School starts tomorrow!

The boy is starting middle school tomorrow. I'm a little worried about him. He tends to be clueless about things. He doesn't know what bus he rides home. He tends to do poorly on the first day of a new way home, but I guess we'll see what happens. The girl wore panties from when we took off last night's diaper this morning til after bath tonight. Both of those kids. Growing up.

Knitting progress - I'm almost done with the garter stitch blanket. I'm hoping to finish tonight. I'm down to 29 stitches in a row. ~400 stitches for the whole thing, perhaps. Got some work done on my sock too - wee! - I'm mostly through with the heel, getting ready to "turn the heel" and make the gusset, after 2 more repeats on the heel flap. Went to Michael's yesterday and La-la helped me pick out some new sock yarn (on clearance, so it hardly counts as stash enhancement at all), and I found a "complete" set of size 3 DPN's. Heck, I'm not even sure if I'm using size 3's right now, but the set of needles I'm using right now are a composition set - I didn't have a full set (from my heirloom stash) of the size, so I've got 2 of 2 different types in circulation, and I think they're slightly different gauges. On this heel flap, I'm using one of each type, and I'm noticing that the purl side is definitely more challenging. I think it's a function of the needles, rather than a function of the pattern. Oh, and interestingly, Michael's has a sit N stitch, they call it, $5 for 2 hours, and they have an instructor present.

I signed on to handle our Troop's popcorn situation. OOOh! I can bring knitting with me to the popcorn meeting on Thursday! What to bring? I'll probably be ready to start a new project or have started one by then. Another sock? A scarf for me? Hmm. Only time will tell. So...if you guys need some Trails End popcorn, I can hook you up!

My LYS is moving from Winter Park to Maitland. I like them. They have a good personality and an interesting selection of gourmet yarn. As their web site points out, they have a delightful sale playpen and a very nice store dog. He got along pretty well with La-la, and she's a crazy toddler, and he's one of those little dogs with bangs in his eyes, so that's saying something. There's something inherently cool about a yarn shop with a store dog. My mechanic has a "store dog" too. It sounds like the new place should have much better parking, and will be closer to me. It's a good thing. I had "martha's voice" faux-tags around the "it's a good thing" but it dumped when I saved as draft and then came back to edit. Sad. You can imagine it though, anyway.

I need to go finish this baby blanket.

I had a snappy title for this a few days ago....

Now I'm too tired to remember it, and I'm sure I'll leave out some of the "good" dirt.

I'm plugging away at the garter stitch baby blanket. We're at under 90 stitches/row. When I was at about 97 stitches/row, I approximated the number of stitches I had left as about 5000. (Used the Gaussian formula of n(n-1)/2. Technically it's (n(n-1)/2) - 10, because I stop at the row of 4 stitches. At row 97, the answer is 4646. Depressing, but I chug along. I'm actually at the part where the slingshot acceleration starts, where each row doesn't completely wear you out, and you just want to keep going and finish (at least this is how it is for me, and this is my 4th one of these blankets).

I tried a swatch for DH's scarf, but it involved cable 10 (5 on the cable needle - I had to look it up - when I tried the other swatch for him it was cable 4, and at first I tried 4 on the cable needle.) So, anyway, somewhere on this swatch, before the end of the 1st repeat of the pattern, I dropped a stitch, probably in the cable 10 business. So who's gonna find it in the middle of that mess? Maybe that pattern isn't the one for me. Frogged that puppy.

Speaking of frogging, I frogged the blue chenille sweater. Ruthlessly. Now it's a garter stitch baby blanket. I wish I had bigger than 15 needles, cause I just don't think 15's are big enough for this yarn. It's darn snug on the needles. I'll have to look in the stash.

I'm beat. Very active weekend. Looks like a long week. I just spent an hour and a half shopping for appliances online. Did you know that the 4th wedding anniversary is the year of the appliance? I looked it up at Hallmark's website. If anyone knows, they do. So now DH and I are getting eachother a dryer and a dishwasher. Not sure which is for whom, but I do know that I couldn't get Sears' check and compare feature to work.

photo-rich blogging today!

I got a package from my folks with stuff that I picked out of my grandma's stash when I was on vacation. This is my inheritance.


