The garage is cleaner

than it has been in a long long time. Not that you care. We are a family of class-A packrats, and slobs, too. Our garage has served as a dumping ground for all sorts of stuff for many years and today we made major strides on cleaning it. Our big ambition was to be able to park the pop-up camper in there for the winter, and I am happy to say we accomplished that goal. I have a large stack of cardboard in the back of my van to take to recycling on Monday, and Scott has a bunch of potentially Free-cyclable stuff to take to our storage unit in his van. We filled up many extra large (like 5 feet X 3 feet) black garbage bags with trash and put it curbside for Tuesday a.m. collection. I found the box from my first CD player, which had been purchased in 1987 or 88, in Ithaca NY, 4 moves ago, and died and was disposed of about 4 years ago. It's truly pathological when the boxes and styrofoam packing materials stay with us longer than they items they originally protected.

This morning was knitting group time for me. My friend Terri was there and Jenny, whom I had met one previous time. You know, as much as people think a big group is a sign of success, I really like it when there's just a few of us. It's easier to get to know people and have a more unguarded conversation. If you find yourself in Madison on the last Saturday of a month, come knit!

Other good news: download The Jester Hat pattern for free at The Garter Belt now and you can have a new hat by morning. Many thanks to Wendy for her speedy work getting that up. And make sure you admire Melly in her Jester Hat, too!

On the computer front, I now own and have running, an external hard-drive to back up everything at all times. Whew. In the modern era, it seems to cost about a dollar per gigabyte. When I think about my first computer, which did not even have an internal hard drive, and when a 30 megabyte harddrive was considered generous, I marvel at how things have changed. Remember being thrilled by 8 megabytes of RAM? Those were not the good old days.

I'm off to order pizza. I think I need a good soaking and scrubbing to get the dust of ages from the garage floor out of hair and pores. Maybe some day we'll live like normal people. Probably not.

My in-house tech guy managed to replace the file that was in a corrupted place on my hard disc, so my email crisis is temporarily avoided. But, I have no illusion of safety. Over the years, I have been remarkably free of major computer catastrophes, so I feel as though I'm living on borrowed time.

Here's a quick little knit for those of you who have a hard time with delayed gratification:

Here's a close up of the ball on top:


The ball is knitted as an extension of the i-cord and stuffed with a ball of the same yarn, rolled very tightly, before the final decreases. I got this idea from Anna Zilboorg's Fine and Fanciful Hats book. I'm not sure how different my instructions are from hers, but I love the concept. This will be a free pattern on the Garter Belt soon.

What's In My Knitting Bag
I don't have any really cool big projects to show. Instead I have a bunch of small, rather pedestrian projects.
One of my smaller knitting bags:

The contents:

We've got a pair of blue socks for my mom's birthday. That was August 1. Oops. The socks have been travelling around in the knitting bag, needing only to have the ends sewn in, since about mid-Sept. Rumor is my folks are coming to visit in mid-November, so I'll just give them to her then.

There's a couple feet of a skinny Branching Out, about 40% of the final length. I really wanted to give this yarn a test-run on a small project and I am quite pleased with it. It's the Blackberry Ridge wool and silk laceweight yarn in Mallard. I can imagine making something larger and more complex from this yarn. The silk gives a nice body and the yarn is pleasant against my neck and face. It's made in Mt Horeb, about 15 miles from my house. Talk about supporting a local economy!

And there's a sock and beginning of the mate in the Regia from the Sows Ear clearance bin. I think I have a lifetime supply of that! This is my second pair from this grey.

Several other projects are languishing in the wings right now. Nothing so exciting I have to show the world.

And Other News...
We are finally experiencing crisp autumnal weather. OK, first there was soggy autumnal weather, but today is crisp. I love this time of year and even late fall, when the leaves have all dropped and the world is not so colorful. I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire and November had its own particular beauty that all the October tourists never understood. The hillsides have a rich purply-grey and the green from the pines. The sun is either slanting in low or gone altogether.

Our porch has been really truly done for about a week. The cold and wet weather moved in right for the completion. I'm happy we'll be ready for the nice weather when it comes. It feels like such a perfect extension of our house that I already wonder how we lived without it.

