Cattywampus

Going Dark

I keep unintentionally going dark.  I'm not sure when I last posted, but I feel like it was a few weeks ago at least.

I seem to be getting worse and worse at documenting anything about my life at all, but I do have a few things to share.

Thing #1

A finished quilt!  A truly, completely finished quilt!  I finished the top of this quilt last march at the quilting retreat my mother and I went to, and then, I dunno, I just stopped.  It is done!  This one is for a dear friend's little boy.  I picked out the colors when he was about 4, I think he'll be 7 this year, but luckily this isn't a kiddie quilt, just a generic boy/manly colored quilt, so it'll be fine for his as long as it survives.  I am now going to put this away until his birthday in November.  Seems a bit silly, but his sister got hers for her birthday last year, so it makes sense.

Thing #2

A yarn crawl in NYC!  The PKT (Philly Knitting Triad) took a trip up to NYC on a random weekday to check out these fabled stores we have heard so much about.  We visited School Products, Seaport Yarns, Purl, and Knitty City.  It was a grand time, we took the train up, took the subway everywhere, and wondered what ON EARTH people did before google maps was portable.  I have absolutely no pictures to document this event.  I can show you evidence tho - look!  A bag full of yarn!  :-)

And don't worry, not that you were worried, about my whole 2 for 1 deal to burn down the stash, this trip was figured in from the beginning, so I haven't broken any promises to myself.

I brought home some sweet georgia merino in saltwater (4 skeins, right - this is a gorgeous blue/gree color, I can't make it show up anything but blue in the pic, very annoying) for a sweater, some sweet georgia sock yarn (immediately to the left), some malabrigo sock (above), and some worsted weight lorna's laces in rainbow for house socks.  House socks should be bright and happy, IMHO.  All the way to the right is a cashmere/silk blend for a scarf to replace the one my stepmother lost - you will notice how it is distinctly NOT within my color palette, but it is very much in hers.

It makes me sad that it's almost impossible to capture the beauty of the yarn on "film", but there it is.  If only I didn't lean towards reds/blues I could take much better pictures of the yarn I buy.  Sigh.

Thing #3

A book review.

Zoo Station by David Downing

I really enjoyed this book, reading about Nazi Germany is always depressing and shocking, but this was done from a point of view I hadn't seen before. It is set before WWII and the main character is a British journalist trying to stay in the country to be with his German-born son while trying to do what he believes is right. An interesting set of circumstances cause him to struggle with doing what he believes is right vs doing what he needs to do to be with his son, good character development.

Thing #4

Spring is happening!!!!

These are the only blooming flowers I have seen so far, but they are in a sunny, protected spot, so I deem them the harbingers of spring.  Can harbingers be in advance of good things or just bad?  Usually it's harbingers of doom.  Hmmmm, interesting question.

Everything else looks like this - full of promises.  I love spring.  Adore it.  Even if my throad hurts and my head is congested and my eyes are itchy.  I love it.

Thing #5

Cute, sleepy doggies.  

Duke is doing well, he's half way through his chemo and acting more like his normal self these days.  He has fully recovered from the surgery and seems to be doing just fine.  We are hoping the chemo does the trick and wards off additional cancer for a good, long time.  He's probably hoping he just doesn't get poked again!

Sunday evening again

Already the weekend rolls to a close, and it was a long one for us too - we both took off thursday and friday, and OH was it nice to be home for so many days in a row!!

We watched The Burbs Wednesday night to prepare, I had never seen it!!  We also watched Superman II, The Descent - OMG it was terrifying, I spent about half of the movie hiding behind my knitting, it was mostly a suspense flick with some gore to set the mood, but it had great build up to the terror, and Reno 911, which was funny if you like the show.

I finally finished the first installment of the mystery stole, there is no way I will be done with the second installment by this friday, so I'm obviously going to be behind for the whole thing.  Oh well.  I just can't knit it endlessly, it takes too much concentration for me to work on it for more than an hour at a time.  So far it's gorgeous, so it's worth all the trouble...and Duke likes it too...

We had  a frog visitor last night, for some reason it decided to scale the window on the side of the front door. 

I am still re-finishing tomato, I am much happier this time, I just need to sit down and finish the ribbing on the bottom hopefully I'll have an FO pic of it in a few days.

The herb garden & the marigolds are happy, but everything else is suffering from the drought.  You can see one of the less-than-lush beds behind the herb garden.   

