The Stripy Bag and Pink Helicopters

I feel like lately I'm the slowest knitter on the planet. I know that I put everything else on hold during the Olympics and this past week my eyes have been itching a lot in the evenings (this is the season for my eye allergies to act up) which makes it tough to do anything, but I was looking at all my WIP's and I feel like they're getting no where. I've decided to get them under control until the only things I have going are 1 pair of socks, 1 other knitting thing, 1 crochet thing, and 1 pattern being tested. I think that will be less stressful for me and I should be able to actually get some things done. I have fallen head over heels in love with The Traveling Sweater (which comes out next week), but I'm going to get my poor Cassidy cardigan finished before I even buy the pattern or yarn. I started that before Thanksgiving! I'm a total knitting slacker!

OK, so here's something I have gotten somewhere with: The Stripy Bag. I'm in the third stripe repeat now and I think four repeats total will be just about perfect. Since The Babette will definitely take longer to crochet, The Stripy Bag will be the crochet project I really work on to get it out of my WIP's pile. It's pretty portable, so if I remember to grab it, I can work on it while I'm waiting on Caleb.

So many of you asked to see the pink helicopter seeds off of Apple yesterday, that I went outside and got a pair for you. The big helicopter came off one of the Maples in the front yard. They aren't Red Maples. They have no names. They are also farther along in the budding/leafing out Spring process. You can see the pair of pink helicopters are smaller and while they aren't ready to fall off the tree yet, I don't think they'll get as big as the regular helicopters do. There were Red Maples in Virginia and Caleb and I would walk to school while the pink helicopters swirled around us in the wind, picking them up along the way and watching while they twirled back to the ground (it took a while to get to school some days). The pink helicopters in Virginia were definitely smaller than the big helicopter in the picture is, so I'm assuming these will also be smaller when they start twirling off the tree. I think if I was one of those people who actually owned my own real helicopter, it would also be pink, so I totally understand why Apple makes his own pink helicopters.