Peanuts, Turtles, morning TV, and more

Here we are again, a month later! Maybe I should just tell myself it's okay to update the blog once a month and call it good.

The house is beginning to fill up with foster animals again. I just had Ella by herself for a day or two. By the Friday after Valentine's Day, I'd been given a black lab named Dakota. Unfortunately, she only made it through a weekend here. She has some pretty major separation anxiety issues, and with me working full time and traveling quite a bit for church responsibilities, having a dog that can't handle being home without someone there just won't do. On a positive note, I've been wanting to change out the ugly commercial-looking carpet in the back area for something like vinyl or laminate flooring for a while. Now it looks like it's going to be something more definite than a vague "someday."

The shelter was able to find another foster for her--someone who is home more than I am--so on Monday evening, I traded her out for a smaller, less destructive model named Snoopy. I tend to call him Peanut--he's a bit too neurotic to be a cool, laid-back dog like Snoopy.

Peanut is a chihuahua mix who loves to snuggle up next to you and snooze. Right now, I'm sitting on my couch with Peanut on one side of me and Jamison on the other. They're about the same size, though Jamison looks bigger in this photo. He pretty much ignores the other animals in the house, although sometimes he gets hyper and wants to play with the cats, and they think he's scary. And then Zen wants to play, but Peanut thinks Zen is scary. I'd be scared of rough housing with someone ten times my size, too.

 

Today was an adoption drive at PetSmart, and I ended up coming home with another foster chihuahua. To be honest, I'm really surprised that Peanut wasn't adopted. He's adorable and friendly and little and just a fantastic little dog. Turtle is a little bit bigger than Peanut, but not by much. He doesn't like kids, so I'm a good fit for him. He's pretty funny--quite a different personality than Peanut. Peanut is a slightly neurotic cuddle bug. Turtle likes to be wherever you are, but he's not as much of a lap dog. However, he does like to play with tennis balls.

I have a couple, because Zen likes to chase them, too, although his attention span is pretty short. Right now, he wants to go chasing after the tennis ball too, when I throw it for Turtle. Sadly, Turtle is worried that Zen is chasing him and it ends in a snarl on Turtle's part.

Peanut hasn't shown much interest in toys until this evening. Just to see what he'd do, I rolled a tennis ball by him. He pounced on it, but his mouth isn't big enough to grab it.

Work has been pretty interesting lately. I saw a posting in a library forum online at the end of January talking about a program called "Blind Date with a Book". Basically, the idea is that you set up a display of a bunch of books wrapped up so that no one can tell what's inside. People can come check out a book and find out what they actually got when they get home. Like a blind date. I thought it sounded like fun, so I got permission to do it at my library. We had a questionnaire that people could fill out about their "date"--questions like "How was your date? Was there a "love connection"? Would you two go out again?" and a place at the bottom for them to put in their library card number. They could turn the date review slips in for a chance to win gift certificates for dinner and a movie for two. It was a lot of work to pull the books (and they really were random--I just walked up and down the aisles pulling books willy-nilly) and wrap them up and make sure that the correct barcode was on the outside. That part would be easier at my brother and sister-in-law's library, where the barcodes use RFID so they can be read without having to optically scan the numbers or key them in. But I think it was a big hit. We had almost 120 books checked out, only a little over half said they liked the book(s) they got, but everyone said they thought it was a fun idea and were looking forward to doing it again next year.

Our local news station has a regular feature they do called "Thrifty Thursday" where they do a story about different ways to save money. A couple of weeks ago, we got a phone call from a reporter asking if she could do a story about free or inexpensive things available at the library--particularly ebooks. So one Thursday morning, a coworker, the library director, and I showed up at work at 5:15 am and we filmed a couple of segments live for the morning news. It was nerve-wracking, but still, kind of fun. You always sound different in your head than you do when you hear recordings. You can see it here.