Colin wants to be a pink bunny for Halloween, so I've been busy with that kind of sewing that is not what I would choose to do. You know, there are projects you take on because you want to, and then there are projects that are foisted upon you. I bought some pink pants and a pink sweatshirt at the Goodwill last week, hoping to avoid a major effort and cash outlay. I couldn't find a pink blanket sleeper big enough for him in the thrift shops. He loves the shirt and pants and runs around in them quite happily. This disgusts Owen, who cannot believe his brother is running around in pink from head to toe. I bought some pink polarfleece and made a hood with bunny ears. The ears have pale pink satin linings inside. Also, will make the tail out of pale pink satin. While looking for costume ideas online, I found a blog with a boy in a bunny suit and numerous commenters assumed that the mother had done this to the child as torture. I'm here to tell you, some kids do this to their mothers! My mom always had us make our own costumes from stuff we had lying around. Small wonder I always went as a gypsy (I know that isn't P.C. in modern times) or a princess. We had a bunch of 40's dresses, a lot of 60's hippy garb, and lots of costume jewelry for dress-ups when I was a kid.

computer acting out again.

I just wanted to alert everyone that my computer gave me a "corrupted file" message earlier when I was trying to get email. This using Outlook Express. I can still (for now) send and receive email with the infuriating Mail program that came with the iMac, BUT all my email stuff: address book, unanswered messages, past correspondence with unfinished business, etc, is all locked away from me in a probably-unretrievable part of my hard drive. Scott will be helping me back up everything so we can go back for more Applecare: getting our money's worth out of that deal! But, if you sent me a message in the last little while and were hoping for a reply, it would be good to send it again, both to jog my memory and make sure I have your email address.

Lots of other mundane details to report, but now it's very late.

I'll try to get my act together to post in a day or two.

A little knitting humor

I saw this in one of our local papers a couple days ago. Click for a larger image.

Some knitting content. Finally!

I figured I better post some actual knitting content, including photos, before some of the web rings I'm in start disqualifying me.

I donated blood this morning and rewarded myself with a trip to The Sow's Ear in nearby Verona. I had Colin in tow, which meant that I had to placate him with a cookie and do my yarn shopping FAST. I bought a skein of Blackberry Ridge wool and silk laceweight yarn to make a little lacy scarf. Although it's lighter weight than suggested for Branching Out, I decided to to give that a whirl. Then I can post pictures of my progress along the way and everyone will know what it's supposed to look like, and I don't have to waste 5 weeks trying to invent the perfect simple lace scarf pattern. Here's the first progress picture:

I realized that I was doing one of the double decreases a little wrong, but straightened that out. All you experts will spot the errors: the rest of you will just have to wonder.

The other current project is a top-down raglan in Donegal lambswool tweed.

This yarn changed a lot after washing, so I'm basing all my decisions about the size I need on the washed swatch. The pattern stitch tends to spread a little more than plain stocking stitch, which might work out pretty well for me for the raglan shape. Often, I need to add rather a lot of stitches under the armpits to get around the bust zone when my length is correct for raglan seam shaping. This time, I suspect I'll just be needing an inch or two under each arm.

I'm still itching to launch into a complex color pattern soon, but haven't had the undisturbed time to really play with color and pattern. Lately, I feel like all my time is being scheduled by circumstances beyond my control. I don't like that feeling but what can I do? Colin missed preschool on Tuesday (intestinal distress) and I went with Owen's school to a field trip all day on Wednesday. Thursday evening went to see a dying friend at the hospice center. Today I donated blood. All these are important things to do and attend to, but it makes for a crowded week. It's not like I can tell my friend that he picked an inconvenient time to die. I'm sure he'd agree, as he would have enjoyed having a few more 24 hours on earth. And as I type that, I look out the window facing east and see a beautiful, almost-full moon rising in the pink evening twilight.

I'll sign off with two more photos.
Owen's first effort at needle felting, two geese


A view of the nearly finished porch with the table on it

More Porch Progress

I took this picture Thursday of last week. We really are getting close to the end.

Long time, no post

Gosh, I've been a flake about my entire online life lately. I haven't been reading blogs, haven't posted to my blog, haven't been checking in on knittyboard. What have I been doing?

I did finish the knitty submission by the deadline. It was kind of dicey at the end because I realized that I hadn't been very honest with myself about the size I would need to look right in the garment. And it was way too tight for me to model it. So, I sent a desperate email to 5 or 6 women I could think of who might either be the right size or have a friend who is and Lo and Behold, one of my fellow MadCity knitters worked out just right. She could have worn a size smaller, but it didn't look too ridiculously big and the colors and pattern suited her perfectly.

Immediately after sending that project off, I had to start paying attention to work I needed to do for my all-volunteer non-profit enviro group. Our big annual meeting was this past Sat. and I handle a lot of the clerical kinds of tasks that make a meeting like that run smoothly: copying, collating, updating member lists, etc.

