Knitting, with Dogs

Knitting for disaster victims?

One word:  Don't.  They don't need knitted items.  They need food, clothing, and places to live.

Give money.  That's what's needed. Remember, it might have been any of us living there in New Orleans.  Or it might be some other catastrophe that hit OUR home towns, some day in the future. 

Give to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army or whoever you prefer to give to.  I'm broke, but I have a home, a family, and a small income.  I can afford to give a little.  Maybe soon I can afford to give more.

I hope you can too.

I'm still here...

just very, very busy!  I've been trekking over to the shop in Monroe almost every day of the week (2 hours driving time round trip), tottering around taking care of little dogs and kitties in my area, and generally being busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.  It's crunch time at the shop -- opening day is less than a week away.  Eeek!  But we're starting to put product on the shelves.  I put up all the books today, as well as labelling and sorting over 1000 balls of yarn.

I'm pooped.  But more regular posting should resume after Sept. 1 when the dust settles.

Oh, and I've got a birthday coming up...

Like I was rode hard and put up wet

That's how I feel right now.  I went to the shop in Monroe this afternoon.  I help Paula and Margaret put together three large bookcases.  Then they had to leave, so I got to put together six more bookcases by myself.  Four of them were pretty quick and easy.  Two others were a little harder, mostly because there are great long honking screws that you use to put the legs on it.  It takes forever to do that, and it wears out your wrist. 

I really wanted to do more.  Putting things together is WAY up there on my list of Fun Things To Do.  But because I'm fat and out of shape not used to physical exercise these days, I had to stop after 5 hours of work.  But all is not lost -- I get to go back and do it again tomorrow!  w00t!

Unless of course I'm too stiff and sore to get out of bed.  But ibuprofen is my friend, and a little rest and ice on the bits that hurt the worst will help a lot.

It's all good.

Just a quick little update

Caution:  no knitting content

I'm back home after spending Sunday night and Monday with my dad.  He got the lithotripsy done on his kidney stone and came through it all ok.  We were all tired and groggy Monday afternoon.  I blame it on having to get up at 4:30 in the morning so we could be in Macon by 6:00 am.  Sheesh.  Then we got to cool our heels until 8:00, when they took him in for the lithotripsy. 

The doctor called us out to tell us (me and my brother) the procedure was done and all was well.  I was holding a cup of coffee, and the strap of my pocketbook was over my forearm.  While he was talking, I tried to move the strap of the pocketbook to my shoulder.  The strap got caught, my pocketbook dropped, and I splashed about 2/3 cup of coffee all over my chest.  Luckily for me, the coffee wasn't really hot.  The doctor did a very good job of not busting out laughing at me.  My brother, not so much.  The doctor left, and I went to the ladies room and blotted off as much coffee as I could. 

Then I just had to endure a coffee-smelling shirt and my brother's wisecracks the rest of the morning.

Of course, later that afternoon, he leaned back in my dad's computer chair, not realizing that the back would tilt WAY back, far enough back to let you fall over backwards.  Luckily, he wasn't hurt.  But he didn't tease me about spilling coffee on myself anymore that day.  :)

Today's schedule is midday dog walk, then off to the shop in Monroe to work.  And Dear Robert's promised to take me out for barbecue tonight.  w00t!

A New Challenge

I bopped over to Monroe today to pick up a new knitting kit. 

[An aside:  I haven't been using the air conditioning in my car because it's behaving a little erratically.  JEEZOPETE!  How in Og's name did I live through 11 years of driving lotsandlots of miles in the summer when I worked for IBM???  With no a/c in the car??  I have no idea.  Yeah, I know I was younger then, and probably more heat-adapted, but still...  I left Monroe and got the biggest cup of ice I could find at a convenience store.  (Holding ice in your mouth keeps you from dying in the heat of a Georgia summer.  One lesson learned from all those a/c-less years.)  I ran out of ice right about the time I hit the stop-and-go traffic.  Not so much fun, really.  Then I had to mow the front lawn when I got home, before it started raining.  I think I've sweated off about 5 lbs.]

Anyway, look what I get to make.  It's a vest kit from Nancy Shroyer.  w00t!!

(Hey, I can't keep my title of World's Worst Knitting Photographer if I don't do stuff like forget to take the pattern booklet out of the plastic bag, can I??)

