This is a picture of my beautiful... um...relative.  Nico is the second son of my nephew....what do you call that kind of relative?  In any case he is beautiful and he is winsomely modeling the sweater I made for him before he was born.  This is a version of the Hooded Sweater for Everybody made with hand dyed sock yarn so it is warm and entirely washable.  Based on his parents I assumed a dark haired, dark eyed baby and as you can see I assumed correctly, which doesn't always happen for me.  There was, of course, no way of anticipating the awesome adorableness of Nico himself.  He is a darling baby boy and is, in this picture, approximately 6 months old.  If you would like to make a version of this jacket for your own charming relatives it is listed on the pattern page here and on Ravelry here.  If you do decide to work one up please send me photographs.  You really just can't have too many of these cute baby pictures.

This is a mood shot of the studio, with my latest shawl on the blocking board.  This is hand spun Shetland (breed of sheep) from a sheep of my acquaintance who lives with my friend Beatrice Gilbert.  This moody gray is the actual color of the sheep, the wool has been washed, carded, spun and knit but not otherwise interfered with.  I will be posting the pattern in the next couple of weeks.  But the studio looked so nice this morning after I pinned it out that I wanted to show you.  See the spinning wheel, with the blue wool/alpaca blend that I am spinning up for the next project.  You can glimpse a Hawaiian pillow in the seat beside the spinning wheel, which provoked me to add the orchid on top of the shawl.  It seemed unbalanced to have only one Hawaiian touch in the frame and this orchid reminds me of the wild ones that grew beside the roads in Orchidland where we once had our little homestead on the Big Island.

I love that my work spans influences from Hawaii's orchids to Maine's wool and that both ends of this spectrum are anchored in the natural world that surrounded me in each place.  

This is a detail shot of the lace on the corner of the shawl, which is a  Shetland Hap Shawl.  These were everyday shawls that Shetland women actually wore, not the fancy delicate ones that they sold.  I thought about doing a cable pattern with this yarn, but it seemed to want to be a shawl, so I went with it.  I now have seven shawls, which may seem excessive to anyone who is not me.  That is one for every day of the week.  A friend suggested that I should stop now, since one for every day of the month might seem like overdoing it.  But one for every month of the year perhaps???