That Girl

I want to thank you lovely ladies for the birthday wishes! It really made my day to read your sweet comments.


Remember Marlo Thomas' funky flip haircut in the 60's TV series, That Girl?



I loved her flip hairstyle, and I've been thinking about doing something different with my hair, so after getting about 9" cut off my hair (it feels fabulous!!), I now have my very own, updated for the new millenium, That Girl flip. (It had a little more flip before it was windblown on the ride home)




Of course, the new 'do is to divert your attention from the fact that I've done absolutely no cross stitch or knitting at all so far this week!


When I start a new xstitch project, I have this thing about starting from dead center (or as close as absolutely possible). I wanted to start Marriage of the Minds, but in the project package from Needlecraft Corner, the color I needed was missing. I emailed the proprietress, Drema, who replied with a profusely apologetic email and promptly popped it in the mail, which arrived today.

If you're looking for a great online xstitch store (it's in the US), Needlecraft Corner is fabulous! Very fast, courteous service. Drema is so nice to work with.

Now that I have Gloriana Silk #117 in my little hands, I might put some stitches in this evening...

Birthday Funnery

Happy Hour was a blast Friday night. Here's a picture of my sister and some of her friends we met up with at Joe's Crab Shack in Station Square. (DSis is 2nd from left. DH and I weren't in the pic.)



The Wildthings game Saturday night was really fun. Unfortunately, some thunderstorms blew through with a cold front and they called it in the 2nd inning. But, otherwise, we had a fantastic time.

When the Wildthings pitcher threw the very first strikeout of the game, they tossed out these little foamy toilets with a local plumber's advertisement on it into the stands. It's like one of those foamy things you squeeze when you're all stressed out and need a release. Anyways, DH caught one. It's his 'Major Award'. :o)

Me, DH, DSis, Dad and Mum:


DSis and DSis's beau:


Even my Jaywalker got in on the fun.




And, of course, there were prezzies:

This was from DSis. How purr-fect is this??? It's going on my desk at work.



Mom and Mum & Dad each gave me some green prezzies (This is what I got last year, and the year before that...notice a pattern forming? :o), so I made an etrip to Needlecraft Corner and bought all the fixin's for Marriage of the Minds. I can't wait to get it started this week!!



And this Every Day Needlework Bag from Namaste was from me to me:




Gelato and Mum's Cardi were well received. Mum's Cardi fit Mum perfectly! Unfortunately, it was very hot and humid, so she didn't keep it on long enough for me to get a picture.


This wasn't part of the gifties, but I also got some sock yarn (from The Loopy Ewe) to get started on some Christmas presents for my Mum and Dad:



The Lorna's Laces (Red, white and blue) is for Dad (he loves all things patriotic), and Claudia's Steelers (The black, gold and white) is for Mum (she watches/listens to all the teams: Steelers, Pirates and Penguins). I'm going to make both socks with the Switchback Socks pattern. I'm not sure who will get the Flared Lace Smoke Ring (moi? :o) but since the Farmer's Almanac is calling for a cold, snowy winter in the East, I will definitely be making it...for someone.


Since it was my birthday today, and because the weather was so gorgeous, DH and I decided to take a ride here. We came home with almost $70 more than we went with. This was mostly thanks to DH, I was the Human Money Funnel. (Well, more than usual. It was just more concentrated today)

I also was left messages on the answering machine from the niecelets, and other various family members, singing 'Happy Birthday' to me.

It was a great birthday.

Pumpkins!

I keep deluding myself hoping that if I work on Autumn themed projects, we will have Autumn weather. So far, my theory has fallen flat on it's face. It's supposed to be 92F today with dew points around 70F. Now you know not to ask me for any good lottery numbers!



