Continuing along with the squares that make up the Neopolitan blanket that I sent to the Texas State Fair, here are the cables!!!

The diamonds square is from Beautiful Knitting Patterns by Gisela Klopper p. 51




The next cable square is a complicated middle cable framed by two XO cables. The
two smaller cables came from The Harmony Guides 220 Aran Stitches and Patterns vol. 5 p. 34 and the main cable came from a variation of the cable on p. 69



The 3 giant cables are pulled from this pattern. The cables are 12 stitches wide total. The outer 2 twist to the right while the middle one twists left….sorry, no picture since I neglected to take one before I shipped it off.


The final cable pattern is from the Great American Aran Afghan book. I repeated Chart A from Barbara McIntire’s square (p. 45) twice. This one turned out slightly more narrow than I would have liked, but I was able to find a place for it since the Seaweed square turned out to be a little slender as well.

Sydney and I went to take out the trash. She seemed to enjoy running around in the wheat-colored weeds that were as tall as her. It would have made a really pretty picture. So we went to get the camera and came back outside. Then, she seemed to think that she should stand in the driveway and stare at me despite my many “release” commands. Oh well, at least I got this pic of her with the crape myrtle….and a nice chuckle at her thought process.

A good friend and I went to see Cyndi Lauper at the Paramount last night. It was a lot of fun. Prior to the show, I was speed hooking a baby blanket while she and I chatted. When the show started, I tried to put everything back in the bag and managed to drop my hook on the sloped theatre floor. This wouldn’t have been a big deal with any other hook, but this was my perfectly round $8 speed hook. I waited for the intermission and then paced up and down the aisles obviously searching for something until a couple of ladies asked if I’d lost something and held up the hook. So, in case you are wondering how far a crochet hook will roll on the Paramount floor, the answer is 3 rows.


David Rhodes opened for Cyndi Lauper. He’s an extremely talented guitarist (Peter Gabriel’s guitarist since 1979). His singing, however, didn’t speak to me. The auto-tuning on his guitar broke just before the show and I actually preferred to watch him tune his guitar rather than singing creepy songs about his beekeeping. Him telling us he couldn’t tell jokes with his accent while trying to tune and talking to his guitar was actually funny.

Cyndi was great! She’s totally cute and energetic and has a great voice. She sang several of the songs off her new album and updated versions of some of her classics. She managed to stand on a front row chair while singing and danced all night long. She was coordinating her next song at one point and a guy in the audience yelled, “Goonies never say die!” and the whole crowd errupted with cheering. A whole place full of Goonie lovers = good times!