Here is a photo that my mom just sent me of me and my girlfriends at the wonderful surprise bridal shower that my best friend (and bridesmaid!) Sara through for me last weekend. Sara is on the left, she's a super talented painter, she gave me that cupcake painting I'm holding in the photo. I received lots of other beautiful and generous gifts, I'm sure I'll blog about them soon. Also pictured are Jenna of the fabulous Jenna Rose collection, and Jordana, photographer extraordinaire! We met during art school.

Now that all the chaos of the Knitter's Frolic is over, Chris and I can spend our evenings packing up our apartment. It really is shocking to discover how much stuff we really have. And nothing illustrates that point better than moving! One very packed bookcase turned into about a dozen boxes of books. My "modest stash" of non-TFA yarn filled 3 large garbage bags! That one was a shocker, its actually kind of embarrassing. I may have to do a couple of blog giveaways to de-stash some of it! Stay tuned for that.

At the end of the day, when we're done dyeing, labeling, packaging and shipping, and we've spent a bit of time packing, I sit down and hook away at these totally addictive little circles.

My only rule for picking colours for these little guys is to try really hard to break out of my comfort zone. To not follow any rules! I am so used to really planning a project, picking colour palettes, working in a planned and well thought out manner, but this time I'm just flying by the seat of my pants. Sometimes making pretty circles that I really love, sometimes purposefully making ugly ones that don't make any sense to me, because when they are all tied together with the white border, they work together to look amazing.

When I was a kid I can remember sitting at my grandmothers with my sister and looking at all the multicoloured granny squares in one of her afghans. Since Grammy's afghans were almost certainly stash busting projects the colour palettes were sometimes rather disjointed. Lilia and I would chose our favorites and point out our least favorites, its all part of the fun. I can remember often pointing out a particularly unattractive colour combo and saying: "why would anyone ever pair those colours together!?" and now I'm purposefully doing the same thing in my own afghan! Call me sentimental, but maybe some day I'll have grandkids of my own who will look at this afghan and point out their favorite squares and their least favorite squares, and I'll tell them that I did the same thing when I was their age.

Grammy turned 92 years old yesterday! Happy birthday Grammy!