rollin rollin rollin

Look at these contest entries just rolling in! My evil plan to lure unsuspecting knitters to my blog has worked! Bwah ha ha ha! Everyone has such great things planned for summer knitting, I'm slowly searching all these patterns out on Ravelry and adding them to the never-ending queue.
Someone asked about my favorite summer knit. Sadly, I don't have much to contribute in that regard. Last summer was my first summer knitting, and I spent most of it struggling with the ASS--the All Season Shell, that is, from Lion Brand. Never was a worse pattern written. (Well, that's probably not true . . . I'm sure if I ever tried to write a pattern, I'd put something far worse together. But I am not commercial yarn manufacturer, so I have no standards to live up to.) Needless to say, that was not one of my favorites.
This summer, I'm hoping to finish the Lotus Blossom Tank, and knit (among other things, I'm sure) the Lutea Lace-Shoulder Shell, Josephine Top, and maybe a Dream Swatch, I think it would be cute with my new hair (and here's what I remember disliking about bangs--they already need a trim! Do I really have to go pay someone $30 to snip the ends off a few inches of hair? What a waste. I'm considering trying to do it myself. I'll be sure to post pictures of that disaster.).
Lately, it seems, I haven't finished knitting much of anything. LBT is on hold because I need more yarn. I've started neither my April nor May Christmas projects. And I've started 3 baby items for Susana, only one of which is kind of finished:
Here are my Saartje's Bootees (perched atop your prize books!), sans buttons. And they really need the buttons for the full effect, I think. I'm sure you are supposed to crochet the button loops, but I can't crochet to save my life, so I just kinda wound the yarn around itself a few times and left it at that. I think they're adorable, but I don't really like the idea of a bootie with a seam along the sole. Obviously a baby won't be walking in them, but it still seems like it would be uncomfortable. You can't ask the baby, though, so I guess we'll never know.
I also have a February Baby Sweater and a Personalized Baby Blanket on the needles. So far no problems with either, but I haven't reached the sleeves on the sweater yet, which I expect will be the tricky part. Damn that pithy Elizabeth Zimmerman and her pithy directions. I learned to knit from a book called Knitting for Dummies, I really need my hand held through these difficult patterns!
I hope everyone has recovered from Sheep + Wool last week! Here is my sad tale of woe: Sometimes the most obvious things don’t occur to me. Like, for example, that some people think lamb = food. Reading through the Ravelry “MDS+W: Day 1” thread, with talk of pit lamb, lamb sandwiches, etc., was enough to put me off this festival until the end of my days. I realize that perhaps it’s “cheating” a bit to accept wool as a legitimate use for sheep but to oppose their use for food (and trust me, this is an issue I grapple with frequently; how humane is wool production? I’m probably better off not knowing.), but the very idea of eating a baby anything makes me want to vomit. So I think I'll be skipping this particular festival (Obviously I can't and don't avoid all social events where meat will be consumed, but I can't quite reconcile myself to participating in an event that in essence celebrates that consumption.); it's not as if I need more excuses to buy yarn anyway.