I've been working away at my Batch of Pumpkins during lunch. I got a lot done yesterday while participating in an Oracle conference call from the comfort of my desk. (Hey, I can't help it, it was scheduled during my lunch hour - the fun of working for a company headquartered in the Central Time Zone)

I probably won't get much more done on it this week, so this is probably going to be the last update before moving onto the next project in my rotation.

We've got lots going on this weekend. Tonight, DSis organized a Happy Hour gathering at a local haunt to celebrate her making it to her 30's with her boyfirend and a bunch of coworkers. Even us old fogies were invited, and although this is something DH and I rarely do, I thought it would be fun to get out and pretend we're not old and boring. :o)

Tomorrow morning, I have to put the finishing touches on Mum's Cardi and DSis's Gelato and gift bag them up. Later on Saturday, we're gathering at Mum and Dad's house to exchange gifties before going to the Wildthing's (Minor League) baseball game. The game Saturday evening (provided it's not storming) will be the collective August birthday celebration for Mum, DSis and me.

I also need to work on my Jaywalker sock before the game Saurday night to get it past the turnheel so I don't have to do it while at the game. It's not that it's hard, but it does require a bit more undivided concentration than other parts of a sock.

Sunday, I'll probably sleep in to some obscenely late hour, like 9. :o)

Afternoon Edit: Here's the result of my lunch time knitting today on my Jaywalker. I finished the turn heel and started the side gussets.




Have a fantastic weekend, everyone! :o)

My Little Sister Quilts!

My sister and I are pretty much 180.

- I'm the Suburbanite and she's the Urbanite
- She wears DKNY, I wear Lands' End
- I like wine, she likes tequila shots
- She bar hops with the girlfriends, I curl up with a good book and tea
- I watch Sense & Sensibility, she watches Rosemary's Baby

For all of our differences though (including she's 9 years younger than me), when we are together, we're always laughing and having a great time, and you'd know in an instant we are sisters. But, for her swanky, downtown lifestyle, now my sister...quilts!

I guess she couldn't fight the draw...it's in her blood. Mum sews, crochets and cross stitches. I sew, knit and cross stitch. And now my sister quilts. (Even Dad does woodworking)

I wanted to share the gorgeous potholder she just made for her kitchen. The center looks like you're looking down on a blueberry pie with a star cut out to vent it. (I don't think that's what she was going for, but that's what it looks like to me, anyway :o)



The really, really cool thing is that she's making me one for my kitchen too!

What a weekend!

1. Mum's Cardigan is finished! All ends woven in and buttons are sewn on. I'm still thinking of sewing around the button holes, because they seem a little loose.

With all the pictures I took this weekend, I somehow forgot to get a picture of the cardi - hmphf.


2. Felted DSis's purse. It went very smoothly! I did have to run it through the wash three times (we have a front loader), but did manage to get 6 bath towels washed in the process! :o) I have to sew on the snap. I picked out some prospective buttons for the flap, but she and I have very different tastes, so I'll show her the buttons I've picked out, and let her pick from those, or she can find something herself.

The blue stuff in the purse is a plastic bag from the grocery store with crumpled up newspaper so the bag would dry in it's finished shape. The little ball thing on the flap is a pin, so the flap wouldn't dry all misshapen.



Every time I'd pass it (it was on the kitchen island), I'd make some adjustment in it's shape. I don't know if it's the engineering gene, but I have a thing with symmetry. I strive to keep my world even and symmetric (I am, however, able to restrain myself from adjusting crooked pictures hanging when at someone's house. :o)), so obviously, every time I stopped to examine the drying progress, I had to stick my hand in the bag, make a pull here a yank there and many, many adjustments in between. I'm surprised it doesn't have bruises!

And, yes, after taking the picture above, I did adjust the flap to the right so it was even between the front handles.


3. Since I was felting anyway, I pulled out a pair of Fuzzy Feet I knitted a while back and felted them too.



I really like them, but they're a bit big on me. I don't want to have to wear socks under them, so I think I might give them to MIL as a Christmas present. She wears a half size larger than me, so they'd be a better fit for her. They were a fun (and fast) knit - just a huge pair of socks, so I'll just knit myself up a smaller pair.