Spring is starting to show up here, and the gardening bug has bitten. One of my coworkers gave me a couple of wisteria pods last week. I planted the seeds and also tried to root the branches that the pods were attached too. It's too early to know if the seeds will sprout, and even if they do, I've read it takes ten years for wisteria plants to flower from seed. Sadly, the stems were pulled out of the dirt in short order by some cat or other. I planted a "non-invasive" honeysuckle vine out along the fence this afternoon. I have this idea of covering up the chain link with some vine or maybe a combination of several--honeysuckle, virginia creeper, berry bushes, whatever. Just something to give some privacy and still let the wind blow through without knocking the fence down. And the flowering plants should bring hummingbirds. :)

I picked up some orchids from the clearance racks at Lowe's this week. One for $7 and the other two for $1.50 apiece. The last two had already finished blooming and I'm not sure one of them is going to make it, but for less than two dollars, it's at least worth trying. Thankfully, the pets have left them alone. So far...

 

On crafty things

I'm still knitting and doing some sewing. The big project recently was something called a "vertical yarn swift." A lot of times, yarn comes in big long looped hanks (like an electric extension cord) rather than prewound into a ball. It keeps the yarn orderly without stretching it out (which can mess up your sizing when you knit it up), but it's not convenient to knit from--too easily tangled. So when you're ready to use it, you loop the hanks around a couple of chair backs, or your knees if you're up for an ab workout, or the hands of an obliging lover.

(painting by William Sidney Mount, Winding Up, 1836)

If none of those things are convenient, there are tools out there that will hold the hanks for you and spin. The most common ones look like the frame of an umbrella, or two cross-bars with vertical pegs sticking up at each end of the bars. They take up a lot of room, or they have to be set up and put away. That's where the vertical swift comes in. The yarn loops around vertically, rather than spinning around horizontally, and so I don't have to clear a space on the table for a swift to clamp.



It's not perfect--I kind of winged the design and I'm no IKEA designer so the pieces aren't cut and the holes aren't drilled exactly. It wobbles a little. But it does what it's supposed to do, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

A few other things I've done lately:
My fantastic Aunt Carrie, a quilter, finished a quilt for me in exchange for a pair of knitted socks. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. I picked out the colors in the center and did some of the sewing of the blocks, and she added the borders and backing and quilting. It's the perfect size to snuggle under when I'm sitting on the couch.


A few months ago, some random person in England sent me a message on Ravelry saying that she had bought me a pattern from my wish list. She said that once a month she picks a random person and buys them something just for the fun of it. I used it to make mittens for my friend Ashley.


A train hat and a bunny for two kids from church. Their mom is my best friend, and for Christmas last year I gave her kids gift certificates for "something wooly". Their mom lets one person cash in their ticket at a time. The next one wants a Santa hat with an attached beard. LOL.
 

Finally, I painted the bathroom a fun shade of Tiffany Blue a couple of months ago. Eventually, I plan to put up a chair rail and bead board (or more likely, bead board wallpaper) on the bottom half of the walls.


I really need to post more often--these get waaay too long! :)

On animals

It's been a long time again! I'm still up to the same old tricks: work, fostering, church, and making stuff.

First of all, fostering.

I've had three dogs and another cat since I last posted. Bandit and Kiwi and Ella were/have been here for months. Bandit had a close scrape. He's an eleven year old dog whose joints hurt and he escaped a couple of times and bit me once when I tried to catch him to bring him back it. Dogs that bite are really hard to adopt out and we were afraid we'd have to put him down. Fortunately, though, he was accepted into a senior dog rescue, was adopted, and now lives somewhere in Georgia. And all very happy, I'm told.

Kiwi you met last time. She's still a pile of "adorbs" but I left her today at the cat room in PetSmart where she'll get a lot more exposure and is more likely to be adopted. It's kind of weird not having her nosing around for love or at least something to eat, since I'd had her since sometime this summer.

I got Ella as a teeny-tiny scared kitten back at the beginning of November. She's very cute and loves to be snuggled--once she's caught. Normally, she'll sit in the same room I'm in, but if I stand or make a move toward her, she'll bolt. It's literally only been in the past two or three days that she's stayed put and let me come up to her. I think she'll be ready to be put up for adoption very soon--yay, Ella!

