Saturday, February 28, 2009

If you love someone

you need to go read this from one of my favorite bloggers - it's wonderfully accurate and well worth your time.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Another rowdy Friday night





White pizza and The Producers tonight.






Settle in after the big snow and a busy week.

Monday, February 23, 2009

My Kauni cardigan is getting a sleeve!


Why, yes that is a new sofa. Thank you for noticing.

We finally parted with the 18 year old sofa. I think we got our moneys worth.

(I truly understand why our parents have ancient sofas. There's no point rushing into anything, is there?)



Georgie likes it very much.



I've also been spinning up some merino/alpaca/silk I dyed last year.

Funny how two bobbins can look so different?












Paul and I headed out for a walk after work. It's in the teens here today. All the snow will start to melt again tomorrow - it's due for the upper thirties.


Our old topless silo.




View from the Waterford bridge.










Paul took more amazing bird photos this weekend.

Here's Mrs. Red-bellied woodpecker.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Sunny Saturday

We had fresh snow through the night and woke to a sparkly sunny morning.


We sat in the sun, drank our coffee, listened to Radio Heartland and perused the morning paper.

Paul had plenty of help when it came time to do the sudoku puzzle.





I did a little spinning before beginning the work of the day.

This is the merino/tencel that came from Chameleon Colorworks last month. I'm spinning it from the fold in an attempt to make it a fluffy laceweight. Is a fluffy laceweight even possible?


The Lopi cardigan has the ends woven in and is blocking.

There are two stores in town that sell buttons. Neither had anything even remotely appropriate.

So now it's either drive a minimum of 50 miles roundtrip (for buttons!!) or order online. Rats! Should have thought of this a while ago, eh?


While putting away the needles I used for the Lopi, I noticed these beauties. My size 1 Addi Turbos with definite kinks in 'em.

I don't even know how this happened. They've been hanging in an organizer with all the other circular needles. None of the others are damaged.

Freaky.

Well, as long as I'm ordering buttons, I'll may have to shop needles too...

Monday, February 16, 2009

Late to the party

I return to steek, yet again.

The Kauni cardigan is ready to have the sleeve steeks cut.

The sleeve stitches will be picked up around the steek and knit down to the cuff.

I've always sewn my steeks on the sewing machine, as I did last week for the Lopi cardigan.

For this cardigan, I've decided to try a crochet steek. I took the instructions from Meg Swansen's Sweaters from Camp . On the interwebs, a really good tutorial is on Euny Jang's old blog, See Euny Knit.

The visible yellow is the crocheted steek.




And I'm late to the party. This is a great way to steek! Why have I never tried this before?!

Look at that nice neat edge after I've cut. I'm very pleased! This a technique I'll permanently add to my repertoire.






Here's the newest colorway from the crockpot.

Yes, I can use something other than blues and greens!






Personal growth? Perhaps, but not of a very important variety. But I'll take it wherever it comes...


Hey Minnesotans! Did you all have this fabulous sunrise today?

There was a column of light extended far into the sky. Gorgeous.

I didn't take the camera with me to work. I tried to take a pic with my cell phone with very little success.

Paul took this photo before he left for work. Like I said, I'm going to have to wrestle him for the camera!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Family Sunday


We had Sunday dinner with most of Paul's family today.

We got to play with little E - our grand-nephew. He'll be one year old in early March, and he's cute as a bug!








After dinner, Paul and I headed out to the arboretum for a walk.

A quick stop at the river, looking for eagles, but no luck.






Looks like a frozen creek, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, it's the trail. Most of the trails in the arb looked just like this.

We shortened our walk to only 2.5 miles.

We were afraid we'd fall and break some sort of important bone. Getting out of there with a broken body part could be extremely difficult!



Paul's been practicing with the camera.

He got these great shots of cardinals at one of our feeders.







Looks like we might be wrestling for the camera!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Valentines Day from ChocolateLand

Happy Valentines Day to you ALL!
For three months every year, we see a great deal of our favorite chocolate shop proprietress.

There's the traditional Christmas chocolate, Paul's birthday, our anniversary, and then Valentines day.

We both visit for all of these holidays (except Paul's BD), and she always knows exactly what we want. Usually, she has boxes set aside for us, full of our favorites. Paul particularly likes truffles and I like dark chocolate covered cherries.

