Melanie has just added the Jojoland Tonic yarn to the store. She brought in all sorts of really nice colors, so I brought home enough of a heathered red with which to make a kid's sweater. Alas, this yarn and I have had a hard time becoming friends.

Tonic is an acrylic/wool blend, but that's not really the problem (although I prefer wool, I do not consider myself a yarn snob). It took me six tries to find a stitch pattern that made this yarn happy. Yesterday afternoon—after four solid days of cogitating and swatching—I wrestled this design into submission. I think it will be worth the difficulty, because I love love love the way it's working up thus far, but once again it brought into sharp focus that designing, at least for me, is not all that easy.

Actually, I do know what part of the problem might be. At the risk of providing too much information, my ability to design waxes and wanes with the month, just like certain other things. There is one week out of the month (guess which week it is this week) where the design part of my brain refuses to function properly. The first few times it happened, I chalked it up to coincidence, but it's happened too consistently to be a fluke. Normally I just work on something that I've already got on the needles and wait for the design part of my brain to begin functioning again. This time, though, I didn't have anything on the needles and I simply had to push through.

This is not anything I've discussed with any of my designing friends, so I don't know if a) it happens to anyone else or b) anyone else is in tune enough with what's going on in their brains as I am to even notice.

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I made a lot of headway on my to-do list today, which makes me very happy. We have a funeral at our church Wednesday (the father of one of our friends on the fire department) and I was asked to be part of a quartet, so Wednesday is pretty much full. I've got to make potato salad in the morning (DD#2 informed me yesterday that my mother and I both pronounce "potato" as "potata" when referring to salad—who knew?) and then get over to a quick rehearsal before the service at 2:00 p.m. There will be a meal afterward (hence the potata salad) and then I have a regular meeting at 5:30 p.m. Taking one full day out of my week for an unforeseen event means that I have to work twice as hard on the days I AM here. And last week was so full that last week's laundry, cleaning, and bread-making has spilled over to this week. At least I am not working on Saturday. Yay.

I'll keep you all posted on the progress of the kid's sweater. The nice thing about garments for kids is that they work up so quickly.