Did I just go a whole month without a blog post?

Oh dear. I was very close to having a June blog posting this Tuesday, but Flickr foiled me again! I wanted to upload a batch of photos from my computer to Flickr, but I could only do one photo at a time, and 2 or 3 photos repeatedly failed. So finally, about a month after I recieved it, here is a great package I received from my SP15 redux Secret Pal: Literary Cat card, 2 skeins of some beautiful DK weight purple yarn, and some dark chocolate (which is long gone!) Thanks Secret Pal! Luckily, I did manage to knit during some of my non-blogging time over the last month. Some projects were secret: Some were gifts: (You'd think that I would have had the foresight to take pictures of knitted gifts with my camera before they get wrapped. Apparently not) But this one is for me: This is Jewel from the book "Custom Knits" by Wendy Barnard. The yarn is "Dusk" by Filatura di Crosa. Several of my non-knitting hours last month were spent at my LYS Passionknit, perusing the bags of yarn that they had on sale for 50% off. More hours (and yarn) than I care to admit to. The Dusk was one of the yarns they were clearing out that followed me home. The pattern is written for 20 st/10cm, but my gauge was 21.5 st/10cm, so I started knitting the Large instead of the medium. This worked out OK until I got below the bust - then it started looking too loose in the back. Because of the contortions involved, this shot doesn't really demonstrate that fact very well. However, at this point I only had 1 decrease left, and was not yet at the narrowest part of my waist. So I ripped back to a few rows before the bottom of the bust (over 2 skeins of knitting - sign!), started the decreases earlier, and added some extra decreases in. More on that later...