The temperature here (about 30 miles north of Boston) is about 67ºF this morning and I’m just tickled right down to my toenails :)  It’s kind of cloudy and rainy too, but I can live with that.  This is August?  Bring it on!

I finally finished the multi-directional scarf this weekend, so that set is complete.

I’m real pleased with these things and am looking forward to using them come winter.  Come to think of it, if things get any cooler around here, I may be using them sooner than that!  Heheh - now wouldn’t that be a shame :)

I did play with a couple of potential tablecloth motif patterns…

Snowdrop I did in the same thread as the doily and I like the way it came out.  Pagoda I did with heavier cotton and a larger hook and I didn’t like the cotton much at all.  I’ll have to redo the piece in the finer thread to get a real feel for how I think it looks.  Actually, because of the way these pieces are intended to be joined, I really have to do a block of several joined pieces to see what the final pattern looks like.

While this is something I do want to do, it’s going to have to wait a while.  I have projects in the works that need finishing up and I’m trying very hard to be more organized. 

I also wound up needing a gift in an almighty rush - by Thursday morning - and I spent all day yesterday (really, ask Myria!) testing stitch patterns and looking for a simple scarf that I could make quickly out of nice yarn.  Of course I didn’t find anything I liked - ARRGGGHHH….  I’ll continue the search today and hope I can actually get started on something!  Sheesh!  Where’s your imagination when you need it?!

While Goldie and Jade aren’t exactly best buddies yet, negotiations continue and hostilities aren’t as fervent as they used to be.  Except when Jade’s been in the catnip.  Then all bets are off as she alternates between “Come hither…” and “Get the hell out of here!”  It can be quite entertaining - but don’t get between them!

Hope you all had sweet, crafty weekends and that your coming week is tolerable!

We have a small kitchen table, you see, and I’ve always wanted to make a lace tablecloth…(click photos for links)

Like this, maybe: Pagoda - 


Or this: Sweet Clover - 


Or perhaps this: Star - 

I’d only be making two or three small motifs at a time and that shouldn’t tax my fingers overly much.  Eventually I’d have a beautiful piece of lace.  God knows I’ve got enough thread :)

My fingers were complaining big time, by the time I finished up last night, so I now know that 6 hour crochet sessions (well, when little tiny crochet is involved) are not a good thing.  But Celt’s Vintage Crochet site is such a treasure trove of beautiful stuff that I’ll definitely be going back.

The reason for the 6 hour session is that when I had finished my daily allocation of White Sapphire, I realized that I only had another couple of rounds to go.  That being the case, I went ahead and did them (one of them twice, due to an inaccuracy in the pattern - grrrr…).  Then I washed it and pinned it out.

This is what it looks like:

It measures just over 15” in diameter.  The original pattern called for a #10 or #11 hook and a finished diameter of about 14” so I’m right in the ballpark there.

Today I’m going to knit.  On big needles!

Happy Friday-the-13th folks!

I’ve discovered that working a little on multiple projects every day seems to get me somewhere :)  Right now I’ve narrowed the project rotation to the bathmats, the crochet lace, the multi-directional scarf and the Harry Potter scarf.  I’ll do a square for the bathmats, a couple or three rounds on the lace, a triangle on the M-D scarf and a color repeat on the HP scarf.  And you know what?  It seems to be working.  We’re not going like gangbusters here, but these four projects are slowly getting done.  I’m actually getting a little glow because I know that within a week, at least three of them will be completed - unless I have a very lazy couple of days.

The Waterspun scarf is about 5” wide and currently about 53” long.  Another couple of pattern repeats will bring me to 60” which is long enough for me, I think.  I may even have enough yarn leftover to consider an edging of some sort - probably just something simple and crocheted.  Hmmm….

The ravens claw and the huffles puff,
While the rest slyther in through
The Gryffin door…

Eeeps!  Clearly I haven’t have enough coffee yet :)  This is a bit more than half done and I enjoy thinking about my nephews wearing them while I’m knitting.  Frankly, it’s so simple I only ever have to look at the work to make sure I don’t knit through a stitch marker :)

I’m thinking about having another “organize the stash” day as soon as we have a cool enough day to make it feasible.  I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t know what I have or how much and I really need to find out.  I’m thinking about this because I have the sneaking suspicion that there may be a couple more good add-in yarns (for the possible deep pink shawl) lurking in there that I’ve completely forgotten about - or even just haven’t considered.  I’m beginning to reconsider that shawl too - not that I don’t want to make it.  I still certainly do want to make it.  But I don’t think I want it in garter stitch - at least not entirely.  I need to mull it over some more.  I want it to be simple enough to show off the color changes of the carry-along yarns, but I don’t want it to be plain.  Does that make sense?  Any thoughts or suggestions?

