Birthdays Galore

It was my birthday on Sunday (Happy Birthday to me!) and I had a great time at dinner on Saturday night, brunch on Sunday morning and eating yummy cupcakes later that day (yes, the same cupcakes from my husband’s birthday earlier):

My gifts weren’t too shabby either between my amazing Nikon D90 that I got last month (it was a birthday gift), a gift certificate to a manicure/pedicure, flowers, other gift certificates/cash and, of course, YARN, I think I did pretty well this year gift-wise. 🙂 One of my closest friends, who is not a knitter, gifted me with one of my all-time favorite yarns – Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca & Silk – in TWO different colors. Now is that a great friend or what?? Look at these pretties:

Two skeins in each color (Amethyst and Mandarin)… enough for a pair of gloves! I could probably even make a pretty nice hat as well as, amazingly enough, I already have two skeins in Mandarin. Plus, I’ve been ordered to make things for MYSELF with these, so no gifting them out, which works just perfectly for me!

The friend who gave me this lovely yarn is also the one who has a birthday this week and I have been making the Cherry Fizz scarf (Rav link) for. I finished it last week and I love how it came out! I already gave it to her so she can use it in this freakishly cool weather we’re getting here lately and she is so happy with it, so it was definitely a perfect gift for her.

Also I’m SO happy to add that I entered it as an entry in the Online Knitting Contest for March-April (Rav Link) and I won first place!!! I’m so honored to have won and so excited about this scarf winning it as it was definitely one of my most challenging knits with lots of new stitches and a very complicated chart to go with it. Plus, I think it turned out lovely too. Kimberly who gave out my prize was also extremely quick about it and I already received it in the mail! I got two balls of Lang Jawoll sock yarn as well as the book Knitalong, which I’d been thinking about buying. My husband is very excited about the sock yarn as he claims that I finally got a “guy” color to make him some socks, LOL.

I also have another FO to share with you all… this one was very very quick (only about 5-6 hours) but it turned out quite nice. It’s the Star Crossed Slouchy Beret (Rav link) in Manos del Uruguay Wool Classica. This is also for a friend – a belated birthday gift in fact – and I really like the end result. It’s very slouchy, but I really like the extra slouchy-ness of it.

I do like the color a lot as well, it’s very limey and just plain yum!

As if you really wanted to hear of yet another birthday, my sweet baby Kubrick just turned two years old on April 30! He’s such a good boy and had a great day playing with his brand new duck toy (he won’t even let Hitchcock play with it):

He had a lot of fun shaking it, and shaking it, and shaking it:

He also got a birthday treat… a doggy peanut butter cup that he was nice enough to share with his little brother:

And here are the two pups doing a nice Sit and Stay for the treats:

And just for fun, two of my favorite pics of the two pups taken today:

Please ignore the shoddy top knot work… we’re both in training with these. 😉

The next post will have lots of WIP’s – mostly socks – and some cool new knitting gear I’ve gotten that I love and want to share with you guys. Hope you’re all enjoying my birthday month! 😀