4. I am finally down to the heel on my first Jaywalker!




5. I finished up my week with The Liberty Inn, which I mostly worked on during lunch at work.




6. Last night, I started the next piece in my rotation, Batch of Pumpkins from Homespun Elegance.




7. And, since yesterday was cold and rainy (It didn't make it out of the 50's!), most of my day was spent curled up in the Ladies' Parlour. The kitties joined me.

Abner curled up by my right shoulder, on the back of my stitching chair:



He must have been watching Itchey do her version of an Itchey Enchilada:





You might recognize that as the Basket Weave afghan I've been working on here and there. Yesterday was a perfect day to work on it, but Itchey made it clear that she'd rather test it out early, so I put it down and worked on something else. They have me trained well, don't they?

Please excuse our dust

Remodeling of The Liberty Inn is coming along quite nicely, indeed. We're right on schedule. Please watch your step. And be careful not to brush up against anything, you'll get dreadfully dusty.

The front room is almost complete and we'll be starting the Parlour and Music room soon. The windows will be in this afternoon, so no drafts in your room overnight. Don't want anyone to catch cold.

Tea is at 3pm, out in the gardens. Do have a lovely day.

Grinning like a fool...

I used to be such a computer nerd back in the very early 80's, but somehow, technology ran me over passed me by. I've been bored with my blog title for a really long time now, but since I hadn't the foggiest idea how to change it, so it remained. And I really want to learn HTML. I grew up on DOS commands (and I've even programmed assembly language), so it can't be impossible, right?

In a spurt of divine inspiration today (while I should have been doing other things, like those I'm paid for), I put together that magic combination of HTML code to display a custom header! Since then, I've pulled up my blog page about a half dozen times, partly to make sure it's still 'working', and because I'm just so smug with myself I figured it out. (Kind of like when Tom Hanks created fire in Castaway)

It doesn't take much, does it? ;o)


Hope you like the new look...

Santa takes a rest

Sorry about the blurry picture - it must have been before my morning coffee! :o)

I finished up working with the Santa of the Forest stop in my Rotation this past Sunday. Now that I'm following a rotation, I should have been working on my next project, but we had some movies to watch, and I wanted something I could do on overdrive.

We watched Miss Potter, an adaption of the life of Beatrix Potter with Renee Zellweger. 5-star Chick Flick. Excellent movie, but you'll need kleenex.

And we also watched Thunderpants. No surprise here that DH added this one to the queue. It was...interesting, but kind of cute. A kid with uncontrollable flatulence saves the world. Rupert Grint (Ronald Weasley) was one of the main characters (not the one with flatulence) and there were a smattering of other English actors. This is a must watch for goofy adolescents and goofy adolescent husbands.


To close out the evening, we watched an episode from a new English mystery series I found at the library, The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries which is a series of mysteries (PBS Mystery!) solved by a lady, divorced (gasp!), and educated in criminology (double gasp!) back in the 1920's starring Diana Rigg as Mrs. Bradley. Very good, and very English - right up my alley.

This was a little lighter than the movies, so I started up the next project in my rotation, Liberty Hill Inn, from Little House Needleworks. There's not all that much excitement (more time was spent getting the floss and general new project preparations), but here it is:



Aren't you excited? ;O)

I get by with a little help from my friends...

With the help of Knitting in Plain English, The Knitting Answer Book, some paper, a pen, and my trusty HP calculator (Inverse Polish Notation rules!)...



