And...much love!

So, last Saturday was my birthday and I got some marvelous gifts, like handmade strawberry jam from an old friend, some books I found at The Dusty Bookshelf for practically free since I have a store account there (for the record, it was this one in paperback and this one, which came with a printout of the painting of the Dancing Muses. I saw it as a sign) and a new CD Alarm Clock from mom to replace the old one that no longer played CDs and ran fifteen minutes faster with every month. Don't ask me where those fifteen minutes went, it was bad enough that I had to reset the time on the clock every month. And finally, a Palm Pilot from dad, slightly used as it spent time showing off in a tradeshow. It has all sorts of things but what I like most is the task list. And the potential to put a Davis Drug Guide on it in the future, when I can save up for it. The Nurse's Cheat Device. I better remember to never put it in a pocket where it might fall into a toilet, though. Things have a tendency to jump into toilets when you're wearing scrubs, it's happened enough times to me and coworkers. It's really bad when it's a cellphone or something like that.

Anyways, another gift I got was the time to free a sock from its needles. And so I give you MY Bayerische, part I.



And from the top:



You know, the tip to getting the right sort of picture to show off your FO is to take a lot, take them near light, and try not to use flash if you can avoid it. Flash totally flattens a photo, you just can't see texture. I say this because I was looking at some other pictures of Bayerische done by other people and some of them have obviously used flash. You just can't see the texture and the yarn kind of glows. And then they try to fix it using the 'sharp' function in Photoshop. I've learned that that tends to make a bad situation worse. I prefer playing with the 'levels' or the brightness & contrast functions. Sometimes I work a little with the hues too because with my camera, it tends to add a lot of blue to an image. The socks above are a far more wine color, like their colorway name "Wineberry". It's not really that grape-colored.

Well, back to the second sock, I cast it on just last night! So it's not even past the cuff yet (yes, I'm slow).