Happy New Year!

It's good to be back home again! We went to see my parents in Connecticut and it was really a very nice trip. We drove. From Florida. To Connecticut. 1200 miles each way. With two kids in the back seat. It was an adventure. We picked up a DVD player from Target before we left that has two monitors and plays two discs. I'm pretty sure we got our money's worth out of that investment. Although overhearing a bunch of Pixar movies is sort of a surreal soundtrack for the trip. Very different from the soundtrack from the last time I drove that far (when I was finishing college, we went on a family roadtrip with my folks where my sister introduced us to the Talking Heads and I listened to a lot of REM. And you know what? There was no snow at all. A couple of little near-flurries that by the time La had on her parka and boots were over. The taunting made her mad.

We got to see lots of people - we stopped in Charlotte on the way up and spent the night with my mom's sister Suzy (and husband and daughter). I was able to convince my husband that I came by this crafting stuff naturally. This is what she made LaLa for Christmas:

It's a Blues Clues quilt. She printed family pictures onto fabric (all the grandparents, Me, DH, the Monkey, my nephews) and Blue and Magenta and other characters. The handy-dandy notebook opens up and has three pages: 1. Whose grandparents? 2. Whose mom, dad, and brother? and 3. Whose cousins? It's a clever idea and well executed!

This is what I got from my mother - I had seen some fancy casserole dishes at a department store and asked her to make me one. She had a few already, either made by her or bought at the gallery-shop of her pottery studio.

It has a lid too, that fits really well. All of the pictures I took with the lid on were wicked blurry.

I also picked up a box and half a suitcase of vintage yarn and fabric from my Grandma Mercier's stash. I had really wanted to hit some CT yarn shops but after sifting through my grandmother's yarn and fabric, knowing how much I have at home already, it made me feel kind of gross. I should probably listen to that feeling. I brought home 2 WIP - half a pair of mittens and about 10" of scarf, lots of miscellaneous yarn, some wool, some acrylic, some modernish ("Mexicana Red Heart"), some way vintage (Bernat Scandia, that goes with a pattern book of hers from the 1960's), some in nice shape, some a little felty or sticky. But I dug through it and brought home stuff I either really liked or thought I could use for something (charity knitting?) some was almost enough for a sweater, some was a tiny skein.





I really want to sew - I have three quilts ready or nearly ready for quilting, and now the makings for a whole bunch more stuff. I also want to sew a new bag for myself, I have the fabric and ideas for Pocketbook 1.1. I'm also thinking about reupholstering the dining room chairs with some fabric remnants and going with a "barely coordinated, let alone matching" strategy. I got buy-off from the architect on that. These projects are all on top of the pile before the plain canvas bag project for environmentally friendly grocery bags. I just need to clear off some floor and table in order to get to do this (and have a couple of monkey-less hours to get going.)

There is not much fabulous knitting progress to report from my 20 hours in the car. Not so much because I was really pulling my weight with the driving or referreeing the monkeys either. Partly because the day and a half of knitting on DH's sweater, I had to rip out. I had the feeling. The feeling that my quick gauge calculation was not real accurate. I'm trying it again with 40 less stitches per round. It's almost as long as my hand. My second pink and grey sock is about 10 rounds from the heel flap. Two stockinette tubes. Not so exciting to look at, although I'll try to have pictures next time because they are pretty. The red scarf is coming along slowly too. I did manage to work in a repeat of the Shetland Triangle last night. I have an error in one of the rows but I got tired of re-knitting the second half of that row and left it in there. I figured that the stitch counts would work out, so there was no real harm in it.

Well, I need to make my lunch and get my stuff ready for tomorrow and maybe do a little knitting. Happy New Year - I hope you guys had a great one and an excellent holiday.