Chloe was my shortest-term foster, ever. I picked her up at the shelter a week ago, and today she was adopted at PetSmart. She was shy but loved to be cuddled. I like the shy ones, I guess. It's rewarding to see them come out of their shell and learn to be friendly.

So right now, I just have my Zen and Jamison and Daisy, and fostering Ella. I'm also technically fostering a puppy named Lance, but he was adopted today and I'm only hosting him until Thursday. He's a surprise Valentine's Day gift.



So come Thursday, I'll be down to one foster animal. I'm okay with that--things were getting kind of crazy around here. :)

Two months--part two

It may be shocking to some, but knitting has been put on the back burner lately. I'm still working on things, but not very quickly. I've been:

Sewing. As I mentioned two months ago, I've been itching to sew lately, but needed a better place to put my sewing machine. A hunt for a good vintage sewing table led to the discovery that antique sewing machines are plentiful, usually work as if they were new, and really cool. One thing led to another and I have my sewing table for my sewing machine and also a beautiful antique treadle machine from 1923. I got this machine for a really good price because it wasn't working. All it needed was to be oiled well. The cool thing is that Singer set the standard for sewing machines a hundred years ago, so this ninety-year-old machine takes the same bobbins, needles, bobbin cases, and even presser feet as my BabyLock sewing machine that I bought new seven or eight years ago.

Obviously, the table top is not antique. I bought the sewing machine on Craigslist and the treadle irons at a flea market kind of place here in town. The top is a remnant piece of laminate countertop. It came with the irons, but you can get them for really cheap from home centers. I kind of like the granite look, but I wish it had some drawers underneath.

I love sewing with it. There is something nice about the rhythm of treadling, and it's fun to make something and realize that it didn't take any electricity. Well, except for the lights and the iron. But the actual making-up part of it cost nothing. I still have to break out the other machine when I need to do zig zag stitches, but 90% of the time, this will work.

My project this weekend was organizing my pantry. There's a company out there called Shelf Reliance and they make these fancy-schmancy shelving units that organize tin cans so that you can easily use the oldest ones first. But they're really expensive.

I signed up for a food-storage newsletter a month or two ago. Every couple of weeks they email you something simple you can do to get food storage started or more organized. Two or three weeks ago, they sent a link to a pattern that you can use to make rotating can-storage racks from cardboard boxes.

I can get good quality boxes free from work, so all I had to pay for was a utility knife (box cutter) and glue (I used hot glue). The boxes work well and I'm pretty pleased with them. I made a couple following the directions as they were, and then started making them with one rack more. It makes better use of my shelf space, but also means that I can load the boxes from the front instead of the back. I did find that the instructions for the vegetable can size seem to have the back panel about half an inch too wide, but that was an easy fix.

Anyway, I could blather on and on about the things I did--a quick, unexpected trip to Salt Lake to say goodbye to my grandpa, a weekend trip to St. Louis to hang out with my besties for Time Out for Women, for example--but I don't want to give ALL my secrets away.

Two months went flying by--part 1

Where do I start?

First of all: Name change. I started this blog a few years ago primarily as a place to talk about the things I was knitting, and now that I'm using it as more of an expanded general blog, it needed to be renamed. Obviously, if you're reading this, you're not still looking for my blog on the other address.

I'm on my third foster dog (and that may be changing to my fourth soon). Katie went to jail--quite literally. She's been taken up by a program that works with prisoners in the Kentucky State Penitentiary. The prisoners take care of the dogs and put them through quite a rigorous obedience training program, and it's a win-win all around. The dogs enjoy the work, and they "graduate" from the program well-trained and are much more adoptable. The prisoners are learning job skills that could help them find work when they are released, not to mention the benefits of being able to focus on and care for something other than themselves while in prison.

Dog #2 was Heart. She was a terrified, malnourished little thing when I got her, so frightened of everything that she wouldn't even walk on a leash; you had to carry her from the car to the house. I only had her for a couple of weeks before someone called to adopt her (and I hear she's doing GREAT!), but she had totally come out of her shell and was beginning to fatten up.

