Sorry it’s been such an uneventful knitting week :( In addition to a lack of motivation (not total; I have managed to work some on the ongoing projects) my right shoulder has been screaming at me all week.  Over the last year it has been cheerfully getting more and more arthritic and on occasion can sing very loudly indeed.  Such is life :)

We are about to lose our cool weather as today the temperatures are supposed to go back up to something more like normal for this time of year - mid 80s to low 90s.  Still, September isn’t very far off and the temperatures won’t stay that high for long.

I’m hoping to get another couple of coasters done this weekend and, for some reason, my mind has been turning to socks again.  I’m thinking something with cables because I like my socks ribbed all the way up the leg and cable ares just a lot more interesting to do that plain ol’ ribbing.  Clicking on the image will take you to the pattern.

There’s this from Debbi Young at Cloud Nine Knitting:

I just love the appearance of this sock.  They even look comfortable!

And there’s these from J. Sumner:

These also look super comfortable and I have plenty of Woolease :) But I’d also be making them - the first time through, anyway - with an eye towards scaling things down for DK, fingering or sock yarn.  As is, though, these would be great with my beloved (and increasingly tatty) clogs :)

And then there’s this one which just looks like fun :)

These are probably intended to go with boots, but I think they’d be cool regardless.  I very much like the idea of the attached decoration - you could have a lot of fun with that!

Anyway, that’s about all for today, folks.  I’ll mention that I started reading a series of mysteries by Simon Brett that are a lot of fun.  His main character, Mrs. Pargeter is delightful and the writing is quite entertaining.  There’s nothing ponderous about this series; it’s not going to solve the problems of the world or anything - it’s just fun. 

See you Monday, folks - have a wonderful weekend :)

I had lunch yesterday with a dear friend who presented me with these:

I have no idea where she found them, but aren’t they cute?  They’re from Lion Brand, size 10 US, flexible plastic and designated as “children’s needles”.  They’re also quite short - about 7” long.  I’ll probably give them a try, but I expect they’ll be - for the most part - a decorative addition to my needle jar :)

I also got to the library yesterday for the first time in quite a while.  I can go to any library in the consortium (about 30 cities and towns) but the one most convenient to me is down for a couple of years - undergoing badly needed repairs and redesigning.  I have finally found another that isn’t too difficult to get to, has a nice array of material and (very important) has plenty of free parking :)

Among many others, I took out three knitting related books: The Knitting Stitch Bible by Maria Parry-Jones, Knitting in Plain English by Maggie Righetti and Meg Swanson’s Knitting by Meg Swanson.

First impressions? 

I’ve been eyeing The Knitting Stitch Bible for quite a while, having leafed through it in the bookstore, admired it’s very useful design (hard covers, ring bound), colorful photos and been frightened off by its cost - $29.95.  It’s not a very big book and useful though it might be, that’s a lot of money to shell out.  Having had the opportunity to go through it a bit more last night, it seems to me that there are other reasons to think before adding this one to the library.  First, almost all of the stitch patterns can be found elsewhere - there isn’t much new here.  Second, while it’s nice that there are color photographs of each stitch pattern, in some of the photographs, the stitch pattern is difficult to impossible to make out.  Third, some of the samples are not very well done.  If you still have to have it, Amazon offers it for just over $20.

Knitting in Plain English looks useful and is indeed presented in a pleasant and straight-forward manner.  Righetti doesn’t resort to buzz-words and fad terms which are usually intended to display the author’s technical prowess and to make the reader feel stupid.  I only scanned the first few chapters, but my impression so far is that this would be a useful book to read - if not own.