I wasn't diligent in watering during the spring b/c we were out of town so much and now there's no point, it's too late for them to catch up and with the drought it seems like a waste.  They're mostly perennials, so we'll see how they do next year.

Next up the Sockapalooza socks MUST be knit.  They've been started & sitting in a bag for2 weeks now...

The state of my garden

okay, not the whole garden, just the flowers that are blooming & pretty.  does anyone see a color theme here?  I just can't help it...I know I should buy other colors, but they're not as pretty!

And the strawberries I got yesterday - YUMMM

Oh & btw, the dwarf gila monster that Pixie almost ate yesterday was still in the driveway today, so she did enough damage to kill it.  Poor little dwarf gila monster.

So then I had to figure out what to do with it.  Bad.  Very bad. 

Pretty flowers and BAD BAD sahara

This post is going to be picture heavy, so consider yourself forwarned.

Plants I got for $1 a piece after our campus sale.  I coul dn't turn them down.  4 Geraniums, 2 dusty miller, 4 gerber daisies, 2 portulaca & some marigolds.  For either side of the front steps...

The climbing rose in the back, looking good.

The BIG GIANT (10x15) perennial garden we planted that looks like nothing much right now.

The smaller(6' round) perennial garden that also looks like nothing much.

The herb garden with some snap dragons up front.

The flower garden in back that the deer tromped in BUT DID NOT EAT - woohoo!

The impatiens in the nook between the porch & the stairs out back with the clematis just behind.

And last but not least (of the garden pictures) the rose bush out front which is covered with WHAT ARE THOSE TINY LITTLE WHITE THINGS?  aphids?  greedy little white bugs eating the blooms?  something harmless?  Okay, I know the last one was wishful thinking - but what do I do with it?

Dogs wondering what the heck I am doing and spotting something interesting over there.

And now on to Sahara.  Sahara is being bad.  It may get a time out.  I have bound off the lace neckline not once, not twice, but three times - and unfortunately the third time is NOT the charm.  It is still too freaking tight.  I have already gone from a size 5 up to a size 10 needle, I think I might work the next lace pattern row and then bind off. 

Can you see how it's pulling & bunching up there around my neck?

I may  have to put it down for a few days.  I just can't stomach pulling it out for the fourth time tonight.  I'm going to have to cut off that section of yarn anyway, it's starting to look scraggly.  sigh.  whine.  grr and whatnot.  stupid stupid sahara and its stupid pretty lace. 

Sockapalooza & other knitterly goodness

Sockapalooza has started, woohoo! I'm so excited to do this, I've never participated & the idea of 1000+ people all mailing socks around the world on a specific date is just too much fun!

My pal doesn't like lacy socks, which is a bit of a downer for me, cuz those are the kind I prefer to knit, but I'll make do. In fact, I already chose the pattern Sieze Diamondbacks, which is fun without having lace & without cabling - I think cables look LOVELY on socks but I haven't done any yet & I don't want to start a project I'm not sure about for sockapalooza.

I think I will probably dye the yarn myself, these look almost kneehighish, so I will need more one skein, and while the Colinette is quite pretty - I'm not forking out for two skeins (sorry sockapalooza pal), I wouldn't do that even for myself!  It's just too expensive for footwear.

So I'll have to find a source for heavy weight dyeable sock yarn.  Hopefully that won't be too hard.

In other news...

Pretty, no?  Blooming ahead of it's comrades in our front bed.

And I got this:

from Samurai Knitter's etsy shop.  It's called practically purple - merino laceweight.  My camera just can't capture the color, I tried a dozen times, my camera reads it too blue, even with the 'warm' function on.  It is a lovely deep blue-purple with lighter purple highlights.  I would say that the deep purple is the color of those really purple petunias - that's a good color comparison. 

I had two hours while giving a final today to read through Victorian Lace Today.  Talk about informative.  Holy crap.  It is that engrossing, two hours!!  And I didn't even completely finish it.  I was in the build your own shawl section (which is exceptionally helpful) when my last student finished.  For this yarn I am picturing 'A Curved Shawl with Diamond Edging'.  I have at least 4 or 5 other shawls that I already know I want to make from that book - just wait until I actually get GOOD at lace and feel like I can tackled the ones labeled 'experienced lace' difficulty level.

Weekend Sum Up

So then. A busy weekend!

