These goats are made for knitting

The knitting continues apace. Above is my second scarf. I have learned to do ribbing, and to make stripes, and the whole thing casts a spell over me. I don't get tired. I just want to see my scarf grow. (Alexandra is having a similar experience right now.) It puts me in mind of when I took a woodcut class in art school -- it's the same kind of soothing repetitive motion that puts you into a kind of trance and makes time fall away. And, like with woodcut, it's good because it only uses a little sliver of your mind (when you're doing to basic kind of knitting I am doing, anyway) and leaves the rest of it free to watch movies! Woodcutting for me will be forever inextricably intertwined with The X Files, because Jim and I were newly living together when I took that class, and I had never watched X Files before, and he had tape after tape full of episodes, and so for a whole weekend when I was working on a big wood block, I watched dozens of episodes. And whoa did I have weird dreams that weekend!

I don't have a whole lot of time right now to slip into a knitting trance. I have a new Laini's Ladies line I'm working on, plus writing Silksinger, so it's only at the very end of the day when my head is tired of thinking, that I let myself knit. Last night caught the end of a documentary on Alexander Hamilton, reminding me again how little I know or remember of US history. Had the same feeling watching the John & Abigail Adams doc last year. It feels so wrong to have forgotten what these men did for us!

But enough of that. Back to knitting. Here is my first scarf, all rolled up:

That one was Manos del Uruguay wool, lovely stuff. And this is my current scarf:

It's mostly Debbie Bliss "Alpaca silk" -- which will have to be the subject of a new "Earth's Greatest Hits" -- I never knew alpacas went into chrysalis! Wow! [snort! just kidding!]. But whatever alpaca silk is, it's really soft. Then there's a skein of cashmere in there, the poppy red color, which I just had to have, and then saw the price tag and realized it was cashmere. Ulp. By the way, quiz: Where does cashmere come from? Do you know? It's one of those things I wasn't sure I knew. Sheep? Um, bunny rabbit (not really). Here's the cutie:
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(He's the one on top!) The Kashmir goat! Did you totally know that already? Am I the only one who was fuzzy on that? (no pun intended.)

Ooh! P.S. Publisher's Weekly review! Click here and scroll about halfway down. Yippee!!