Heart's coloring is proof that eyeliner does make your eyes look bigger!

Current foster dog is Badger, a short little senior mutt who loves attention. His name is definitely appropriate, because he's got really fuzzy stiff fur and shuffles around like I imagine a badger might. I've also got a foster cat named Kiwi. She has beautiful big eyes and she's a snuggler: if you pick her up and hold her against your chest, she'll tuck her head up under your chin and put her paws on either side of your neck like a hug and purr and knead. *melt*

Badger may be moving on soon. Someone had expressed interest in adopting him last week, but hasn't returned my phone call lately. Or I may be trading dogs with another foster family; they have one that doesn't get along with kids as well as they'd like, but since there are no kids at my house, it's not a problem.

I enjoy fostering these dogs and cats. Especially in Heart's case--it was so rewarding to see her fatten up and it made me ridiculously happy to watch her come running from across the yard when I called, remembering how she wouldn't even walk with me when I first got her. So...if you're looking for a dog or a cat, I know people who can hook you up.

Oh, irony, how you make life interesting

Katie broke her streak of daily accidents this week! Of course, she had one the next two days in a row, but it feels like progress. I'll take it. I got a text from the adoption coordinator at the shelter and someone has been inquiring about her. I'll bring her to the meet-n-greet at Petsmart on Saturday, and hopefully she will be going home with a new family for keeps!

I've been having this urge to sew lately. Some of my friends have these cute little Japanese knot bags, and I've got fabric laying around and there are free patterns on the Internet. It doesn't look too hard (famous last words, ha ha!). But I don't have a good space for my sewing machine. There is room on the kitchen table, but then it gets in the way of eating. I have a whole spare room that has nothing in it but a few boxes I haven't looked into in a year, but no furniture in there. It's all just enough of a pain to make sewing a low priority. Until yesterday.

Having reduced every dog toy in the house to floppy shells, Miss Katie has taken on new, giant stuffies to destroy--the dog beds. When I first brought her home, I had three dog beds in different rooms of the house for Zen to lounge around on. Within the first week, she'd peed on one. It was a pain to wash, and I rationalized that Zen had two other beds and threw the smelly one away. Then a second one got torn to shreds. Last night, I was absorbed in a book, and only vaguely registered that she and Zen were play wrestling around me. I finished the last chapter, closed the book, and looked over to see what the dogs were doing.

That's the guts of the last bed. I wasn't really mad; puppies chew, and to her, it was not much different than any of the stuffies I'd allowed her to destroy. Just bigger. I felt worse that Zen now had nowhere soft to sleep, and was mildly annoyed that this little foster dog was going to cost me so much money in unexpected replacements for the things she's chewed up.

 

On closer inspection, I realized that she'd ruined the zipper of the outer cover, but the inner pillow was only torn at the seam. Fixing it wouldn't take much. So I pulled out the sewing machine and set it up on the floor of the spare room, and fixed the inner bag as best I could. I wish I had photos of the yoga poses I had to make up with the foot pedal at the same level as the sewing machine! It would be like trying to drive a car when the steering wheel was next to the gas pedal, and there were no seats in the car.

 

Now that the sewing machine is out again, I've really been bitten by the sewing bug. First, though, I'd like to have some sort of table to set up on. I spent my lunch hour at a flea market kind of place on the south side of town, but didn't see anything I really liked. I'd rather have an antique-type sewing cabinet than a new craft cart. The old ones are made of solid wood and are much better quality than the new laminate-covered particle board most places seem to sell. And they cost less.

 

Tonight, I set the sewing machine up on a TV tray in the spare room. It's not ideal or even a long term solution, as it's kind of wobbly and there's not enough room. But it will do for now.

 

 

A few months ago, I bought fabric to replace the tapestry side of the couch throw pillows. They don't match my living room decor. I cut the fabric for all four pillows, finished one, and set the project aside. (Probably because I needed the kitchen table!) I did another pillow tonight, and realized that in order to make the new pillow not be lumpy, I have to re-fluff the poly fill before cramming it back into the case and sewing it up.