Saturday we went out for the afternoon, I knit at the coffee shop while DH got a massage for his neck problems. I met a woman who was very excited to learn about our Knitting Group, it's always nice to find random people who are interested.  At the coffee shop I got loose peppermint tea to make iced tea with.  YUM.

Then we stopped at B&N & I got Victorian Lace Today.  I have been wanting it for a while & since I finished my first lace shawl & have started working on my next, I figured I could 'invest' in it.  I had a gift card tho, so it seemed free, even if it wasn't really.  OH it's soooo pretty!!  I haven't sat down to read through it yet, but I'm really looking forward to doing that.

I did start the Swallowtail Shawl friday night, but had to rip back already, I lost a YO somewhere & two of the repeats were blended together.  ACK!  That's what I get for trying to start a new piece of lace after having mojitos!

Anyway, we went to the Farmer's Market b/c they were having a wine tasting, the tasting was mobbed, so we skipped it, but we had fun wandering around looking at all the plants & fresh produce.  And the whole place smelled gloriously like almost over ripe strawberries.  I got some, they are not even the same type of food as the strawberries you get in the supermarket.  They are soft & sweet & red to the core, they are juicy and did I mention they are sweet?  MAN.  I love NC strawberries. 

This morning we finished planting all the plants!!!  YAYYYY!!  About two hours of digging & whatnot and we put a small bed in the front yard & filled in here & there with the rest of the plants.  The beds are good to go - now they just need to grow.

Then I worked on the quilt for my goddaughter - I finished all the squares & I was trying to lay it out for the rows.  I thought there was too much yellow, so I removed the glaringly yellow squares & shortened it a row.   I think it'll still be long enough.  I ran out of steam at this point tho, so I just stacked 'em up in order & pinned 'em so they would stay that way.

Pixie thinks I was laying out a bed for her...

I've been working on Sahara, making progress, I just joined a few rounds back.  It's...snug.  I"m worried that my new double wrapping technique tightened up my gauge in the middle of this project.  Hmmm.  It's really hard to tell how much give the lace inset will allow.  The body part that I have done is okay, it's snug fitting, but not too tight, but the bustline looks hysterical, it looks like I've made a strange little vest.  I know it's all curled up and so it's really hard to tell what it will do at the end, I just have to trust that Wendy knows what she was doing, and I do trust her.

Ohhhhh, and friday I got my Socks that Rock shipment I had ordered with my 10% off coupon.

PRETTY.  Rhodonite, Stormy Weather, Watermelon Tourmaline, Titania, and Lunasea, and I got two patterns, Titania's Revenge & Rock 'n Weave.   It's odd, I got two with green in them.  I don't like green, I must have been in a weird mood that day.  They're all gorgeous, of course...the Lunasea doesn't look like much in the pic, but it's really quite pretty, very subtle variations of blue/green/grey.

The herb garden

Oh how I love my herb garden.  I just planted some flowers to fill it out & my little basil & parsley sprouts have started to come up,  I am fearful that the monsoon rain last weekend washed them away, but hopefully not.

It looks a little sparse right now, but the thyme is substantial enough to use, and the  rosemary, chives, and oregano are very full already.  YAY for fresh herbs!!

Socks and more socks

Sockapalooza!!  I heard about this last year, before I had knitted any socks, and it was like a strange and exotic location that I wasn’t yet able to travel to, but this year…this year, I happened to read about it during the two days that sign up was open, and signed up.

I had a moment of brief trepidation that involved self doubt such as “What if I suddenly hate to knit and can’t finish them?  (lol – seriously???)  What if my summer goes by so quickly that I don’t finish them?  (if this summer is like last summer I won’t be sane enough to know I didn’t finish the socks, so it doesn’t matter)  What if I break my fingers? (I haven’t borrowed any money from large men named Vinnie lately, so I should be okay on that front)  What if…what if…what if…”  I’m sooo good at what ifs!  But I did actually manage to overcome all my paranoia and signed up.  FUN!

And check ‘em out – the Twinkle Toe socks in gorgeous Frog Tree alpaca from my SP10.  Oh it’s sooo soft.  They're going sooo fast.  I’ve never finished a pair of socks so quickly before – I think my prior record time is about 3 ½ weeks.  I know it’s sport weight, but even so, super fast!  And I love love love the figure 8 cast on for toe up socks, it makes such a nice little pocket for the toes, I have fairly square feet, so less pointy is better for me.  Why I will wear pointy shoes but prefer unpointy socks is a question for another day.

You can't really see the pattern here - I'll take a picture in better light for the FO post, which will hopefully be this weekend.