...Mum's Cardi now has buttonholes. All knitting is complete and all I have to do is weave in about a gazillion yarn ends and sew on the buttons. Originally, I was going to use six buttons, but since this sweater is meant more as a jacket I went with seven so the buttons would be a little closer together. (Keeping Mum warm and cozy)




And I wanted to share some yarny goodness that showed up on my doorstep yesterday. Six balls of Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk DK to make Grumperina's Shifting Sands scarf as a birthday present for MIL (It's in early December, but it never hurts to get an early start)



Here's a better closeup of the soft blue color:

Projects on my plate

I started this post yesterday (Thursday, as the date above shows), a few hours before we got hit with one of the scariest thunderstorms to hit the Pittsburgh area in my recent memory. Around 3pm, round two of severe storms for the day moved over the West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, moving southeast but north of downtown Pittsburgh, and blossomed into a huge severe storm, complete with a tornado warning. (We very rarely see tornado warnings, let alone an actual tornado) It was as dark as night outside, very windy with heavy, heavy rain. The industrial park where I work was in the direct path of this storm, so they herded us all downstairs to the manufacturing floor just to be safe. I hate thunderstorms as it is, so this was not a fun day.

I'm not sure if there actually was a tornado (and if there was, we don't see much more than an F0). There were lots of trees and branches and debris everywhere. The typical locations were flooded. Thankfully, there were just minor injuries and, as far as I've heard, no fatalities. It took almost two hours to get home (usually 35-40min). Some traffic lights were working, and some were out, some roads were flooded, some had a lot of debris, and the occasional fender bender, all of which made traffic terrible. (Pittsburgh doesn't have a highway beltway system like other cities, just a handful or so of main thoroughfares spoking outward from the city and lots of back roads, which, when something like this happens, makes traffic very difficult).

Once we got closer to home, it was like being in a different country. No debris, no flooding, all traffic lights working. The worst of the storm skimmed a bit south of our house. We did get a lot of rain, and we must have lost power at some point, because my coffeemaker was blinking 12:00 and the microwave was asking to be RESET. I could tell it had been a long day for Itchey - she likes thunderstorms as much as I do! :o)
Abner just wanted his dinner.


Onto more fun subject matter:

This week is Santa of the Forest's turn on the Xstitch rotation. I did some fill in on Mr. Bear's paw and arm, and I want to get a little more done on Santa's cape in the bottom right of the picture.




Lots of knitting content to follow!

1. I picked up one of my 'Forgotten Socks'. The first sock was done maybe a year ago, and I only put the starting stitches in on the cuff. To clean up those skeletons in my knitting basket, I'm going to get that 2nd sock done. I'm using Lion Brand Microspun (on US#3 DPNs), and I'm making these to be slipper socks because they're so soft and cushy.




2. My pair of Jaywalkers for the KAL are underway. I opted for the Austermann yarn (over the Trekking XXL - pics in a previous post) because it's self-striping, and from some of the finished Jaywalkers I've seen, the stripes tend to enhance the zig-zag pattern of the sock.




3. I also cast on a cardigan similar to Mum's, but this one is for me. It's a Knitting Pure and Simple Vneck cardigan (I really like their patterns), while Mum's has a rounded neckline. It's actually in the same yarn that I used for Mum's Cardi, but in a deep red (like a Maple leaf in fall, but a little lighter than what my picture shows). I'm using US#9 needles so it won't be as densely knit as Mum's sweater.




After all the wild weather we've had this week, this weekend is supposed to be lovely - sunny with low humidity. If you bet, put your money on that part of my weekend will include stitching out on the deck. :o)

The Dog Days of Summer

Since we've been having typical 3H August weather (Hazy, Hot and Humid), DH and I have been hibernating in the cool darkness of our house with the air conditioning set to 'freeze' and all the blinds and draperies tightly closed. (my sister, the sun worshipper, calls our house the Bat Cave :o)

We've just started watching another BBC series, this weekend, called The Duchess of Duke Street. The main character is Gemma Jones (the mother from Sense and Senibility and Madame Pomfrey from Harry Potter). It's been an enjoyable watch, and I've gotten a lot knitting and cross stitch done since Friday evening.


