My morning began as it usually does.

I got up before sunrise, helped my son get ready for school, walked him to the bus stop, and saw him off.

Then, after a cup of coffee, I was on my way to dog sit my mom’s dog, Toby.

While she took care of some business, Toby oversaw my activities, and, as usually happens when I dog-sit Toby, I got a fair amount of work done.

My main function is to be there for Toby to ignore, but I also offer him reassurance should he need it. Toby, as always, did an admirable job not noticing me, and I got a fair amount of work done.

While I made substantial progress on the scarf during the dog-sitting venture, my mother finished with her business fairly quickly, and I was soon free to go on my way and complete some errands.

The scarf did not get finished until early afternoon, but the motifs worked out just right, and I used all but about 2 feet of the skein. Here is the scarf before the ends were woven in:

and here it is after the ends were woven in and it had been soaked in warm water and rolled between towels:

Pleased with both the stash bag and the scarf, I was ready to move on. After perusing the book Crocodile Stitch Fashions (one of my acquisitions from the Chain Link conference in Greensboro, North Carolina):

I decided that I wanted to make the shawl using the four skeins of variegated blue dazzle aire that I got in my recent stash acquisition.

The pattern calls for a fingering weight yarn with mohair in it. Because mohair can be a beast to unravel the author, Lianka Azulay, recommends that you start by making a swatch in a frog friendly yarn (one that unravels easily), which I did:

Pleased with my success, I decided that beginning work on the shawl would be the perfect project for my son’s trumpet lesson, so I gathered together the book, the yarn, and the hooks I would need and headed out the door.

As I was using a yarn that is a heavier weight than fingering, I used a hook a 6.5mm hook rather than the 5.5mm hook called for. Diligently working my way through the trumpet lesson, I got this far:

I had been concerned that the crocodile stitch would be difficult in some way, but it is a surprisingly straight forward stitch, once you get the hang of it, and I am looking forward to seeing how this shawl turns out.