Meg Swanson’s Knitting is lovely to look at and filled with delightful stories about Swanson’s life and, of course about Swanson’s mother - Elizabeth Zimmermann.  The patterns she offers aren’t for the faint of heart and they’re not for an inexperienced knitter as directions are casual and written for knitters who are familiar with stranded techniques.  But the designs are fabulous and you might want\to look through it to see the kinds of things to which you might aspire someday.  For me, that day is a long ways off but a couple of those sweaters make me want to hasten it along :)

Goldie seems to enjoy looking out the kitchen window - even on damp, dreary days like this.  We found a teriffic comb that’s helping us to slowly get the mats out of his fur (his fur has an undercoat that’s nearly as dense as a thermonuclear reactor core) and he is looking a bit more presentable these days.  I think he must be feeling better too because he’s not having to haul around uneeded insulation in the warmer weather.  He’s funny about the actual grooming sessions - he doesn’t like the grooming but he definitely does like the attention.





And I did, finally manage to get this cast on and get a bit of work done on it.  I’ve been playing with an idea to adapt a cap pattern to work with Gryffindor colors too.  Well, why not? - but I’m still working it out :)

Glop Tales

You remember the Great Gelatin/Yogurt Experiment?  This started as a way to have a low calorie dessert that would still have some ...oomph.  It worked out so well that we’ve been having fun with the concept all summer and the end result has come, affectionately, to be known as glop.

The last batch went this way.

I have never pitted cherries before in my life.  In fact only last summer did fresh cherries become somewhat affordable in this part of the country.  So the knitting needle is there (size 8 US, for the terminally curious) because I thought I could pole a hole in one side of the fruit and then poke the pit out from the other side.  We all have bright ideas once in a while but this wasn’t one of them :) After thoroughly mushing up the cherry and staining my fingers a lovely cerise, I decided to go with the knife.  That worked just fine and I pitted and halved a couple of cups of fruit.





Then I got out the not-as-big, honkin’ bowl (there is also a big, honkin’ bowl), put the water on to boil and assembled the rest of the stuff - two packages of sugar-free gelatin (cherry flavored, in this case), two 8 oz. Cartons of non-fat, sugar-free yogurt (also cherry) and the prepared fruit - 1-2 cups depending on what you have and how much you want.





If you’re using sugar-free gelatin (and I am) it will dissolve pretty quickly.  I use a wire whisk to encourage it.  Okay, when the water boils, measure out 2 cups and add that to the gelatin.  Stir until everything is dissolved.  Then add the yogurt and stir until completely incorporated.  The whisk comes in handy here as the yogurt - being a semi-solid - needs to be broken up.  When the yogurt and gelatin are mixed to your satisfaction, add the fruit.





Then cover with plastic wrap and set in the refrigerator for a couple of hours to firm up.

Adding fruit does increase the calorie count somewhat, but it also substantially raises the fiber and overall nutritional content.  A little non-dairy whipped topping doesn’t hurt anything either.  And it tastes pretty good too :)

I’ve been playing with all kinds of things as this is easy and even kind of fun.  Instead of yogurt, soft drinks (also sugar-free) can yield interesting flavors and textures.  One package of lemon and one package of lime gelatin made with 7-up (use only 1 cup boiling water to dissolve the gelatin and then add 2 cans (24oz) of 7-up) makes a very refreshing combination.  The next time I try this one, I’m going to add some cut up, green grapes.  Strawberry gelatin combined with strawberry/banana yogurt and a couple of sliced bananas was pretty good too.  Especially spectacular have been the cherry combination above and one I did with orange gelatin, Polar Orange Dry tonic and cut up nectarines.

An imagination is a handy thing to have in the kitchen :)

Oh Lord - what a beautiful weekend we had here!  Temperatures in the low 70s, breezy and cool.  Aaaaahhhhhhh....  And, according to the local weather critters, the temps are supposed to stay down for the coming week.  Of course there’ll be some rain with that but hey - that’s a reasonable trade-off in my opinion :) Makes me want to pull up the quilt and go back to sleep - and what an absolutely delicious feeling it is to need the quilt in the middle of the summer!

