Long Time No See (aka I've Been Lazy)

Maybe not so lazy about projects, but very lazy about posting. I think I just doubled my old record of four months between posts. Part of the reason is that I just keep making the same things over & over and it's got to be boring on your end to look at lap robes & hats when the only differences are the colors. Anyway, I started out the cooler days of fall crocheting more lap robes for the Veterans' Hospital.

This last one is knit. Our K4 group was given a number of lightweight coned yarns & I knit this one from five strands on size 13 needles. I has royal blue, navy, purple & two strands of black. Still the purple & blue seem to stand out most. Working with 5 strands of lace weight yarn wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done, so I was very glad to bind it off.

We had a request from one of our members for baby afghans for an organization serving families of Down's Syndrome babies in Michigan's Upper Pennisula. We were able to send a dozen including these two which were made from donated granny squares. Carol sewed the squares together & I worked a different color border on each. I only have photos of these two but we had five of them total.

Then my world changed thanks to this little gadget..

My DH bought me a B&W Nook for a belated birthday/early Xmas present around December 1st! With it, I can download books via our library from the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services and I've really been reading a lot - over 50 books since I got the Nook set up & figured out the download process. It's really great because when I finish a book, I can immediately return it for the next person on the waiting list. I've had a wide variety of books to read and it's much easier to balance the Nook on my knees while I'm knitting or crocheting than my old method of keeping a book open on my lap with a clothes pin. Only problem is that if I brush the screen with either my project or just the yarn, I can wind up on a different page so I switched to hats, scarfs & dishcloths - smaller projects that I can normally keep away from the screen. I didn't bother to take a photo of the 50+ dishcloths I finished because they looked so much like the last batch.

This first hat was worked in bulky WoolEase. The band is seed stitch & is worked sideways with the crown picked up and finished.

A hat & scarf set in a bulky boucle. The hat is knit in Quaker stitch & the scarf is simple garter stitch.

This crocheted scarf was made pre-nook. You start with a long chain & then work increasing numbers of triple crochet in each row. I used a narrow ribbon yarn in white. It went on our sale case & was gone the first day.

Another scarf worked in garter stitch, but this time I placed a marker three stitches in from one edge & knit the 4th stitch through the back to twist it. When I bound off, I let the three stitches unravel creating a fringe.

A couple more bulky hats knit in the round with wide seed or moss stitch bands switching to ribbing at the top.

And here again is my "go-to" hat pattern in various colors - I'm trying to work my way through the stash of K4 yarn left over from other projects that has accumulated.

You may have noticed that large orange & white kitty in one of the shots. Remember last October when I told about adopting Quinn and that he was one of the youngest & smallest cats to join our family. Well, he didn't realize that he was supposed to have already reached full size and has expanded like a cactus after a rainstorm. He's now around 20#s, up from 13#s & has grown in height & length as well as width..

And then there's my new "baby". They went & moved the Senior Center from here in the village to out on Joslyn Road about 8 miles away. I haven't had a car of my own since my 1988 Colt kicked the bucket at age 18. I wanted something small, so I've been waiting for the last year while Toyota's Scion IQ made its way from showrooms on the west coast to the south, to New England & finally here to Michigan. I think it was worth the wait. It's 10' long, two doors & a hatch with ample storage room when the back seats are folded down. Four star safety rating with 11 airbags & it's supposed to get 37mpg. The color is Hot Lava!!