(Miércoles) mid-week mildness...

i've finally figured out (part of) the reason why the squirrels seem to spend so much time hanging around our balcony.  our concierge likes to feed the local wildlife.  there's a small mountain of peanuts on the grass near the entrance to the building. it may seem perfectly harmless, but the squirrels keep digging holes in my flower pots to bury the empty shells. i actually had to intercede as one of the cats was about to pounce on a squirrel in the middle of hiding away his precious.  Diesel, the cat i had before these two, was in the habit of hunting stuff outdoors then bringing the carcass indoors and depositing it in my shoe as some twisted form of "sharing".  while i don't expect these two to be equally insane, i would rather avoid the risk of finding a dead squirrel in my favorite pair of sneakers.

i have, however, come to terms with the local flock of pigeons that like to hang out on the edge of the roof.  i even have a favorite.  this one...

ain't (s)he purdy???

i'm  finally gotting around to taking a few photos of my (relatively) recent finished objects.  this was a sweater i made for my favorite animator's birthday some months ago.

he has this thing about close-fitting collars, so many, many, manyyyyy sweater designs were rejected before he finally settled on the plain-Jane Flax pullover from Tin Can Knits.  the deciding factor? as he put it, "it has a wide collar, plus, i can run my fingers up and down the arm ridges like i'm playing a washboard".  yep.  pretty much.

i had two batches of yarn in a lovely heathery wool-alpaca blend, but i did not have enough of either batch for the project, so i used one strand from each dye lot, held together, for even more heathery goodness.

and i finished it off with a nifty label from RememberWynn. i'm still fighting the urge to get some custom labels from them so that i can sew my name into all my clothing, big kid style.

alpaca is notorious for blooming after the first wash, and this one did not disappoint.  looks like a veritable garden of cushiony mosses (and this is the most spot-on representation of the color).

some of the definition of the shoulder ridges was lost along the way, but as he put it, "i can still feel them when i run my fingers up and down my arm". yep.  pretty much.