Initials inscribed

I packed all ten skeins of yarn for my Dallas trip. On the way down I was very ready for some alone time and, for a while, soundly ignored my fellow passengers attempts to make conversation. I was listening to Naomi Wolf's Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries and feeling good about watching the plains go by. Eventually I did get chatty with the other passengers and made a few texan friends. This turned out to be a good thing since my suitcase went missing part way through the trip. I didn't have much in it that I cared much about losing, except for a book I borrowed from a friend and most of the yarn for my sweater. Luckily, one of these new pals of mine discovered it had just been moved into another area- whew! 

By the time I got to my friend John's place, the sweater was about here...

Much of the rest of the sweater was completed at John's apartment during slow quiet mornings and on our road trip to Austin once he finished with work for the week. 

Dallas? Eh. It's okay. When I arrived off the train, John instructed me to find a coffee shop to camp at while he came to fetch me. It was about 4pm and I was in the middle of downtown- and completely unable to find an open coffee shop! I was rather disappointed about this, it doesn't seem very big-city to me to not have some place to camp out at downtown on an afternoon. The district Deep Ellum had some cool sights to see. One could tell they had found Deep Ellum because of the sudden appearance of some very strange and wonderful murals. 

Austin was much cooler. My main argument for the coolness of Austin lies in the discovery that they have the largest urban bat colony in the country. It is a huge bridge that smells like bat shit and it seems to be a popular activity for Austinites to gather at the nearby grassy lawn and watch the exodus of bats in the evening. Other things to like about Austin- one is allowed to ride in the back of pick-up trucks and women are not required to wear shirts. Not that I took advantage of the latter option, but I like options, and I like Austin. We hung out at some very cool galleries/shops/bars/restaurants and went swimming in a river at Red Bud park. My friend Maggie was our lovely guide. I think it was good for John as well. He's based right now in Lawrence, Kansas and Dallas has not been very easy to get used to for the summer. We drove through rural Texas on the way back to Dallas, I knitted, and we talked about many things in a most refreshing way. 

When I got back to Michigan, I had a few inches on one sleeve to go, and of course it took me a week to knit those last few inches and another week to weave the ends in.

Sorry this isn't the best image of it... I learned a new thing about my camera- when one sets the timer, it will take about three or four pictures in quick succession, so as a result I ended up with about 16 pictures of me in various stages of sweater-posing/adjusting my hair/walking/looking at the camera somewhat puzzled as to why is was still clicking. None of them were very good lightingwise, but this one you can see the yolk okay-ish and I'm looking a little blankly confused about the camera, but at least I'm not waving my arms around. So, well, perhaps not the most triumphant imagery, but maybe I can coax a friend into helping me get a better picture later. It still needs to be blocked, but all the same - SWEATER! Ha! Did it! Woooo-hoooo! I don't even care that it hasn't transformed me into that pretty Rowan model. And now I don't feel as intimidated by those long winded patterns.