Surprises from across the big pond!

I was so excited to receive a package from my ISE4 pal this weekend---all the way from Australia! My no-longer-secret pal, Sue, sent me a lovely scarf made from Noro Silk Garden, as well as some other Aussie treats! Here's a picture of the scarf trying to get some light on the window sill. I wanted to make sure you could see all of the colors....

Along with the scarf, Sue also sent some lovely and soft alpaca yarn for me to knit something warm and fuzzy, as well as some yummy treats and scented wax tarts. Here's a picture of Toebi giving the package contents his stomp of approval...

She has now unfortunately started me on a newly-acquired TimTam craving, which I won't be able to supply once this box is gone! The TimTams are chocolate-y and good! Sue informs me that a great way to enjoy these treats is to bite corner off opposite ends and use it to sip your coffee, causing it to become more gooey and yummy! Yikes! I guess I'll have to find an import store to supply my new bad habit!

The wax tarts are scented---vanilla, orange spice and frangipani (my favorite). The wax tarts melt into a pool of liquid to release their scent.

Thanks again, Sue! I love all of the goodies, and the scarf is lovely! However, for the minions, the best part of the package is to ignore the contents in favor of snooping in the empty box...

On the knitting front, worked further on my garden lace shawl, but not enough progress to post another picture. I also managed to make some small progress on the MD moss grid hand towel. Here it is in progress, almost one-third done. (The pic is kind of bad, but hard to get the right light to be able to see the stitch pattern.)

I'm really liking the feel of this hand towel, but it seems somewhat time-consuming to knit as the stitch pattern changes every row in a 14-row sequence. I would love to knit another one in a different color for a set, but I'll see how I feel about that after I see how long it actually takes me to finish this one!

I'm getting anxious to cast on for my next pair of socks, but have been somewhat stunted by trying to decide which yarn to use, with which pattern. I guess too much selection can be a bad thing! I thought I had settled on the Tofutsies, but had a little "winding incident" with that one, making me favor it not so much right now (more about the "winding incident" later). Perhaps I will have to punish that bad yarn in favor of another until it learns to behave...