, healing sleep. "Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of time..." Good old Shakespeare!