The cooler temperatures have meant that fewer fans are running and those that are in use are generally set to “low” rather than “gale force wind”.  That means the living room doesn’t resemble a wind tunnel quite as much as it usually does this time of year and that means I got to work a bit on this:





I’ve made friends, again, with the Pi shawl.  I finally managed to frog back to the mistake and correct it and yes, I did have to cut the yarn - twice.  I lost about 18” of the stuff all together (let us have a moment of silence for the honored thread) but feel that was a small enough price to pay to get the mistake repaired.  I sailed on for another few rows after that and am looking forward to working on it this week while the climate remains reasonable.

I also finished the purple coaster.

Oddly, the purple came out a bit bigger than the pink.  I can’t see any difference in the two yarns and I know that sometimes color (the dye or the dye process?) can make a minor difference in the thickness of the yarn so I’m chalking it up to variable tension :) As in - I was probably more tense when knitting the pink coaster than I was when I was knitting the purple one!

And, just by the way, does anyone else forget how to start something on DPNs between projects?  This drives me absolutely, certifiably, unequivocally, two-fries-short-of-a-Happy-Meal BONKERS!  As part of this weekend’s festivities, I decided it was time to start the second Harry Potter scarf.  And I did try.  Several times :( I can usually manage to get something going on DPNs without too much difficulty.  My usual method involves casting the full amount of stitches onto straight needles and then sliding the stitches onto the DPNs, joining and carrying on from there.  I did it for the first HP scarf and I’ve done it in the past for mittens (all right - a mitten) and for socks - should be old hat by now, right?

Well, it ain’t.  Clearly the process is something my pea-brain finds far from intuitive because every now and again - yesterday, for example - I find myself at a total loss as to how to accomplish it.  It makes no difference that I’ve done it in the past and I can lecture myself blue in the face about all the times I’ve been able to pull it off before.  Still no dice.  Does this happen to anyone else out there - the having trouble with something you know you know how to do?  I may try it again this afternoon to see if my knitting chakra has managed to unblock itself.

In the meantime, I may take a nap :)

Now, where’s my quilt...?

Have you seen these guys?

They were around last Christmas in a couple of styles and a bunch of sizes and “breeds”.  This one has a battery pack.  When you press a button, he barks and his ears move and his tail wags.  It’s pretty cute - especially the wagging tail thing.  I was able to pick him up, post-season, on clearance and I enjoy him.  I don’t have to feed him or clean up after him - I just get to play with him.  The cat ignores him :)





Worked on this last night while watching “Mercury Rising”.  I hadn’t seen it before but it wasn’t too bad - well, not too bad for something with such a slender plot.  But that kind of film can be acceptable - even enjoyable under the right circumstances.  Bruce Willis is a great action hero, Alec Baldwin was a convincingly oily and evil bad guy and sometimes that’s all you need for a good time.  It was the presentation that kind of did things in.

According to the IMDB, the running time for this film is 108 minutes (you have to give the producers credit for knowing they didn’t have a lot of story to tell and for keeping it brief).  It aired, last night, on TBS from 9 PM to 12 AM.  Three hours!  That’s 180 minutes.  Now, let’s subtract the 108 minutes of actual film (we’ll assume nothing was cut...cough) and that gives us 72 minutes - of advertising!  GACK!  I should have known when the first commercial break was long enough for me to go into the kitchen, make dinner, and be back in my chair before the movie resumed.

I reached the end of the half-ball of Waterspun last night and will have to wind the other two hanks now to go on with the scarf.  I’m liking the look a lot.  I’m trying something different with the patterning and am slipping the first stitch (on the return leg of the short row) rather than knitting it.  It produces less bulk along the seam and also creates a rather decorative chained line along the join.  We’ll see how it works out.

I was supposed to go to lunch with Dad today but after a night filled with stomach cramps and not much sleep, I figured I’d be better off staying home.  Well, I’ll probably go out long enough to get some ginger ale.  My mother always gave that to me as a kid when I had tummy woe’s - she used to let it get flat, though.  It always helped - but I don’t let it get flat any more :)

Happy weekend everyone :)

You know what?  I had a long rant written about the price of cotton craft yarn and the apparent conversion of stores like A.C. Moore’s and Michael’s to novelty yarn extravaganzas where nothing either ordinary or less than $4/50gms was permitted.  And I realized that you probably don’t want to read that.  Likely you already know these things and who wants to listen to me being grumpy anyways?

