Button, button, whose got the button..?

The Mickey Haiku is finished, at least the knitting part.



It still needs buttons and my quest for Mickey buttons has so far been fruitless. Between my mom and my sister and me, we hit stores in at least 3 cities all to no avail. My sister mentioned that there's a pack of buttons (mostly pastels) usually available in scrapbook areas, but there's only one red button per pack and each pack is $2. While I'm not opposed to paying $10 for nice buttons, that's a bit more than I'd hoped to spend on buttons that I'm not sure will really hold up to, you know, actual use.

At this point, I have two options that I can see:
A) Use largish yellow/gold buttons like Mickey has on his shorts. I'm not fond of this idea. I don't really want the poor kid to *look* like Mickey Mouse; I'm just trying to stay with the theme his/her mom's picked out for the nursery.
II) Rib out the button band and re-knit it with six button holes, thus enabling me to use the letter buttons my mom got that spell M-I-C-K-E-Y. I like this option better, and since this is a Haiku and therefore knit side-to-side with the button band last, ripping it out wouldn't be too onerous. But it's still not ideal, so I'm still waffling.

In other news, though, said sister has competition this weekend for her school's one-act play (she's the director) so won't be at the aforementioned shower. Which means I can continue to work on her shawl there and continue to put off deciding what to do with the lovely wool I got last week. So far, even though I seem incapable of making it through a full pattern repeat without forgetting at least one yarn-over, it looks good when you stretch it out:



It's the Adamas shawl pattern from KnitPicks in the Lost Lake colorway of Shadow The pattern is a bit more fussy than I remember Birch being, but then that could be selective memory. It does seem to be settling in now that I'm into the second body repeat, so it must have figured some way to break into my lizard brain at any rate.

And in preparation for the Knitting Olympics, I ordered the yarn for my Fair Isle 101 pullover. And, relatively true to form for me, I didn't get anything I'd been considering. *grin* I decided not to risk KnitPicks Palette being scratchy and ordered Merino Style instead - which, unlike Palette is a dead match for gauge (at least, it should be.. we'll see if it is when I knit up the swatch). Which, of course, required some fussing with the colors since Merino Style doesn't have shades of grey (literally; there's only one shade of grey). So I changed the base color of the sweater to Cinnamon and will be using Hollyberry, Dusk, Moss, Butternut, Nutmeg, and Honey. It's a more earth-toney palette but I think I'll like it better than the primary color palette in the original pattern.

And as if that weren't enough, I also ordered two skeins of Gossamer in the Blue Jeans colorway to make another shawl for my administrative assistant, who's been coveting my Birch since she first saw it. It won't get started until March, though, but that should be just in time for spring.