Now I'm in that let down after the big crunches. Colin was throwing up on Saturday and has progressed lower down the digestive track to running at the other end. I'm hoping for no more symptoms between now and noon tomorrow, because then he will be good to go to preschool: 24 hours symptom-free.

In knitting news, I've started a top-down sweater in a rich purple tweed lambswool I bought in the summer at Lakeside Fibers. It came on a 2 pound cone that was on sale: who could resist? I'm using the same simple texture I used on the The Professor Vest and hope it will be a cozy dead-of-winter sweater. I'll try to post pics in the next day or two.

The porch guys are really close to finishing. Of course, it appears that our long warm spell has finally given way to more seasonably cool weather, so we might be waiting until spring to really enjoy it. I will definitely have a little social for all my knitting buddies when the weather gets warm enough again.

Porch progress

Here is today's photo of the porch progress. We are getting very excited as it gets closer to completion.

The knitty submission is giving me headaches. I need to take the neck off and redo that. Plus darn in ends and some other finishing work. Not even thinking about finishing the writing right now. And some of the numbers turned out wonky, which I think I understand. Part of me wants to bag it, but it really is pretty close. Maybe tomorrow evening I can rethink the troublesome neck and everything will work out. Today, while avoiding thinking about that project, I worked on my boring socks. Nice to have something that works out well to fall back on.

Much rearranging going on here Chez SABLE. The porch project is coming right along: the roof structure is all in place and now all the finishing details are going on. This is kind of slow work, because we didn't choose to have a bare-bones porch. This week the french door for the living room will be installed, so we had to do a little clearing to get ready for that. Of course, everything in our house is so over-capacity that it's like a complicated puzzle to move some stuff out of the living room. It may seem like the basement project and the porch project have nothing to do with one another, but they are very much connected. I needed to get all my stuff (sewing and knitting) consolidated in the terminus of the finished half of the basement so that space could be made in the bedroom we call the Toy Room for all the toys from the living room. I would like the living room to become a mostly toy-free zone, if possible. To get my stuff all in the basement, Scott had to move out all his model RR stuff and other misc. junk. I'm mostly arranged down there now. Scott has kindly built me a bookshelf so I can finish that move soon. The shelf functions as a barricade to help kid-proof my space. We also hope to move the tv down to the basement, but I think that plan is still several weeks from fruition. Today, Scott took the boys to one of their favorite train haunts, Mid-Continent Railway in North Freedom WI. That gave me a few hours to work on de-cluttering the living room a little. I wouldn't call it clean, but it's closer than it has been in months. I boxed up a lot toys I hope will not be missed and we can stick them in storage for a while. Also threw away a lot of crap. At least now the door can be installed this week and we will have direct access to the porch from the living room.

A day late...

My pirate name is:
Black Ethel Kidd
Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Even though you're not always the traditional swaggering gallant, your steadiness and planning make you a fine, reliable pirate. Arr!
Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Not my knitty submission

From Knit King magazine, c. 1972


I debated long and hard about posting these next two images. Maybe I'll just not add captions, and people can imagine what I would have these models saying...


What do you think these people are saying?

Still busy, but end in sight

Update on the knitty submission: I am now on the raglan area above the armpit joins and making pretty good progress. I have been having shooting pains coming from my elbow, which worries me, but nothing to do but soldier on. I live on ibuprofen anyway, so what's a few more. I'm pretty confident I can get the last stretch done and a reasonably accurate pattern written by the deadline.

The porch guys took Wed-Fri off to go to a trade convention in Chicago. The decking is mostly done and the posts are up, awaiting the beams and roof structure. Pretty exciting. The kids have been using it as a stage and putting on impromptu plays. I bought a small round wooden table at a yard sale yesterday. It's in terrible shape, but I'll paint it glossy white and it'll be fine for holding an ice tea or cup of coffee out on the porch. Some neighbors threw out a chair that will make a good porch chair. It had a padded seat and back, with exposed wood legs, arms, and frame. Kind of a "waiting room" chair. Scott's painting the wood parts glossy white (I stripped off all the upholstery a couple weekends ago) and I've got everything I need to recover the seat and back pad. It should be a rewarding project. If I keep amassing odd pieces of furniture and painting them all white, they should look like they go well enough.

Must go cook a vegetable for dinner.

Busy

I'm now on the third sleeve of the Knitty submission, deadline looming. What's that you say? Third sleeve? Well, I told you the first effort was not working out. The second attempt was a great success. Frogged the first down to the cuff and am making good progress on the reknitting. But damn, I have a thing with sleeves. They are the part of the project where I am most apt to get hung up and get a bad attitude. Only I don't have time for a bad attitude on this one. 17 days to finish the knitting, finish the writing, do the math for the other four sizes, guesstimate the yardage for the other sizes, make the schematic and graphs, block, take the photos...