I wrapped up my week of The Prayer. Towards the end of the week, I worked on it during lunch and I got a lot done last night while watching about 4 episodes of The Duchess.



It's time to move onto another project in my rotation. This week, I'm going to work on Santa of the Forest. (Maybe working on a Christmas-themed project will offset the 90F weather forecast this coming week.)


I've also been working on my Flame Wave Sock sometimes during the commute to and from work. Is it me or does it seem that I've been working on this same sock for about the past decade? Surprisingly, I'm getting close to the toe decreases, which I consider the Home Stretch. (And I still have the second sock to do!) But, I am enjoying it, because the ride should be as enjoyable as the destination, right?




I knit and also cross stitch, so I share part of my blog time in the Knitting Realm and part in the Cross Stitch Realm. It's interesting to see the differences in overall blogging style, which I think, is partly due to the nature of each craft.

Knitting blogs seem far more competetive, where the most read blogs are those whose owners are very fast knitters and can show great progress with each post. Since cross stitch in general is a slower craft, cross stitch bloggers/readers are more laid back and are happy for any forward progress on the current project(s).

When it comes to either a knit-along or stitch-along, I think the knitters are more organized, simply because of the sheer numbers of knitters involved. It's not unusual to have a knit-along with at least a hundred participants (some have hundreds of participants). Because of this, there's typically a blog set up specifically for the knit-along and all the knitters have access to the blog to post their progress.

Because I do both, it's fun to see how different each are. Neither are better, just different.

It's been a while, but I've recently joined some Knit-alongs:

1. Knitty KAL - Knitty is a free e-mag with patterns submitted by fellow knitters (usually members of the knit blogging communitiy). This is a knit along for anyone who is knitting a pattern that has been in any issue of Knitty. For this KAL, I'm going to knit Wisp.

2. Favorite Socks KAL - A couple posts ago, I showed a sock pattern book of the same name as the KAL (and the purple Flame Wave socks are a pattern in that book).

3. Jay Walkers KAL - A knit blogger named Grumperina designed a sock pattern called Jay Walkers that were on another e-mag called MagKnits.

For my pair of Jay Walkers, I haven't decided if I'm going to use this yarn:



Or this one:




What I like about the KALs I've joined is that they're open-ended, which means there isn't any starting date or end date, and you can knit more than one project for the KAL, so if I knit another pair of socks from the Favorite Socks book, I can continue to post on that blog.

Some time around the beginning of September, someone starts a Christmas/Holiday Giftalong, which is a KAL where those of us crazy knitters who decide to knit their holiday gifts can all stress together to encourage getting those gifts done in time so that we're not up all Christmas Eve night knitting those last stitches.

There's also KALs based around TV shows, like the Grey's Anatomy KAL, where you knit while watching the latest episode of Grey's Anatomy, and post your knitting progress (as well as thoughts about the latest episode) on the blog. I didn't participate last season, but I hope it's started up again for the season this fall.


Here's a link to all of the 2007 Knit Alongs.

Had I felt like felting, I would

Here's Gelato in all her pre-felt glory. She's done, bottom sewn up, all the ends woven in, ready for a dip in the washing machine.




And towards the end, it was getting a little scary, that I might run out of yarn. Luckily, I had enough left over for Itchey to curl up with. Whew!

A little Gelato, anyone?

Gelato is knit with two strands of worsted weight wool on US#11 circular needles, so it's a very fast knit. You're looking at the body of the bag, which is done, and only the straps and flap are left to knit. The bottom is open, so before felting, I'll need to sew that closed too.

I just might have to knit myself one of these...

Since Mum's, DSis's and my birthdays are all mid-to-late-August, we typically get together once to celebrate all three (too many calories otherwise). This year, we're celebrating with a fun night out at a local minor league baseball game. This means the 'due date' for my birthday knitting projects (Gelato for DSis and Mum's Cardigan for Mum) is August 25th.