And here's the yarn.  It's Nancy's Digit yarn (aka JaggerSpun Re-Dun).  It's softer than the Shetland yarn a traditionalist would use.  It feels quite nice, actually.

And guess what....

<whispers>

It has steeks.  STEEKS.
I've never done a steek before.

I'm shivering in anticipation.  Or apprehension.  One of those a- words anyway.

This should be great fun.

I think I'm going to lay aside and possibly frog that Skacel merino lace.  It's dead boring.  There's more fun things to do out there.

Tomorrow I toddle back to Monroe to assist with the rite of Cleaning and Painting of the Retail Space.  Lather, rinse and repeat on Sunday.  Sunday night I boogie down to the old Home Spot so I can go with my bro and my dad to his lithotripsy at Six.  O'clock.  In.  the.  Morning. 

I'll have knitting with me, but whether I dare to work with it at that time of day is a separate issue.

Tagged again!

Hockey Mom (another new spinner, btw!) tagged me for the "5 Things I Miss About Childhood" meme.  Hmm, lemme think:

1)  Holidays at my grandmother's house.   Now that I'm older, I'm more aware of how this must have affected the grown-ups.  But for us kids, it was great.  I had a whole passel (and it is passel, NOT passle -- I looked it up) of cousins, many of them within +/- 2 years of my age.  We'd all eat together.  The kids sat at tables out on the back porch.  When the meal was done, and the dirty dishes taken up, a big sheet was laid down over all the food dishes left on the table.  We'd all be playing, but from time to time, we'd creep into the dining room and sneak food from under the cloth.  I have a distinct memory of sneaking turnip greens more than once.  I loves me some southern-cooked turnip greens, folks.  Always have.

2)  Going to the library when it was a new and exciting experience to me.  The first book I remember reading that gave me a real "sense of wonder" experience was Horton Hears a Who.  My young mind boggled at the idea of all those tiny Whos living on a tiny speck, and ol' Horton the elephant having to look after them.  And every time I went, there were new things to explore, new authors to discover, new genres to fall in love with.  Most days now, I feel old and jaded around books.  Everything seems to be a variation of something I've already read.  I miss that sense of newness and possibility.

3)  Sharing secrets with my brother.  My brother and I are less than a year and a half apart in age.  We were pretty close when we were kids.  We used to say "I'll tell you something if you promise not to tell Mama and Daddy!"  As far as I can remember, I never told a single secret we shared.  And I don't think he did either.  These days we don't have anyone we need to keep secrets from, but I still have the same esteem and trust for my little brother that had its origin in the sharing of those early years.

4)  Riding my bicycle all over the neighborhood.  I didn't ever go very far (in miles) till I was grown, but I had a nice route of a mile or two that I rambled over all the time.  There was one hill in front of Tift College that was the closest thing I had to an exciting downhill ride.  I'd ride down it at night when the traffic was light and slalom back and forth between the dashed white line in the center of the road.  Sometimes I'd try to do it without holding on to the handlebars.  I could get most of the way down, but I'd always wobble and wimp out and grab the handlebars again.  Cutting those deep S-curves back and forth was a source of deep pleasure to me.

5)  Playing tag or hide and go seek at night.  This usually happened when some of my cousins were around, because there were only 2 other kids in our neighborhood.  I loved to play freeze-tag.  My brother was a big kick the can fanatic, but that was a boy's game, and I never played it with them.  But I was a dab hand a freeze tag. 

Precious memories, how they linger.  :)

Whisper 2 Scarf complete!

The second Whisper scarf is done!

In this picture, you can see the bit of sheen that the silk gives to the Douceur et Soie yarn. 

Here's a bit of stitch detail:

This scarf, knitted as written, took 1 ball of Douceur et Soie with only inches left to spare.  I had a second ball in case I needed it, but who wants to use 1 yard out of a second ball??  I barely squeaked by with this one.

Again, kudos to Fiddlesticks Knitting for putting out an easy-to-read and well-designed pattern.  I'm spoiled now.  All other lace patterns look crude in comparison.

