Lace Kick

I haven't finished my Branching Out scarf yet but last night I decided to cast on another lace scarf. This one is the Town & Country pattern from the Elizabeth I design that I purchased from Knit Picks. I thought if I had the moral support of my fellow knitters last night I might actually be able to swatch it out to the right size. Turns out - the first needle I choose actually looked good. This was a big surprise because I tried this once before and I didn't like it. I'm just going to assume that my knitting has improved. Here's my progress so far:

I really like it. I haven't finished one pattern repeat yet but it's already getting intuitive. That's what is so amazing. It's pretty much one pattern row with two different beginnings. Very intuitive for lace. I have 5 different colored hanks of this lace weight yarn with 3 variations of the Elizabeth I design. My thoughts are to make one for each of my sister-in-laws and then one for my mom and mother-in-law for Christmas presents. They are all in fairly warm climates so this lace weight scarf might actually get worn! The only drawback to that is this seems like it will take awhile to knit up and I really don't like putting deadlines on projects. Deadlines are just not fun.

On the spinning front I'm having a dilemma. My back starts to hurt after only a hour of spinning and right now I'm just not in the mood to spin. Should I just stick to my schedule and push through this until I fix my posture issue or should I take a little break and just have fun knitting for a week or two? I'm torn because I will never get any better unless I practice but the reason why I like having a few projects going is that I never have to do anything I don't feel like doing. Ugh.

My husbands suggestion was just to spin for an hour tonight and then knit (that sounds so damn reasonable) but I like to just get comfortable and stick with something each night. Yeah, I'm lazy like that.

Free Paris!

Just kidding. Ha!

We headed up north this past weekend to spend quality time with my parents. It was a great trip. I took a break from the lace scarf and just hammered out a couple dishcloths.


Yeah, that's me trying to be artistic with the camera. It just doesn't work :)

I think it's great to work on these in the summer. It's hot out and very nice to work with cotton. Plus they're quick and easy projects. I'm saving them up for my Christmas presents this year. My idea is to make a set of dishcloths, handmade candles and a few soaps to give to my close friends and family. We like doing handmade gifts so this should work out nicely.

Today is Monday so that means the Monday Night Knitting Group will be in full effect tonight. I'm going to grab another ball of cotton yarn just in case but I'm going to try knitting that Alpaca Cloud with two strands and see if I can get it to look nice as something. No clue what pattern yet but I have all day to figure that out.

All is well!

After some prodding from my peeps at KnittingHelp.com I decided to frog. It took me about an hour but I slowly un-knit 6 rows of my Branching Out lace scarf and finally found my mistake. I had added an extra yarn over. That's it. Nothing ridiculously hard to fix. It felt so good to find that.

I celebrated my efforts by sitting on our back deck with my husband and having a nice fire. I worked on my cotton dishcloth here and there but mainly we just sat, talked and enjoyed the 5 foot flames. His reasoning for the big fire was we needed to keep warm and I needed light to knit. My husband is a bit of a fire bug! I would have got pictures but I was too afraid that my camera would melt :)

It's Froggin' Time

Ugh. I should know this by now. Never, never, never knit lace when your tired. Especially since I didn't use a lifeline. I know! It was such an easy pattern that I thought I didn't need a lifeline. Here's the mess:

I'm going to hop over to Knitting Help and see if my peeps can advise me what to do next. There's a KAL for this pattern and they're great about helping in the forums. I think my options are to somehow increase somewhere and just move on or to carefully unknit the last several rows until I can find my mistake. So frustrating.

I wasn't even scheduled to knit last night. I was going to spin after using the Spinning Wheel web ring for inspiration but my contact bugged out and I had to wear my glasses for the rest of the night. I haven't mastered spinning with glasses yet. Serves me right though I guess.

Rain

It's raining again today - so nice to finally have rain. All of my flowers and bushes were desperately needing it. Our grass was even starting to brown and that never happens. It's just a slow rain with a burst here and there of an actual shower. So nice to listen to all day :)

Last night I joined up with the local Monday Night knitting club and we had a good time. I wisely decided to knit up a simple dishcloth instead of working on the Branching Out lace scarf. I definitely can't knit lace and talk at the same time. This is how far I got in a couple hours last night:

Isn't it so cool to see how the color pools? I never get tired of that! I'm using the Blissful Moss Rib pattern and it's complete mindless knitting. I'll save this beauty for my next social outing - most likely this weekend.

Tonight is for spinning but I'm just not feeling the groove right now. Maybe by tonight I will but I have a feeling I'll just be knitting up more of that scarf tonight and just relax. I'll leave you with another kitty picture. I call this one "Cat in a Box" otherwise known as "Kitty Heaven".

$136.25

The garage sale was ok. I was disappointed initially because we didn't get rid of more stuff but I had very unrealistic expectations. I was hoping to get rid of 75-80% while I probably only got rid of 25%. The crazy thing is that We made $136.25 and the most expensive item was $5 that was sold! We had beautiful weather and most people that stopped in purchased at least one thing. Everything was priced to go ranging from 25 cents to $10. I really shouldn't complain. I did find this stack of patterns:


I need to sift through them and keep the knitting ones that I would actually make. Many are crochet, beaded ornaments, holiday gifts, etc. I think I'm also going to keep the box of buttons that didn't sell. They are all brand new and would look great on a knit cardigan someday. I think a couple might be antiques but I'm no expert.

Everything is back in the garage now so I'm going to start sorting into these categories: Donate, Sell, Keep, Trash. There's a Rescue Mission at the end of my street that accepts mainly clothing & furniture so that will help. I'm going to try CraigsList.com for the first time and see if I have any luck. If not, I may try eBay for some of the nicer items.

Overall it was a good weekend, I spent time with family and ended up meeting a few of my neighbors. It's back to the grind now on Monday morning but I'm looking forward to meeting up with the Monday Night knitting group again.

Massive Garage Sale

I am definitely not exaggerating. Tomorrow will be a massive garage sale. We spent all last weekend bringing out all the stuff, organizing it and then pricing it. When we purchased my husbands grandparents home and agreed to get rid of their stuff for them we had no idea. NO IDEA! Last year we made 7 trips to the dump in one weekend alone. We then tried to pack away pretty or useful things in case we would need them. Since they were never used it's time to clear out. Here's a picture of everything packed in my garage waiting patiently to go to their new homes:

This is the best picture I could get. Tomorrow we plan to move half of the tables out to our driveway so there's space to walk around. We chose this weekend because our entire neighborhood is having a community wide garage sale and we're hoping to have a ton of people all day long (please! please! please!)

I feel very guilty about some of the things going. Crystal glasses, antique dishes and serving plates - really beautiful stuff but we just don't have the room anymore. I'm hoping to make enough money from this sale to offset the cost of re-doing one of our bathrooms.

OK - on to spinning news! I successfully spun last night, sticking to my "Tuesdays & Thursdays are for spinning" mantra. My back was hurting from my bad posture but I noticed that my spinning is actually getting better. It's slowing getting thinner and more even, instead of the rope with lumps that I got on my first night spinning alpaca. I've got a total of 3 bobbins full now:

I have one more Lazy Kate to work with and then I'll start plying. This feels like it would be nice as a 2-ply yarn knit up into a simple scarf pattern. It's definitely something that would feel wonderful on your skin!