Happy Tuesday!

We are now officially done with second grade and to celebrate, we went to Waco to see my in-laws for the weekend. We all had fun, but Finn got to experience something new. My in-laws have a pool and theoretically Finn is a water dog (he's also a bird dog but he's scared of robins - a duck would probably give him a heart attack). All of our other dogs (ours, my brother in-law's, my in-laws) have been introduced to the pool at a very young age. Finn will be 3 on Friday. Now he met the pool in December when we came down for our househunting trip and left him, Ramius, and Caleb there. December was very cold though and while Finn thought having a giant water bowl in the back yard was a pretty great idea, he had no urge to get into it. Now that it's June the pool isn't so cold. We all got in the pool and Finn clearly was disturbed by all the people in the big waterbowl and proceeded to circle the pool trying to figure out how to get to us. We showed him the stairs and while he clearly wanted to be with his people, he didn't trust stepping into the pool on the stairs (I think it was a depth perception thing with the water covering the stairs). Finally we maneuvered him onto the stairs and he quickly relaxed just sitting there. We did get him to swim out into the pool a couple of times and he swam like a pro, but clearly it's going to take a bit more practice before he's comfortable getting in and out of the pool. In the picture above, he's sitting on the top step in about 3 inches of water.

I also got a lot of work done on the Rosebud Pink Wrap. I've now got about 2 more inches to go before I start decreasing every row for the final corner. I'm actually still on my first skein of Geisha which is just under 1000 yards. I do think I'll need to start on the second skein of Geisha to finish the wrap, but according to the pattern, I was supposed to need about 2000 yards of fingering weight (it calls for double that amount of laceweight, to be knit with two strands held together). In the interest of full disclosure, I was supposed to increase until I had 210 stitches before I started working along the straight length of the wrap and I only increased to 175 stitches (which will still be larger than the 24 inches wide the pattern claims to give me). I do plan to block the wrap lightly to get the diagonal ridges from all the garter stitch and I'm not entirely sure that they blocked at all in the sample wrap. Now I know the pattern was written by a yarn company and they are in the business of selling yarn, but their yarn calculations seem overly high to me, despite my changes. Once I'm completely finished with the wrap, I will figure out exactly how much yarn I used and let you know here and on the project's Ravelry page in case anyone else is interested in doing this wrap. I think if you were to do this in superwash, it would make a great, easy to care for, gift for a non knitter. I realize it looks like a bit of a boring slog (seriously, it's essentially a giant dishcloth), but it's really moved along pretty quickly for me personally and I just worked on it during those little times during the day when I needed autopilot knitting or in front of the TV at night.