Speaking of other lace patterns, I'm now working on a lace stole made of the Skacel merino yarn.  You know, that really fine stuff that comes in the great big skeins that take forever to wind into balls?  Here's a bit of it pinned out so you can see the pattern a little:

The center section is 33 repeats of the same 15 row pattern.  {deep heartfelt sigh}  This one may be a bit of a slog before it's done.  I'm also anxious to get back to my Spider Queen and my Shetland Tea Shawl, both of which have been languishing while I got some of this shop knitting done.

The Tuesday night knitting group is trying out a new meeting location tonight.  It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

In Other News:

We finally got to meet with my dad's doctor.  The news was a little better than I expected.  He does have a cancerous tumor in his right kidney, and the kidney needs to be removed.  But the cancer does appear to be confined to the kidney, and my dad's in reasonably good health otherwise, for an 81 year old guy.  He also has a kidney stone in his other kidney that they're going to take care of before the nephrectomy surgery.  That part will happen on Monday next.  The theory is, take care of the kidney stone while he's still got 2 kidneys.  That way, we won't have to worry about it causing problems when he only has one functioning kidney left.

My dad continues to declare that he feels fine, and wishes he didn't have to have anything done.  It's tricky to ask an 81 year old guy to undergo such procedures.  I hope we're making the right decisions.  Sometimes you just have to hope for the best and jump off the cliff.

To end on a lighter note, Jasper got caught in the act of being A Very Bad Counter-surfing Dog the other day:

He's a Very Bad Dog.

Inspiration

I started off the morning as usual, reading emails and blogs -- you know, the normal internet-addict's web crawl.  I was moving along pretty smoothly till I got to Cassie's  post  on passions and powers. (BTW, Cassie's doing some fabulous wool processing and spinning.)  I followed her links to Sara's blog, and especially to this post about dyeing knitted pieces, frogging them, and then re-knitting the yarns into new creations.  That tied in nicely with the article in the new issue of Southern Cross Knitting about cold-pad dyeing (link is to the second page of the article.)

So I'm thinking, yeah, this is pretty nifty stuff.  Lots of good ideas here.  This is stuff I'd like to try.

Then I followed another link to Sarah Swett's tapestry site.

Holy cow.  Y'all, go look at her tapestries.  I especially liked Hands (ties in with lace knitting),  Three of Spinsters, and The River Wyrd.  Tapestries like The Hut on the Rock, The Sea make me want to construct a whole story out of what was going on there.

You know, I've never really been a passionate person.  I get enthusiasms, and I play with them till the next shiny thing catches my attention.  I'm a dilettante, and I know it,  and most of the time I'm okay with that.

But when I see works by people like Sarah Swett, I'm stunned.  I sit in front of the computer looking at the images of her work with my mouth hanging open.  She does many of these tapestries using natural dyes, folks.  Some of them are made from handspun.  Neither of these is a small task.  Factor in the design of the picture, the color, and the technique involved in weaving these tapestries, and you've got something that is just astonishing.

I know I'm not an artist like Sarah Swett.  But I could do more than I'm doing.  What holds me back lots of times is fear of failing, fear of looking stupid or making something that looks dumb or ugly.  So I settle for doing what's safe and predictable.

I'm not getting any younger.  With all the other changes going on in my life now, maybe it's time to try something a little different with my crafts too.  Maybe I can branch out a little, use what I've got creatively now while money's tight, and try some new things. 

It's worth a try, I think. 

Thanks for the inspiration, ladies!   
 

Birthday Boy

Guess who turns 1 year old today?

Yup, it's Jasper!  We haven't had him for a year yet (I think he was 8 wks. when we brought him home).

We tell him all the time what a pretty boy he is.  Can you blame us?

And not spoiled either.  Nuh-uh, not a bit.

Knitting news:
I'm half-way through the second Whisper scarf.  It's a really easy pattern, and it's going pretty quickly.  I think I'm going to save the pictures for the end, though.  I've also started on a Skacel pattern for their Merino Lace yarn.  That pattern's fine, but it makes me realize how spoiled the Fiddlesticks patterns and charts have made me.  Of the lace knitting I've done to date, those patterns and charts are the easiest to read and follow.  Of course, they're just scarves, but from what I hear, the larger patterns are equally well-done.

And if I suddenly disappear, you might look for me under a pile of these:

I picked these this morning.  This is just one day's haul.  From two roma tomato plants.  That's TWO plants.  I have at least this many more in the fridge, not counting the ones I took on vacation with me, and the ones we've already eaten, and there's at least this many more on the vines. 