Myria often has trouble getting to sleep at night so she’s recently started a no-caffeine policy after a certain time of day.  Towards that end, she’s making tea to drink in the evening - this pitcher is a combination of de-caffeinated green tea and chamomile/mint.  I suspect it’s the mint that’s got Jade’s attention here.

There’s really no reason at all for the picture of the nectarines - except that I thought they were beautiful :)

Summer is not my favorite season.  Heat and humidity make Robbyn a grumpy girl and about the only exercise I get is longing for cooler weather.  Summer does have, however, a seriously redeeming feature - the plentitude and proliferation of myriad kinds of fresh fruit. Peaches and nectarines and plums, cherries, blueberries and strawberries, grapes in nearly all colors and sizes and melon - watermelon, cantaloupe and honeydew!  Even bananas, plentiful and cheap all year ‘round take on a special glow in the summer.

Given my druthers, I’d probably eat nothing else from May to October - well, at least as long as my intestinal tract held out :)

Which brings me to this.  I bought a half dozen nectarines yesterday - beautiful, firm pieces of fruit who’s skins look like a sunset in red and gold - each of which had a little numbered sticker on it.  Know what happens if you don’t notice and leave the sticker there until the fruit is ripe enough to eat?  You pull the skin off along with the sticker.  Depending on the store and the kind of sticker used, you might anyway; I’ve run into stickers on tomatoes (also a fruit - a type of berry) that were so tenacious they had to be cut off!  This may not matter much to some, but to me it’s sacrilege!  So this morning, while I was having my coffee, I peeled all the stickers off the nectarines.

And I began to wonder how far this thing could go.  I could see myself, a few years down the road, peeling little bitty stickers off a pound of cherries - it would be a morning’s job!  No big deal with melons, but grapes would be tedious, strawberries difficult and blueberries almost impossible.  Yes, I’m being facetious but if it isn’t a banana or an orange, I don’t want to have to peel it before I eat it.

The table center is coming along nicely and has just 7 or 8 rounds to go. 

The thread is curious stuff, somewhat coarse in feel and appearance, though not stiff or difficult to work with and it is certainly strong enough.  There are odd, short fibers that show up every now and then, bits of flax I’m guessing, that can be pulled out of the thread with no ill effect. 

This will probably be my main project for a while as I need to have it done by next Thursday.  And after that I can allow myself the delicious contemplation of a new project!

Happy mid-week all :)

I sometimes think my definition of hell would be listening to someone else’s music.  It’s not even that it mightn’t be something I’d enjoy under other circumstances.  No, the only determination is that I can’t get away from it and I have to listen to it.  Like the kid in the muscle car behind you on the road who’s got his bass cranked so much that your car shakes.  Or the kid in the alley who’s got “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone” playing so loudly your fillings rattle…

Oh well…

Saturday, I received a small package in the mail.  This is what it contained:

This munificence comes from Bron, for no other reason than that she was feeling generous.  Lucky, lucky me :)  The top left is fresh rosemary from her garden and, having already used some, I can tell you it is absolutely sensational, unbelievably savory and pungent!  The bottom left are moss agate stitch markers that she made -  beautiful and useful.  The right-side image is a space opera that I am looking forward to reading having long been a science fiction fan.  Among other things, I am relishing trying out a new author because if I like him, then I’ll have the pleasure of wandering through the rest of his body of work!  Thanks Bron, you thoughtful kid :)

I actually got a lot of knitting and crocheting done this weekend but I’m not going to bore you with picture of incomplete projects - the incompleteness of which you all have already witnessed.  However, I did complete the first phase of this project:

I finished the first part of the bathmat project.  This is as long as the current mat but just a hair narrower and will get a border eventually.  Next comes the toilet mat - which I’ve worked out how to do.  Then, if there seems to be enough yarn left, I’m going to make each of those two mats over again (simple dc squares though, no posts) and attach them to the bottoms of the first mats to make them doubly thick.  I think this would feel really nice on the tootsies :)

The kid in the alley has either turned off the boom box or his batteries have died.  Wouldn’t it be fun to have a little zapper type dingus that you could point at offensive radios and/or stereos and just drain their batteries?  The sounds of silence…aaahhhhhh!