 

 

In other words, I have to tear the stuffing to shreds.

 

Here we go again

Ages and ages ago, back before the days of Ravelry (a knitting website/social network-I know, sounds weird, but just accept that there's probably a social network for anything, and go with it), I had a knitting blog. Just like lots of other people did; I could share what I was working on, where I got my ideas, show off what I'd accomplished. And then most of us moved over to Ravelry for the forums and databases, or life got busy, or we just got lazy, and the knit blog thing really fizzled out. There are still some left and going strong, but as you can see, I hadn't posted anything here for three years or so. I've decided to bring it back and make it less of a knit blog and more of well, just a blog. Only time will tell if I post more than a few times in three years or not.




So what's going on the the Melissa neck of the woods? Well, I'll tell you.

About two weeks ago, I got suckered into fostering a dog for the Crittenden County Animal Shelter, and brought home a border collie/lab mix named Skye, although I've been calling her Katie because it seems to fit her better. She's a half-grown puppy, but I honestly have no idea how old she is; six months, maybe? She's lively but still pretty laid back and really cute and friendly and she's going to make someone a great dog. (If you know anyone looking for a dog, call me!)

I grew up with a dog and have had one of my own for the past three years, but hoo-boy, she's still a puppy and I didn't know what I was getting in to. Puppies pretty much do whatever strikes their fancy. It means they do really cute things like chase their tails or snuggle up for pats. But, puppies chew. Puppies don't come housebroken. Puppies dig. Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it. She's chewed a pair of glasses and an electric razor that was still plugged into the wall, and my good headphones and yarn and a pair of handknit socks and those are just the first things that come to mind. And I think I might have cleaned up some puddle every day for the past two weeks.

I put her outside this morning with a bowl of food so that she could eat and then do her business while I took a shower and got ready for church, without having to worry about any accidents. This is what I found when I finished and went to bring her in. Doesn't she just look so pleased with herself?

Yes, that's a duck in the dirt. It's a stuffie I bought for Zen a few years ago. He'd broken the squeak almost immediately, and Katie's now eviscerated the thing and it's become a duck...pelt. Whatever. Zen does that to his toys, too. If I remember right, my parent's dog Meeko did that with several stuffies or a pair of bunny slippers or something, too.

In other news, I've learned a lot about the plumbing in my house lately. A few weeks ago, I noticed a drip from the bathtub faucet, and set about learning how to fix it. I think it's a pretty simple matter of replacing some parts in the handle, so a $5 or $35 fix, depending on how much I have to replace. That led me to finding out that what I thought were the hot and cold shutoffs for the house, well, aren't. The hot water valve worked, to some extent. It shut off water to the kitchen and the bathroom, but not the laundry room, which, along with the hot water heater, are located in a part of the house that was added on sometime after the house was built in 1929. The other valve, which I expected to shut off the cold water, didn't do anything, leaving me without a way to shut off the water to my house if there were an emergency, because I couldn't find any kind of control outside, either.

I put out a call on Facebook and asked around at work for recommendations for a plumber, and got a few names. The first guy came out last week, and to be honest, I was less than impressed. I've never done anything with plumbing and don't really know much about it, but I felt like he wasn't listening to me. Maybe because he was dismissing my ignorance, but I want to be a responsible homeowner, and if I'm going to be paying someone to do work for me, I want them to help me have at least a basic understanding of what they're going to be doing. And I had my doubts that he knew what he was talking about. I told him what I'd bought to fix the leak in the faucet myself and I would have expected a plumber to say, "oh, yeah, that's an easy fix; I do it all the time," but he didn't seem to know what I was talking about. And then when we looked under the sink at the valves, the things he was telling me about how the water was set up just didn't make sense. The work he recommended doing involved replacing the valves in the kitchen and adding shutoffs above the hot water heater, and along with fixing the bathtub, would have come to about $450.