In these bags were scarves (badly photographed, so you're spared), a few UFO's including these delightful slippers [I think they were inteded for a church bazaar]:


beaucoup yarn, here's an example:

[warmth of natural earthtones. acrylic/nylon blend. brushed. frosted],

aprons (2, but here's one:


And also...Knitting needles (3 size 10 straights, plus some other odd-balls), some knitting knotions, and some embroidered handkerchiefs.

This is a sign that we saw on our vacation, across from a small-town library in my grandparent's town.


I've got a FO-photo - The boy's Gryffindor/FSU hat:

The one for his friend is the same, but Navy and yellow. Seems to correspond to one of those Michigan schools and/or another group at Hogwarts (puffnstuff, hufflepuff, huffnpuff, dunno. sorry.)

Saw a link to this on another blog today. Powerful photos, and an excellent part of the healing process.

Summer here is wrapping up

The boy is home from camp. DH went for the last couple of days. They both had lots of fun, and came home pretty tired. I think he earned at least one merit badge, his Totin' Chip and some fire card.

School starts August 1. Can you believe that? Our county is probably the earliest starting in the whole metro area. Only two more weeks of summer. All the notebooks and pencils and lunchboxes and stuff are out in the stores. Where did summer go? Ours felt so hectic that I sure don't feel rested up for when school starts. But maybe that will be calmer in a way, as our commutes, meeting schedules, and everything reverts back to "normal".

In knitting updates, I finished the Gryffindor London Beanie for the boy (that might be old news), and I finished a navy with yellow stripes one for one of his friends. Each one comes out better than the last, and now I want to reknit the first one, which I made for DH.

I started swatching cable patterns for DH's scarf. That's one of the things I want to get done before it gets cold out - in case he has to go to Chicago, home of the home office, at all this winter. If you have the stitch a day perpetual calendar, I tried the "cable fabric", from April 7, which turned out nicely, although I had a lot of dropped stitch trouble, but what can you do? One I'm considering is "Woven Cables in Relief" from August 22. I can't find pictures online, so I'll show you photos of the swatches when they're done. The Woven Cables in Reilef is sort of a forked tongue cable, and the cable fabric turned out to be kind of a basket weave of cables on the bias. Not sure what the DH is going to pick. I think there are a few other contenders in the calendar too. It's definitely a change from what was feeling like stockinette purgatory - the garter stitch blanket, the sock, and the beanies are all knit stitch rich.

In the news....

Statins may not fight Alzheimer's and Frances Langford dies at 92. These are relevant to me because: (a) My MIL has pre-senile dementia (dementia before age 65, in her case Alzheimer's type probably) and (b) I grew up near Jensen Beach, FL, where Frances Langford lived. In fact, we went to dinner before prom at her former restaurant, the Outrigger Resort. We also went there once when I was little and she still owned it. I had the super-elegant meal of fried chicken and chocolate milk. My sister and I made the waiter come back with chocolate milk so many times that our mother cut us off. We were probably about 7 at the time. My sister and I are 13 months apart, and when either of us tell a story, we set the time as the narrator's age - lumping us both into the same age. So, not twins, but frequently confused.

I had a comment from fickleknitter about braided rugs. This is something my sister and I attempted back in the day (early middle school age?) and didn't get very far with. We recycled a bunch of my dad's old socks, cutting across the calves, so that they were like potholder loops, but wider. We looped them together, like in the demonstration linked previously, and braided three of these strands, sewing the braid into a spiral with ordinary needle and thread. Nothing glamorous and nothing complete, either. We must have gotten the idea out of an old craft book in my mother's stash. This would have been not long after the first Columbia launch, well before Internet resources.

In recent knitting news, we brough the boy to Boy Scout camp! In flashbacks to my formative years, I felt like I couldn't leave until the boy had mosquito netting hung up. I was channeling my mother. DH gave me a talk about how this is supposed to teach him independance, and blah, blah, blah, which made me cry. It was surprisingly hard for me to leave him there, and he's "only" my step-son. (His mother is a long story - she lives in the Crescent City, doesn't call or take advantage of her visitation rights.) OK. Here's the knitting part, really. It's about an hour, hour and a half up to the camp. I started a London Beanie on the way up. Made a mistake. Frogged it. Started over. Made a slew of mistakes. Frogged it again. It's like it never happened at this point. Luckily I brought the garter stitch blanket too, and got a couple rows done on that.