But the rant aside, I don’t have a lot to say.  Did a bit more on the short-row scarf and that’s all I had time for yesterday.  The bathmat project will likely be scrubbed because I refuse to pay half again as much for the yarn as I did less than a year ago.

There was a bright spot though:

These came in the mail yesterday from Cheryl of Tell me a Yarn fame.  Aren’t they wonderful?  A card full of beautiful little turquoise felines to help me keep track of my knitting.  I’m very much looking forward to using them - and using them and using them some more :)

And that’s pretty much all for now folks.  Later!

As I was sitting in the kitchen last night, a specifically summer scent wafted in through the windows.  There are lots of summer scents - freshly mown grass, barbecues firing up, the fresh smell of the air after a thunderstorm.  This one was a little different.  It was the pungent odor of peeved skunk.  I don’t find the odor particularly repulsive and it was evocative of past encounters with the aromatic little critters.

While the apartment isn’t exactly in the city it’s a long ways from being in the country.  Yet, we have always seemed to have a substantial skunk population in this area.  Who knew skunks could (or would) go urban?

In the house I grew up in, the washing machine was in the basement.  You know how basement windows are - up at the top of the wall and just big enough to let in a little light.  One afternoon, my mother called me down to see something.  I hurried down the stairs wondering what was up because she seemed excited - and there just isn’t much to get excited about in a basement full of half-empty paint cans, old tools and one stalwart washing machine.  As I walked over towards her, she pointed up at the window over the washer.  There, snuggled up against the glass and fast asleep was a baby skunk, nose tucked into chest, about five inches long and cute as could be.

It turned out that he was one of four babies that were living in the field out behind the yard.  They would show up in the early morning and my mother (much to the consternation of our neighbors) would feed them whatever she happened to have on hand - corn left over from last night’s supper, half a doughnut - they seemed to eat and to like just about everything.

They were absolutely adorable with their little wedge-shaped faces and their tiny, bright eyes.  Skunks are built wide and low to the ground; quick movement is not their forte.  These four ambled around looking like they were trundling along on little square wheels.  They visited us for about a week and then were gone - presumably pursuing other, more interesting skunky activities.

Then, a couple of years ago as I was leaving to go to work, I was frozen in place on the stairs by the presence of two very adult skunks right up against the house in front of the porch.  They were clearly involved with one another but I couldn’t say whether they were playing, fighting or mating.  I slowly backed up into the porch, closed the door, and stood watching them.  They were really rather attractive in their rich black and snow white coats.  One would pounce and the other would roll around.  Then the other would pounce and the game went on in this fashion.  It took them about twenty minutes to work their way from the porch, across the parking lot and out to an area where I wouldn’t endanger them by trying to back the car out (nor endanger myself). They did seem to be enjoying themselves with their little stiff-legged little jumps and their sotto voce squeaks.

Of course I was late and of course my boss was annoyed, demanding to know why I hadn’t called animal control.  I was dumbfounded - it never occurred to me.  They were not endangering me or anyone else and it was (it had seemed to me) simply a matter of waiting them out.  Different perspectives, I suppose.

I completed the second mitten last night and am very pleased with the pair.  I have made lots of mittens, but these are the first I’ve made for myself.  I had to adjust the thumb - both the style and the length and I had to lengthen the space between the ribbing and the gusset a little but everything worked out perfectly :)

That left me with about two and a half balls of the Waterspun, so I immediately cast on for this:

I thought this might be just the pattern to take advantage of the lovely variegated colors of this yarn.  I didn’t get very far with it last night, but I think it’s going to be pretty spiffy :)

Happy Wednesday all - hope your mid-week is peaceful and (if you want it to be) productive :)