Well, I’ve been puttering along on the same, several projects I’ve been working on for a while now - the HP scarf (one done, one in progress), the Waterspun scarf (to go with the hat and mittens), the crocheted lace table center, the crocheted bathmat set (which I hope to make serious progress on this weekend) and the proposed Waterspun shawl.  The fancy scarf is almost certainly going to get scrubbed - I haven’t liked the way it looked for a while now and can’t imagine giving it as a gift.  Since it is very close to being done, I may finish it anyways.  Oh, who am I kidding…

The shawl, I think, is going to have to wait a while because I want several additional yarns to use as “mix-ins” - like ice cream?  I’ve got a bit - though just a bit - of really nice mohair.  A full ball of that, plus the same mohair in another colorway would be just lovely.  Some sport or DK weight balls in pinks, blues, purples and/or teals would be lovely too as well as something(s) textured.  I’ll be collecting for a while before this gets underway.

Organization seems to elude me as far as knitting and projects go.  When I was part of the 9 to 5 working world, I was very organized.  I could analyze problems, figure out what was necessary to solve the problem and the proceed in a linear and logical fashion to a suitable solution.  In fact I had something of a reputation for organization.  I know - hard to believe, isn’t it!

With the knitting (and crocheting, and beading, etc…) I seem to have seriously truncated my attention span.  I’ll start something and work on it enthusiastically until something else catches my eye or sparks my interest.  Then I’m off on a new project and the old one will languish, to be worked on (guiltily) once in a while, or completely forgotten - until I run across its poor, crumpled form in the bottom of one of my bags several weeks or months later and frog the poor things to release it from its misery.

This approach also results in piles of projects in the living room which only get larger and never seem to get finished and put away.

I have wondered if this is a permanent condition for me or if it’s, possibly, a phase - albeit a long one.  I do learn things this way.  I know that I’m more likely to finish a small project, say a hat, a scarf or a pair of mittens (though that second mitten is tough) than a bigger project like a sweater or a poncho (trust me, at my size, both these things qualify as bigger projects).  But I’ve lately begun to wonder if breaking up a bigger project into small pieces that I could complete quickly might be a way of fooling my impatient self into actually completing something larger than a placemat.

For example, I’ve got quite a bit of some very nice yarn in several, companionable colors.  However, the hanks are only 21-23 yards long.  There will be lots of joining and piecing going on when I figure out what I want to do with this stuff.  Hey!! - wait….  Doesn’t that mean that I could work things in pieces and, maybe, not get too bored with it?  Maybe?  I have a couple of ideas perking in my head and I’d like to start trying to figure out how to work them…but I already have all these projects going on…

What to do, what to do….

Have a great weekend folks!

...I lucked into a spool of thread - a huge spool (about 2.5 lbs) remanded to the “free” bin at the mill because it was pretty grubby.  There’s a label inside the cone that states it’s 70% pima cotton and 30% linen and the count is given as 24/2x2.  I have no idea what that means, but the stuff works up perfectly on a #9 crochet hook.

I wanted to make a nice table center for a friend who is redecorating this summer and it seemed that this stuff might be the ticket - if I could clean it up reasonably well.  So I made a test piece - a small motif of the type that tablecloths were made from in the earlier part of the last century. (Celt’s Vintage Crochet is a great resource for vintage crochet patterns - tons of really beautiful stuff).  Then I washed it in the kitchen sink - and wasn’t too careful about it either.  Dish detergent, lots of rubbing and squishing, lots of rinsing and then crumpled into a ball inside a couple of paper towels to get as much water out as possible.  Then I pinned it out on a towel to sit overnight and dry.

It looks decent, I think - the grubbies are all gone anyway.  The color is sort of an ecru/oyster blend that fretted me a bit until Myria suggested that it looked heirloom.  I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t look too bad. 

So, the material worked up well, cleaned up nicely and is good and sturdy.  That was all I needed to know to start this:

The design (from the above mentioned site) is called “White Sapphire” and was new in 1943.  Currently, the diameter is about 6.75” (unblocked) and I expect it to be about twice that when complete.  I’m quite enjoying working this project as I had thought my fine crochet days were well behind me at this point.  It’s nice to know I can still manage this.

I finally got to work on the other Harry Potter scarf and am, at last, making progress.  I’m still mulling over matching hats and when/if I come up with something, you all will be the first to know :)

Last, but absolutely, positively, categorically and certainly not least, barb-in-east-texas sent me this:

It’s the Sugar ‘n Cream Potpourri Ombre I ran out of for the new bathmats!  It was incredibly nice of her to share this with me.  Barb - you’re a peach and a half!  Thank-you, thank-you and thank-you :)  Now I can complete the mats which will really look nice.  I will post pictures when I’m done.  Just what you wanted, right - to see the inside of my bathroom?