She remembers the year of the Christmas chocolate disaster.

Yummy candy appears in our Christmas stockings. One year I actually purchased Paul's chocolate more than a day or two before the holiday. Then the problem was - where should I hide it?

The stockings were already hung over the fireplace. His stocking is a quilted stocking, fairly puffy looking. It was easy to hide the box of chocolates in the bottom of the stocking! Who looks in their stocking before Christmas morning? Certainly not grown adults!

However, in the weeks before Christmas, we had several fires in the fireplace. I never thought to check the chocolates.

You can see this coming, can't you?

Christmas morning, the last gift out of the stocking was what should have been a delicious box of chocolates. Paul opened the box thinking tasty thoughts, only to find a melted mass of really disgusting looking inedible chocoate melted into one corner of the box.

Now she always reminds me to be careful with my chocolates.


Anyway, we've got a lot of yummy treats for the next week or so. (And no Christmas stockings to hide them in...)





I've been working on applying the button bands on the Lopi Sweater. One side is finished. Now I need to plot out where I need the buttonholes on the other side, and I'll get that side done too.







I've fallen in love with the Kauni Effekt yarn.

So I added a few more balls to my stash. These are a teal/turquoise and a black/white colorway.

Maybe something for the Girl of the House?



This week I got some spinning and the plying completed. This is some fiber I dyed back in November, I think?

It's navajo plied to preserve the color changes. It ended up a heavy worsted weight.





Apparently I've been stuck in a blue/green colorway this long cold winter.

To the right is last weeks dyed merino, on the left is the new yarn.

Stuck in the colorway, as I said...




Today I've got BFL in the crockpot. I'm trying a new colorway. Absolutely NO blue or green. Shocking.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

RVs and possums

We headed out to the RV show in downtown Minneapolis last evening.

There was repeated evidence of the recession. We've been attending this show for years. Usually, it fills all the domes in the convention center and overflows into additional rooms. This year, only about 80% of the dome space was filled, and there were no displays in the additional rooms. There were definitely less people in attendance, too. (Of course, at $10 admission/person and $10 to park, that could eliminate some lookers, too!)

The neatest new thing we came across was this toy hauler camper by Outback. You can see it has a second floor loft! And a TV in it for those who can't go camping without some mindless entertainment. It actually was very cool. In the right surroundings, it'd be a great place to sleep. Not such a cool place to be in many wooded campgrounds, though.



I was sitting, doing our taxes, when the little dog had a barking fit.

Looking outside, I thought he was just barking at a cat under the pine tree. On closer inspection, it was a possum. Mr. possum hung out most of the afternoon.
Funny ugly/cute thing..





After cooling through the night in the crockpot, the merino rovings have come out to dry.

I think this colorway will spin up beautifully.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Saturday in the sun



This morning while Paul was out chopping wood, I met some friends for a walk in the Carleton Arboretum.






The sun's shining, and temps are in the upper 20s.

Nikki's dog, Katie, was happy for the run.








There'll be portobellos to eat this weekend. Yum.









I've made more knitting progress on my Kauni cardigan.

I've decided to keep the dark section. We'll see how that turns out.














This is definitely my corner of the kitchen counter.

Crockpot full of merino roving, the camera bag, and my work PC.




Ain't life grand?

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Cutting the steek

We made it out to Sioux Falls, SD this past weekend for a goodbye party for Paul's brother and his wife. They've had it with the northern cold and are moving to Georgia. (A fabulous job promotion helped to weight the scales in favor of the move.)

We'll miss them immensely. Sioux Falls is only a four hour drive. Georgia will take a bit longer, but we'll get there!





Anyway, there was lots of road knitting time.

The Lopi sweater reached the point of steeking. Tonight I took it to the sewing room.



See the two purled stitches in the center? That's where I'll sew.















Two rows of stitching. I prefer to use a small zig zag stitch - it catches more yarn.







I cut carefully between the two lines of stitching.









Now it's ready for adding the button band and collar!








These were some of the colors I auditioned for the contrast on this sweater. I ended up sticking to my original choice.

But if I want more Lopi knitting, now I'm ready!