I didn't feel good about it, so over the next few days, I kept researching, checking out plumbing books from work and checking with the city and state government agencies here in town that govern construction to see if maybe they had plans for the house. No dice, but I learned that the guy I'd been working with wasn't even a licensed plumber at all! That sealed it. I called him and canceled the job, and had someone else that a coworker recommended out on Friday.

It was a totally different experience. The second guy came across as very competent and familiar with houses and setups similar to mine. I understand a lot better how things work in my house. I learned that the valve that I thought didn't do anything actually works--it shuts off the water going back to the addition, which is actually a sensible thing, given the layout of the house. There isn't a homeowner shutoff; they weren't standard procedure in the 1920's and 30's, but he showed me where the city shutoff is and how it works. He recommended digging up the pipe leading from the main to my house and adding a shutoff on my side of the meter. It's still going to cost about the same to fix, but it's only changing one valve, instead of four. Actually, I think I dodged a bullet, as the fixes the first guy was proposing wouldn't have done anything to solve the problem at all, because he was starting from a totally wrong assumption about where the water came in. It would have been $450 to that guy and $450 to someone else to correct it.

So blah blah blah, this is long enough. Work continues to be fun and life is good and it's hot and we need more rain. The Olympics are going on in London, but I haven't watched any of it. PBS doesn't carry it and that's the only channel I can get on my TV. The one thing I kind of wanted to see was the opening ceremonies, but the internet was out that day, so I couldn't watch it online, either.

I am participating in the Ravellenic Games, though. It's kind of a knitting tribute to the Olympics--pick a project that challenges you and try to get it all done--start to finish--between the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games. It's been going on for several years and it used to be called the Ravelympics, until the USOC sent a cease-and-desist letter to the people who own Ravelry. It was kind of a fiasco because they have the right to the tradmark of the name Olympics or anything like unto it, it seems, but the letter was rather rude, condescending, and insulting to knitters. (Don't make knitters mad--they're armed with lots of sharp, pointy objects). Whatever. The name was changed and people moved on.

I'm working on a throw made out of leftover yarn, mostly from all the socks I've made over the years. Pretty, huh? No, I haven't done all that since Friday. My "event" is to make 48 of those squares.

And that's it for now.

 

Back again

I haven't blogged in ages, but I'm still knitting.

I think I'm probably moving in December, so I'm trying to do some clean up. So I've been going back to the UFO's I have laying around and finishing them off, as well as work from my stash.

I finished all the projects I had on the needles in April, as well as some new ones.

(Aren't the buttons just ADORABLE?)





I only finished my friend's scarf last week. I blocked it last night and gave it to her at church today. I must admit I was gratified to see her so pleased about it!
I forgot to take a photo of the stealth swap project I was working on. I started knitting up the KnitPicks Fedora I bought in April. I'm so enamored with steeking that the only thing I could decide about the pattern was that I was going to knit it in the round and cut it up the center to make a cardigan!

I've decided to make Pink Lemon Twist's Bristow Cardigan, but the construction is so different I guess the only Bristow part is the stitch pattern. The rest of it is just a percentage sweater from EZ's Knitting Workshop. I think I might try to do the seamless set-in sleeves, because I already have two cardigans with a round yoke. I've finished the body and I'm about halfway done with one sleeve. It's been holding lately while I finish UFO's from my basket.

Itchy fingers

I've got so many things on the needles that need to get done: a pair of socks for a lady at church, a scarf for my best friend, a non-bloggable project for my Loopy Ewe swap partner, my tangled yoke cardigan, and who knows what else. But all I want to do is start swatching for a new sweater!



I just got some yarn in yesterday from KnitPicks--the Merino Style in Fedora--and I think I'm going to make the February Lady Sweater.

But this yarn is DK weight, and FLS calls for worsted weight yarn. So I'm going to have to tweak the pattern, and that means knowing my gauge.

But I have to finish the other things first. Well, maybe not the scarf, but definitely the ??? and the socks. And I ought to finish one sweater before casting on for another.

What Makes a Good Blog?