Did I mention that I got the boy's hat done? I need to tuck in the ends, but it's done and he seems to like it. This is good.

Starting another new project!

I came across a blogger who crocheted a tote out of plastic grocery bags and liked her technique for making the plastic bag yarn, found here, it's similar to when you cut up socks to make a braided rug. This is her blog: That Girl. I took La-la to the docs today because her ear still wasn't feeling better, after 2 courses of antibiotics. Turns out it's not infected, but has fluid - so it probably feels like when you're on the airplane and having trouble popping them. He also said, that if she catches a cold again, look out, the infection will come back. So, we had an afternoon at home, with the boy and the girl, and we worked on cutting up plastic bags. Well, I got them started, they turned on a video game, and left me to cut up bags. Fine with me.

Got a package of yarn today from my favorite online vendor. Her online selections continue to grow, her prices and shipping are reasonable, excellent customer service, and all the good stuff. I got two selections of yarn for my secret pal, and some yarn for me. Now I feel like I NNNEEEDD some of what I got her, and the one kind that I got for me and her (in different colorways) I totally can't decide which is for whom. The good news, though, is that I think I have most of what I want put together to send to her. I wonder if I can find any astronaut ice cream around here without going to the airport. That would be fun to send. Or some crazy tourist food. Like that gator egg gum or something. Again, I wonder who sells that locally without having to go to the airport.

I need to sew up a sleep sack for the boy. He's going off to Boy Scout Camp on Sunday. I'm a little worried about him, he's a little goofy still. I think he'll mostly be OK though. What doesn't kill him will make him stronger I suppose.

Did some felting

I finished and felted the French Market Bag in FSU colors for my sister. It turned out well. I really like it - you can see the columns of the stitches in the yellow, but it's really concentrated. The garnet felted a little better than the yellow.

We had less success with the felted slippers for La-la. Lesson learned - use some extra yarn to felt a swatch, to make sure it's gonna felt. The soles (in orange Lamb's Pride) felted fine, the tops (in teal, from the discount bin at the LYS without a good tag, labeled as wool, but apparently pretty tolerant of hot water) didn't felt so much. They still fit my feet and are twice as big as they need to be for the 2 1/2 year old La-la.

I also felted an experimental mitered square made from heirloom wool. It felted OK. You could still see a lot of stitch definition, but it shrank a lot and became quite a bit denser. For such light colors (pink and spring green), I think it probably felted OK. Probably the darker colors that I have would be better felters.

This has the makings of a great science fair project. I'll have to remember it if the boy ever has to do science fair projects.

And with so many projects done.....I started a hat for the boy. Turns out FSU colors are the same as colors for Gryffindor. So he's getting a Gryffindor London Beanie. Had lots of good knitting meetings at work today, but I didn't bring the gold yarn, so I had to quit and be fidgety like the others when I got to the part with the stripes.

I may have already mentioned that I cast on for the Retro Anklets from Socks Socks Socks, in my clearance colorway (very valentine-y colors - reds, pinks, greys). Working on DPN is still slow and awkward for me, but I guess it'll only get faster.

Woo-hoo!

I finally buckled down and did the handles for the FMB! I think I have all four handle segments ready to merge. Oh, crap - that reminds me. I should check my email and see if I broke the build at work again. So, I should have a bunch of stuff ready to felt tomorrow! Hooray! You know what that means - it means I can cast on with little guilt! I think it'll be a "small" project next - either a hat for the boy, since the two colors will be freed up, or a pair of socks! He wanted to use the garnet and gold for the london beanie pattern, saying it would be in the style of one of the Harry Potter groups.

I got to knit a couple rows on the chenille sweater at work yesterday. I was pleased to find that I've got 3/4 of the back done (12" out of 16"), and that the row gauge seems to be 3 rows to the inch. And it wasn't as bad as I remembered it. :-P

OK. I'm going to go check my work email and graft some handles.