Also – love the toe up in general.  I detest the picking up stitches & gusset part of the heel turn on top down socks – it’s annoying and is very, very complicated when doing two socks on two circs, which is (IMHO) the only way to knit socks.  And one of the really cool things about knitting socks is that now I can take almost any pattern I run across and use the figure 8, toe up, short row heel method to knit them.

Yay for socks!

Now humour me with a brief gardening update.

The poor r hododendren that was promising to be gorgeous until 4 nights of temps below freezing did it in.  Spring was glorious here for a brief 2-3 days and then cruel mother nature froze all the blooms in the height of perfection and killed them all.  That wasn't very nice.

And the last of the tulips left standing.

But on the bright side, I did plant my basil  & parsley today after work, so I should be able to use them by the beginning of June. 

Also on the plus side, the oregano is coming up in a million places and looking strong as ever.  The thyme that I wasn't sure would recover from last summer did, the rosemary is thriving, the chives are getting ready to bloom, and the sage is seriously happy.  Man I wish basil was a perennial, it is soooo ridiculously expensive to buy in the store, I do pay for it in the winter, but I cringe as I do it.

One of those days

So you know how sometimes you just have one of those days?  The kind of day when the doctor didn't call in the scrip you needed and the pharmacist looks at you like you're crazy?

The kind of day when you go to the grocery store b/c you won't have time tomorrow and when you get home you realize that there are no bananas, or garlic...or shallots, and you have to call and now you have to go back tomorrow anyway to pick that stuff up.

The kind of day when you come home to a horrible beeping sound b/c the invisible fence line has been cut?

And then when you investigate said cut line it is b/c bellsouth did a good job of putting random ruts through your yard in an unsuccessful attempt to bury the phone line?

The kind of day when you're already tired and fed up and stupid, stupid things keep happening to make you even more tired and angry?

And then you forget that the garbage needs to go out until you're settled and then it seems like a serious chore.

The kind of day that by the time you get outside to take a decent picture of the tulips it's so dark the flash goes off?

Well I hate those days.

But look.  This is what tulips look like in the semi-dark with a flash...

HAH!

Well, my asthma is still kicking my butt, the doc called in some prednizone for me.  Lovely.  But that means lots of sit & knit time, even thought I KNOW KNOW KNOW KNOW that the house really needs to be cleaned b/c my BFF & Goddaughter are coming to visit next weekend. 

I'll just have to hope the scrip does the trick & I can get my cleaning done later in the week.

So.  Look at this - can you see anything wrong with it?  This is where the HAH! comes in.  I dropped a stitch in one of the cables, it snuck back down about 3 rows before I noticed it and I managed to fix it without ripping out the last few rows - and all b/c I'm just too damn lazy to want to redo those rows, I would do almost anything not to have to re-knit rows. so very patient, persistent and resourceful...yeah, that's it.

And check out this way cool zipper placket.   Isn't that great?  You knit them both at the same time & then separate them to bind off and the zipper has this cozy little ready made channel.  I had two crossovers, you can see one there on the right, but they were easy to fix on my bind off row.

And this is fun, I have this book Calligraphy & Illumination, it was expensive, it was one of those I-forgot-to-send-the-no-thanks-postcard to a book club things, and then I ripped the cover opening the box, so I couldn't send it back.  So I've had it for years and I couldn't bear to try & sell it at a used book store b/c I got suckered into buying it and I think it was over $30 at the time.

ANYWAY.  My SP 10 spoilee, who can be found here, does some calligraphy and I am going to send it to her.  I'm not going to count it in my total cost b/c it's something that I am happy to donate to a person who will appreciate it - and besides, the cover is practically ripped in half.  So YAY for purging in a productive way.

And I found a few patterns online for a sock bag (it's in the Jan 14, 2007 post) & a needle case and I'm going to make my spoilee a matching set b/c she said she doesn't have either. 

I have a serious abundance of fat quarters (one of the things I randomly collect, I love making quilts out of them) so I picked some fabric for her, and one for a sock bag for me.  I'll need to make  a trip to Joann's to get some of the notions, but there's no hurry.    

And just in case you don't know me very well yet, the insane pink fabric is for me.

And some more tulips opened up, it has been near 80 for about 3 days now.  While I realize the entire world probably doens't care about each and every tulip that opens in my flower bed, I just can't help myself, I think they are absolutely gorgeous, so I have to share.