90% of the blogs I read happen to be blogs about knitting or spinning. Cara of January One pointed out a blog post by Kathryn about the Knitting Blog Class of 2005. Kathryn went through a Bloglines report from April 2005 and made a list of the knitting blogs that were linked on the site (there were over 1700 of them!) and followed the links to see how many of them were still being actively updated and how readership had changed in the last four years. Only about 1/3 of the original list were left. I've heard of most of them and read several. (Update--I misunderstood the original post, and incorrectly thought that Margene had done all that hard work--thanks for the correction, Kathryn!)

So what makes these blogs last when the majority of them died out? I have several ideas. My blog certainly hasn't been very good lately, so these thoughts are mostly for my own benefit.

I think that the most important thing is that the author updates frequently. Probably no matter how witty and entertaining and informative the posts are or how beautiful the pictures, no one is going to regularly come back if you only post once in six months. (Ahem.) RSS feed readers do almost give you a second chance; if someone likes what they see they can just subscribe and your posts are automatically sent to them. If they had to manually come back and you never updated, you'd be simply out of luck. However, the RSS readers aren't a guarantee of readership. I know that every few months I go through the list of blogs in my reader and thin out the ones I don't remember reading lately.

A second important factor is that the author of the blog actively posts and comments on the blogs of other people. It's free advertising—often if people like your comment, they'll follow the link back to see if they like what else you're writing.

Third, the blogs that I tend to keep in my RSS reader are the ones that I have some connection with. Either I really like the quality of the author's work—the things they make or how they photograph them, or that the way they write about them is clear and clever and humorous. The blogs I read that aren't knitting blogs tend to belong to family and friends. They're things like places to update family photos and read the news about what's going on. One blog is by an artist friend from college who has the most beautiful, deep, thoughtful posts. I love reading what she has to say—I always feel enlightened and refreshed when she posts something new!

I don't yet have any library blogs in my feed reader, but I imagine that that the same kinds of principles will apply—are they well-written, with info that inspires or teaches me something new? Are they kept current, especially if they contain information about events that apply to me? Do they link to places that really are of interest to me? Does the author respond to reader feedback—can I make some sort of connection with the author—whether it be an individual or someone acting on behalf of the library?

If so, it's probably a good blog.

Weekend Knitting

My little sister got married this past Saturday (Congrats, sis!)

I got to spend a lot of quality time with family that lives far away from me.

And I got to spend hours and hours sitting and knitting--in the airport, in the plane, in the car. I finished up a garter-stitch scarf in handspun and started a new pair of socks.

I'm also working on the Mystery Beret (Ravelry link) in some bubblegum pink handspun.

Baby Blankie

The sweater I was working on has been put on hold for the last couple of months to work on a baby blanket for a former coworker. Several of us at work put our money together to buy the blanket, and one of the girls wanted to learn how to knit, so she's making one stripe and I've done the others.

Now I'm trying to decide whether I want to put the stripes I've knit together to form diagonal squares of color, or more randomly. Any thoughts?

New Semester, New Sweater!

Sorry, no photos today.

Classes started up again last week. I've decided to cut back on my job and go back to school full-time. At the rate I was going, it would have taken me six years to finish a two-year program.

What that means for me is lots and lots of reading time, so I've started a new sweater. This time around I'm making Elizabeth Zimmerman's Fair Isle Yoke Sweater. I still need to get the book that the yoke pattern is in, but I still have time. The body and sleeves of the sweater are from the Knitting Workshop book, which I have. When I finish that part of the sweater and am ready to start the color work, then I'll check with the library or buy the book.

Happy Birthday, America!

From my back patio, I can see a pretty good fireworks show on the Fourth of July. It's by no means a professional show, but whoever it is setting them off buys the BIG ones. It's rained all day, so it was nice to sit under the shelter of my upstairs neighbor's balcony and still get to see the fireworks display.

I have always been happy that I was born and raised and live in the United States of America. This year, as I watched the fireworks, the thought struck me that I am very grateful, too. I am grateful that the sounds of explosions and rockets whizzing through the air are not accompanied by air raid sirens. I am grateful that they shoot harmlessly into the sky, not into the homes of families in my neighborhood. I am thankful that they are set off in joy and fun and celebration, rather than in malice and hatred and revenge.

