Three beautiful things from the last week:

1. My folks built their first fire of the season Saturday night. The flames crackled and flared and sent the delicious scent of burning wood wafting into the corners of the house.

2. The Mets swept the Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs. I feel good about how they played, but I also don’t think the Cards are going to roll over without a fight in the NLCS series that begins tonight.

3. Rudi and I normally drive up to Connecticut after work on a Friday night in order to maximize our time there. However, although we wanted this visit to be a surprise, it would not have been a nice surprise for my family if we’d arrived unannounced at 2 a.m. So we headed up Saturday morning instead. It’s amazing how a drive that you’ve made a hundred times can look utterly different when you make it at a different time of day. Who knew that the ride was so lovely?

Over the weekend, I found a dress for the upcoming wedding Rudi and I will be attending. It’s a tea-length apricot-colored organza dress with a black net overlay with black embroidered flowers on the skirt. (I am not an expert on fabrics, so I welcome Mum chiming in to correct my description…) $30 at Marshalls. I love Marshalls.

Earlier in the day I’d been whining to Mum that I’d wished I found a dress earlier in order to knit a shawl to go with it. Since I had waited until the last minute, clearly that was out the window.

The more amazing thing is that I actually have a peach-colored shawl/wrap on the needles already (although not the needles in the photo).

The shawl had been put aside when the weather warmed up because it’s made with the yarn pictured above — 500 yards of Brooks Farms’ Duet, a kid mohair-fine new wool combo — which I bought at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in 2005. The pattern came with the yarn and instructs me how to make a self-fringing wrap on the bias. (The farm shop links to a similarly named pattern, but mine forms a parallelogram instead of a triangle.)

I pulled it out tonight and started knitting on it again. I have 10 days until the wedding and, because the shawl is knit on size 17 needles, I think that will be sufficient time to finish. Despite being several inches into the project already, I loosened my gauge a bit in order to facilitate getting the yarn over the cable join of my circular needles. Yes, I know it will cause the bias to curve a bit at the bottom of the shawl, but by the very nature of the knitted object, I think that will be okay.

Now if I can just figure out a wedding gift, I’ll be all set….