Unveiled

I can finally unveil two recent gift knits--the little Star Sweater (from Adorable Knits for Tots) for E...



...and another Montana Tunic (from Shear Spirit) for my mom.



I knit the star sweater mostly on our trip to Egypt and Israel, but procrastinated about the front (I'm not a fan of intarsia, the technique used to knit the star) till after we got home. (Ravelry details here, if you want them.)

I knit the tunic mostly in February, while reading. I made the changes I talked about last time--I didn't work the back shoulder increases (which are intended to make it fit better while you take care of your fiber-bearing beasties... but my mom doesn't have any), and I bound off the back neck stitches, then picked up across the bind off for the ribs.

You will notice that being headless online is not genetic, since E, my sisters and I all keep our heads, even though my mom doesn't. Or maybe it's a recessive trait, and we have both the dominant (head appears online) and recessive (head vanishes online) genes?

Speaking of genes, Kevin and I were listening to This American Life over the weekend, and there was a bit called "Phone Call to the Fourteenth Century," about an imagined game show in which contestants called a hut the 14th century and told whoever answered the phone as many important concepts as possible (Wash your hands! Watch out for fleas! There's no such thing as witches--everyone floats! Humans are descended from apes!) in the allotted time, getting a point for each one.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to The Origin of the Species while I row (indoors)--which, by the way, creates this kind of hypnotic trance--and I'd like more than anything to be able to tell Darwin about genes. (If I'm remembering correctly from bio, genes hadn't been figured out when he wrote, so he came up with another theory which turned out to be wrong). You can almost hear his brain whirring away, perplexed but not getting any traction.

Phone Call to the Nineteenth Century!