I am reminded again that this is a wonderful place to live, and I am grateful to be here.

Long may our land be bright,
With freedom's holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God our King.

Halfway...I think...

(Insides of the Scarlet Woman Sweater)

One of the advantages of marrying off all your roommates (three in as many years--they all live with me and then decide they want to get married--what's that say about me?) is that suddenly you have a ton of space to block things on the floor, and no one will care because it's not in the way!

The photo above is skewed--it looks like the armscye on the right is bigger than the other. I actually measured it and it's SMALLER; I think it's just the light and how I'm standing.

I'm finished with the Scarlet Woman sweater pattern as written and now I'm on my own for the sleeves. This is where it gets scary, because not only have I never designed my own sleeve caps or sweater yet, I've never MADE a sweater with sleeve caps before. The only sweaters I've done recently were round yoke sweaters (Tangled Yoke Cardigan) and raglan sweaters (Eris), both of which had the sleeves knit into the sweater as the pattern went along.

So I'm a little nervous! I think I'm going to wait for the body to dry, then flip it over and recheck my gauge on the stockinette portion. I really want to finish this sweater (it's been in my WIP list for almost six months) and I'm SOOO close I can smell it! But I also want to take my time and do the proper math and make sure it's right. I tend to get lazy and call things "good enough" and then, when the sweater is done, it doesn't look as good as I had planned. I want this one to be GOOD, not just good enough.

Long Tail Cast On

When my grandma taught me how to knit ages and ages ago, she taught me the long-tail cast on. But it was nothing like the method you see in the books--that one took me years to figure out, and it didn't click until I learned how to knit Continental style.

The way my grandma taught me is more suited to the English style of knitting. It involves wrapping a single loop of yarn around your left thumb, then knitting that loop like you would if it were a regular stitch on a needle. It's not as fast as the classic textbook method, but it might be easier to visualize how it works. If you struggle with the long-tail cast on, hopefully this will help.




There's also a good video of this method at KnittingHelp.com

Maryland

Just like what felt like MILLIONS of other people, I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this past weekend. It was my first time, and I think I did pretty well. I stayed within my budget, and got most of the things I wanted. And that's fine with me--I can't get it all or I wouldn't have anything else to look forward to!

I went to the Ravelry meetup on Saturday, and got a button, but my name was on the missing page of M's, so I didn't get a cool Ravatar Sticker to put on the button.

I got a picture with Mary-Heather, and I posed with Jess and Casey, too, but that picture seems to have never actually happened. Oh well...

I'm lucky enough to have an aunt and uncle who live ten miles away from the Howard County Fairgrounds, so I got to stay in a lovely home with a very gracious host and hostess and eat home-cooked meals instead of a big impersonal hotel. I carpooled with someone who got into one of the pre-festival workshops, so while she went to class, I got to hang out with my aunt and uncle. My aunt and I went shopping, did some quilting, I started teaching her how to knit, and I just basically relaxed.

Here's what followed me home from Saturday:

A Spinners Control Card and an Inch Gauge/Diz from Carolina Homespun (no pictures, sorry).

I finally caved and signed up for a subscription to Interweave Knits. I've been meaning to for quite a while--especially because I always seem to end up buying the issues individually, anyway!)

Some GORGEOUS laceweight yarn from Tess' Designer Yarns

Some souvenir sock yarn (purchased at a great little yarn store during the week, not at the festival itself): Colinette Jitterbug and Araucania Ranco Multi. Both of these are much brighter than my photos show (especially the Jitterbug--it's quite loud, actually).


And what I really came for--lots of great fiber! (It doesn't look like a lot in these photos, but I think it's more than double what I had before.)

I started spinning up the Louet fiber. It's practically spinning itself! Most of the time, I tend to spin sockweight or laceweight yarn, so I'm really trying hard to do something a little bigger; I think this one might turn out more like a sport weight. It's so soft! I think I'll have to order some more.