So, if you all don't see a new post until Oct 1, you'll know why.

And my volunteer non-profit is having its big annual event Oct 8. And though I thought I was getting out of that commitment, they keep flattering me and making it hard to say no.

OK, nine 2.5 hour preschool sessions, less transportation time, less organizing my thoughts time, equals about 17 hours of working time, in less than 2 hour chunks, between now and Oct 1.

I'm off to sleep. Tomorrow afternoon is a preschool time. Yay!

The porch joists

It's thrilling to me!

Labor Day

Designing news
Last night I realized that indeed, this is September! and the deadline for winter Knitty submissions is Oct. 1. I have a torso up to the armpits done, and had done one sleeve that was giving me pause. After sleeping on it, I knew I had to redo that sleeve. One issue is that it was too tight around. It fits on my bare arm, but this is supposed to be a winter sweater and I need ease for a turtleneck. Also, some of the patternwork was vexing me around the increases for a while. About 10 inches up, I had my "AHA!" moment and have produced a far more elegant sleeve the second time around. I'm about eight inches up the second attempt. I still need to rip out the first effort: I like to leave than until I have a better replacement in the bag. It seems less painful that way.

Last night I spent a little time on the writing up phase, too. I tend to underestimate how much time that will take since I try to include at least 5 sizes, from 36"-56", and especially if I need to write it for the lowest common denominator knitter. I read these posts in the knittyboard forum and am constantly surprised! "It says 'reverse shaping.' How do I do that?" "It says increase IN PATTERN STITCH. How do I do that?" You get the idea. If I only had to write a pattern for the quickest minds, it would be a breeze. Cast on X st. Work until the armpits. Do the sleeves, cast off some stitches for the underarm seams. Put both sleeves and the body on the long circular. Make sure you put one sleeve on EACH side of the body. Work in rounds to neck, decreasing as appropriate. Cast off. Anyhow, I'm happy to have made a start on the writing part, because it's easier to come back and do a little here and there once it is started.

Other news
Both boys will have normal school weeks this week. I'm a little anxious about Colin's reaction. I know he will settle in quickly after the first week or two, but it could be a bumpy ride until then. I still need to take care of a few back-to-school details, but most of that is DONE. Thank goodness I don't buy Back To School clothes. (Am I the world's worst mother?) That's right. I do not go out and buy a bunch of new clothes just because the calendar says Sept. Further, I wonder why everyone else does. It's the most painful time to be shopping. The stores are full of bickering parents and kids. The weather is still summertime hot, so all you need are the shorts, t shirts, and sandals you've been wearing all summer. Life is hectic enough with amassing the stuff the school requires. I do stock up on this stuff in late summer because the savings are remarkable. Spiral notebooks for a dime each, instead of $1.89, markers for $1 a box, instead of $3. But the clothes? I let that slide until it seems necessary. Anyhow, I am really looking forward to having a few afternoons of peace and solitude.

Porch design

Here's the rendering of our porch design. You can imagine how excited we are.

Not talking about current events

I'm consciously not commenting on Hurricane Katrina, as so many others have covered that and I don't have anything to add. What words of mine can mean anything in the face of that devastation?

Instead...
Owen and I spent the evening looking through some of my old (60s and 70s) knitting pattern booklets and choosing ones to scan for the EW! project. We plan to give them EW! ratings of 1 to 4 and make a little gallery. Also, of course, current and new releases are fair game. Owen has been working on a little hurling emoticon, which will function like the stars in movie ratings, only a 4-Ew rating will be one that few would ever wish to knit. Sometimes it's hard to separate the actual design from the stylistic choices involved in the photo-shoot: the props and hair styles and even the color choices of the sample sweaters. I hope to get a little gallery started over the holiday weekend.

In other news
The workers poured the concrete footings for our porch today. The work will take about 5 weeks to complete, so we should have a little porch sitting time still before the winter winds blow in.

Owen had his first day back at school and it seemed to go well. He stayed after to set up computers for the music teacher: she loves him. Colin had an open house day at his preschool. This was a little more tumultuous. Tantrum before and tantrums after. I know these teachers and I'm sure it will be fine once he gets into his routine. But neither of my guys handles big emotion very well. Neither does their dad, for that matter.

At dinner, Owen was trying to discuss something and Colin wanted the floor. Colin started screaming and did the prolonged high-pitch ear-piercing shriek. I decided to to take a walk and stalked off without saying goodbye. Just needed some time ALONE. Both boys started following me, one at a time. First I repelled Colin and about a block and a half away, Owen came scootering up. He turned out to be pretty good company after I got over being grumpy. We took a brisk half hour walk and felt better after. I should try to do that every evening while the weather is nice.

