Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Just To Top It Off!

This week has been fabulous, and just to top it off, I released a new pattern on Ravelry today - called 'Top It Off'!  

Here are my lovely boot toppers, modelled by my lovely Caitlin.  The pattern looks fab, thanks to Rebecca's hunting for the perfect 'Scally Girl Knits' font, and I guess that left me to do the design work and the layout!  We're quite the team!


We had a little fun while we were out there - because they'd just blown a huge lot of leaves into a pile... 



Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Do you like Coffee?

I don't drink coffee, but I really LIKE coffee, especially today - because look what happened to Drink True North's website....


http://www.drinktruenorth.com/

They have my knitwear designs on their front page - squeee!!!!!


Sunday, November 15, 2015

Everything Has Changed...




Love this song.  That is all.

No, it's not all, of course it's not, you know me, I always have something to tell you!



There's this - it's autumn, sort of 'all of a sudden'.  (There seem to be a lot of things happening 'all of a sudden' around here, I have no idea what's going on, I feel partly 'more like myself than I've ever felt', and partly 'like I hardly recognise this more assertive version of me').

The tree outside my window is still lovely, but you can see how sparse it's become in the week since I took the coffee cup picture!  The weather changed, the wind got up, and the leaves are on the ground.

Today was a beautiful day, dry, breezy but not too cold, just cold enough to justify hand knit gloves - perfect!  There was time for a quick post-knitting-class trip to Perrigo Park to blow out a few cobwebs, and then home to get dinner and chores started.  And now the sun is setting, the beef is roasting for dinner, laundry is doing itself, and I have a little time for this... 

Yup, it's cast on a new project day, and I'm excited about this one.  It's a test knit for the lovely Pamelamama, brioche stitch, autumn colours, soft squishy knitting - what's not to like?  

These are my colours....


all my favourites - Black Trillium, Madelinetosh, Malabrigo - yum!!!!  The end colour is a fabulous cocoa brown that the camera just isn't capturing, but maybe in daylight I will be able to do it justice...

We'll see, you might even be lucky to get a progress report, or a picture of the finished piece... sometimes I do blog more than once a year!  



Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Still Summer...

I know I said it was "Time For Socks" but the weather thinks otherwise - it's actually rather lovely still.  There's a chill in the mornings, though, so I know the socks will be in use soon...

They did get finished:



 And I have some other knitting to show you, too, but first... we have two new family members.

This is Lucas, he's a red eared slider, and he's just living with us for a year while his Momma is in a dorm room.  Next year, when she's out of dorms, Lucas will go home.  It took him almost a week to get brave enough to come out of the water onto his basking shelf, but he's confident now, and doesn't even leap off when he sees us approaching!
 See that little ceramic turtle at the back of the ramp?  Today Lucas learned how to throw it into the water!  :-)  How charming he is!

And this is Victoria, although she seems to mostly be 'Tory' these days - she is a beautiful little pale gray-brown gerbil, almost the exact color of MadelineTosh 'Whiskers' (my yarn friends will know what this means) and she is a peach - so friendly and fun!


I have some new knitting designs to share, but it's late, and I'm sleepy, so they'll have to wait...

Goodnight Moon!


Monday, September 7, 2015

Time for Socks

It's here, folks, already - it is time for socks!   The warmth of summer may come back for one last hurrah, but the last couple of days have been chilly and rainy, and when I walked in the door of Tolt Yarn and Wool yesterday and saw their beautiful display of Hyak hiking socks, I knew I had to have a pair or two...

So I bought two skeins of yarn and the pattern, and yesterday evening I did this...

Two skeins of Cestari two-ply aran weight wool on a US 5 - going to be a pretty hard-wearing sock! I'm excited! 

The US Open is on tv, Andy Murray will be playing in a bit, and it's Labor Day, so I have the day off work.... these socks are just asking to be knitted, right?

There are a couple of practical things that need to be taken care of - a quick trip to get haircuts, Kohls to get some new jeans for the eldest, essential oils to be blended and sprayed around the outside of the house to keep the monster wolf spiders at bay (hey, does anyone have a really good natural way to keep those little beasties on the OUTside of the house?  Let me know if you do, all ideas gratefully received.) - but for the most part, there's just tennis and knitting... should at least finish the first sock today.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Beer Goggles.