Jeezopete.

I think I'm going to be dehydrating some, and making some salsa, and homemade tomato soup, and whatever else I can think of.  We don't really eat pasta, so spaghetti sauce is out.  But we've got enough fresh tomatoes to last for a while, I think.

Back from vacation

We're back!  We had a good time, though we missed the dogs.  I spent most of my knitting time on a scarf.  The scarf had some good, low-key adventures. 

It got to rock on the porch with a view of the ocean:

It saw a nice display of sea shells:

And it got to join in the reading of A Certain New Book:

But it didn't get finished till we got home:

The pattern is from Fiddlesticks Knitting, and this is the Whisper 1 scarf, knitted in Douceur et Soie.  Let me give kudos to Fiddlesticks Knitting for a really excellent pattern.  The charts are large and readable, and all the directions were very clear.  I knitted the pattern on US 5 needles (single point Bryspuns), and it took not quite all of one ball of Douceur et Soie.  This is a smallish scarf (see the illustration on the web page), but it's really pretty.  I've started the second Whisper Scarf (the rectangular one), but I'll hold that out till I get a bit more knitted on it.

I also finished the baby blanket:

(Anybody notice a certain consistency in color choices here??  I am so predictable.)

Here's a bit of detail on the pattern:

There are all these little diamond shapes and triangle shapes all over it.  To me they look like little fir trees or something rather than diamonds.  There's lots of purling in this pattern, but it's easily memorizable, and didn't take THAT long to finish.  Towards the end of any afghan-like project I always feel like I've been knitting on it forever.

I've been working on knitting Grumperina's Tivoli tee.  I just frogged it for the second time this morning.  The problem is so not with the pattern.  I'm knitting it in an Adrienne Vittadini cotton/silk blend yarn.  The yarn is fine.  The knitter is not so good with these kinds of yarn.  I've had some ugly rowing-out, and my personal modification attempts have-- let's just say it -- sucked.  So I'm going to start one. more. time. with a different needle and actually do only what Grumperina says to do in the pattern.  Note to self:  you are not smarter than the designer of the pattern you're working on.  Quit overanalyzing!

Oh, and guess what color the yarn for my Tivoli tee is?  Yup, pale green with a hint of blue. 

In Other News:

In my last post, I hinted at changes coming up in my life.  The first one:  I had to replace my Zire71.  :sobs quietly -- I LOVED my Zire:  The Zire 71 has a camera that you access by sliding the front part of the PDA up.  Unfortunately, over time, the cable that controls the camera gets rubbed by this action.  The big fallout of this cable rubbing is that you can no longer hotsync your PDA to your computer.  IOW, you can't back up your data on your handheld, and you can't load anything from your computer to your PDA.  Since one of the big things I use my PDA for is reading ebooks, this was a DISASTER for me.  So rather than listen to me whine all week, Dear Robert took me out and bought me a new PDA, a Palm Tungsten E2.  It's not my Zire, but it'll do.

Second big change:  I'm going back to work.  Right now I'm working with a local pet-sitting company.  It's part-time, and the hours are flexible.  I've thought about doing something like this for a long time, and the opportunity came up recently.  I had my first assignment the weekend before we left on vacation.  That's job 1.

Starting in another month or so, I hope to add Job 2 to the mix.  I'll be working with Margaret Heathman (author of Knitting Languages and all-round excellent person) at her new knitting shop, Margaret's Yarns Down Under in Monroe, GA.  The scarves and some of the other lacy things I've been knitting will be shop models.  It'll be a bit of a commute for me, but it's only 3 days a week.  The only bad thing about this gig is that I'll be working Tuesday and Thursday evenings.  Those are the days of my favorite local knitting groups.  :( 

And I may also end up helping my MIL with computer stuff in her new real-estate gig.  But that's pretty tentative right now.  More news as it becomes available.

All this is a little contingent on my dad's health.  We're still working on getting an appointment with his doctor.  Apparently there are only 4 urologists working in middle Georgia, and he just doesn't have time to sit and talk to non-patients.  I know doctors are over-worked, but jeezopete.  Frustrating.  Everything always happens at once, doesn't it?  But that's just the way the world works, for me at least.

So there you have it.  My life's been pretty static for a while.  It's time to stir things up!