I just realized that fall knitty is about to come out, so I need to get my butt in gear for my winter submission. It's coming along pretty quickly, but the writing up is always more time consuming than I anticipate. Last week, for the hell of it, I googled "rejected by knitty" (but without the quotes). Interesting to see what came up. I shouldn't be surprised at the hard feelings, but it was pretty easy to see where several items went wrong: color choice, photo-quality, too much like somthing else. I don't know that I would handle it better, but I hope so. If I'm going to make a go of this biz, I'm going to get rejected. Better to accept it early on.

Vacation Pictures: Devil's Lake SP, south-central WI

Better late than never, here are a couple pictures from our trip last week.


Here we all are, in our 18 foot canoe. Owen is paddling in front, Colin is next and then me. Scott took the picture from the back.


A view looking down the length of the lake.

Counting down to Sept.1!

I'll start with the obligatory knitting content. Here's a picture of my current plain ole boring sock.



I bought a bunch of this yarn last year in a clearance basket at my favorite local yarn shop. I've been making socks from it as my no-brainer projects ever since. I love to wear handknit wool socks and they are easier to store and justify than endless sweaters.

Today I hit the local Goodwill. I was looking for sweaters to recycle and bought about 6. But I also found this:


Not bad for $1.99! It isn't the Coach bag of my dreams, as it is too small, but still, I couldn't leave it there.

I'm not posting pictures of the six sweaters I plan to recycle yet, but they will make wonderful yarn: lambswool & angora, silk & angora, etc. Next-to-the-skin soft. Now, why I go to such lengths to get yarn is another story. I'm congenitally cheap. And when people whine that they have to use the most inexpensive acrylic because they are poor, I feel a need to prove that a person CAN knit with natural fibers for less than the cost of a sweater's worth of Red Heart. It takes a little more time and determination, but not that much. My local Goodwill charges $3.99 for sweaters: not dirt cheap, but they have a good selection. The St. Vincent's in the area often have lower prices. Additionally, they run a place called Diggers Outlet, at which clothing is sold by the pound. Because I am large, I have to be resourceful if I want a sweater's worth of yarn, looking at the men's XXL options, buying two smaller sweaters that can be combined, or other creative solutions.

We're experiencing a lot of four-year old posturing around here lately. Colin has been a real tyrant! We had intermittent tantrums throughout the day, right through dinner. He's discovered the power in hating lately and loves to yell, "I hate you!" or "I hate (whatever)!" On our camping trip, he tore up a small plastic garbage bag that had Smokey Bear on it and proclaimed, "I hate Smokey Bear!" I had to laugh. Like, what did Smokey ever do to Colin?? He's going to be starting a new preschool program next week and has a lot of anxiety about that. This is the same school we tried to put him in when he was 2, and I ended up taking him out right away because I could see he wasn't ready. Now, he's been to preschool before and will be back in the same speech preschool class later in the fall. That one only meets in 6 week cycles, and Colin is in cycle 2. He will have a number of classmates from last year. I felt that he needed something a little more continuous this year and enrolled him at the Y for afternoons, 3 days a week. I'm hoping that after his first 6 week cycle of speech therapy class, he will be ready to drop that for now.

Anyhow, both boys are a bit nutty in this last countdown week before the school year starts. And when the boys are nutty, you can bet that some of that is taking a toll on the mother.

My little knitting group (I say that like I own it or something) met today. It was very small; just Leslie, Terri, and me, which was perfect. Two hours flew by before I realized what was up. I could have sat there knitting all day, but there were groceries to be bought, battles to referee, laundry to be done, etc. etc.

I still need to finish moving my stuff down to the basement. This, so we can clear all toys from the living room and prepare for the big porch project to go forward. We signed for our home equity loan on Thursday and I went to the builder's Thursday afternoon to take a final look at the plans and approve some fixtures and sign the building contract. Wednesday morning the design team hands off to the construction team, and away we go!

Scott loaded all the vacation pics to his computer then cleared the camera. I'll see if I can find some good ones to post so Zib can see where I was!

BTW, I haven't picked anyone for that timeline Meme yet. Let's see: Fathom, Wendy at Knit and Tonic, Entrelac, and Terby. That's four.

Owen asked me to post a link to his panoramic view of Devil's Lake. Just a warning for those of you with dial-up internet access: you need to be patient! Owen's Panorama

I will get some other photos off the camera later tonight, but have a bunch of other stuff to tend to first.