So we went to Whidbey Island this weekend, and stayed here,


Caity spent most of the weekend wearing her best friend's jacket, because it just made her feel a tiny bit better than the 'completely awful' that has pervaded much of the last 6 days.  It still feels a lot like the whole accident happened to someone else.  

if you can't tell - this was my chair!  I sat here quite a lot, by which I mean 'I lay here half-comatose from when I got out of bed until it was time to go back to bed'!  


The beach house was close to the ferry boat terminal, which was wonderful, because I wasn't well enough to do very much except sit in that chair by the window, so having the boats to watch was very cheering!

We got there Friday night, and I managed to sit up and play cards for a while before we all crashed out for the night, and then on Saturday morning Cathy went off to Langley and gathered up clues for the annual murder mystery weekend that was taking place there.  I did this...


quite a bit, whilst looking out the window at this...

this is the front deck of our little beach cottage. 

oh look, there's the ferry boat - I saw quite a lot of ferryboats, or rather, the same two ferryboats quite a lot of times, this weekend!  

It was a pretty short walk to the water really, but was too far for me to go on Saturday - I made it on Sunday morning, with a cup of tea, and sat right under that flag, watching the orcas play in the water.  The ferryboats divert their crossing route to give the orcas enough room, which is lovely! 

Poppy, being a very good dog, took it upon herself to make sure that I rested plenty, and so she spent most of the weekend pinning me to the chair... 

she's very good at it!  

I have taken more Advil in the last 3 days than I usually take in 3 years, I am exhausted, bruised, exhausted, beaten up, and exhausted.  I have worn sweats all weekend, I have slept in the sweats I wore during the day, and in the morning just changed into different, clean, sweats, I have been well fed, filled with gallons of tea, I have slept, watched ferryboats, petted the dog, eaten something someone else prepared, and slept again, steadily, for 48 hours.  I have barely knitted anything which, for those who don't know me well already, I should point out is astonishing, because I'm always knitting something or other!  

This afternoon I did manage a shower, and then fell asleep with my hair still wrapped in a towel, so you can imagine how it looked when I woke up - yeah, THAT good!  Let's just say, it was a good match for the sweat pants!  

And this evening we drove the whole entire mile to the ferryboat, sat in the line for a while, got on the ferry, got off the ferry 15 minutes later, and went to Ivar's Fish and Chips to get supper.  

As we walked back to the car with our supper, some people spilled out of a bar, haphazard and giggly, and a girl said to us 'you should go in there, it's really fun in there' and a guy said 'yeah, and I just put $20 in the jukebox and picked songs they won't let me listen to' - and we laughed and agreed that it must be a very fun place, because they were obviously very drunk and had already had WAY too much fun - it was, after all, only 8 o clock at night!  And we herded our two teenagers by, and the guy looked at my girls and stated loudly 'Your Mother Is Gorgeous!' - and we all laughed our heads off because, really, I'm in sweats, I have 'slept in a towel' hair, I'm on too many Advil and I look like, well, like I was in a car wreck 6 days ago!  

But hey, you gotta take your compliments where you can get them, right?  



Friday, February 20, 2015

Cravalanche!

In the last 2 weeks, three people have asked me 'do you still blog?', and I wondered whether maybe the Universe is trying to tell me something...

I can't really tell you why I stopped, suffice it to say it's been a challenging couple of years, and I'm not planning to revisit any of it here, so let's move forward and see where we go...

Let's begin with the addition to our family dictionary:

Cravalanche (Noun):
    1.  (literal) An avalanche of crap.
    2.  A continuum of challenging events that has no known cause or any discernible date of cessation.  These events have not been earned nor are they deserved in any way.

    How to use it in a sentence: the last 4 weeks of my life have been an absolute cravalanche!

    Picture examples of events that may contribute towards a cravalanche:  when you do this for a living,




and then this happens while you are minding your own business walking down the street...


or when you need to use this every day,



and then this happens while you are stopped outside of school letting kids cross the street...


It's not good!  Those who love me have gently informed me that I have a black eye, bruising on my back that I cannot see, as well as the things that I am aware of, of course.  And my own body informed me unceremoniously today that I have to go to bed and I don't have any other options!

The upside is that my wrist is barely noticeable now, under the cravalanche of other things that hurt.  It's 3.30 in the afternoon, and I'm going for a nap!