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!!

Has It Really Been Four Months?

Unfortunately, it has been almost four months since I updated this blog. I've been listing the books I've read over there in the left sidebar & taking pictures, but it's been far too long since I've set fingers to keys (remember when the phrase was "pen to paper"?) to mention what's been happening here in Plain Janeland. So, I'll start where I should have after the last post with the antique cabbage roses blooming in the back yard.




These roses are descendants of the ones that were on the farm when my grandparents, Dad & Mom purchased it back in 1940 which is why I call them antique. They're super hardy & spread like crazy given the chance. Unfortunately, given a record amount of mosquitoes this year, I didn't get out of the house to take photos of the Seven Sisters roses when they bloomed.


As we had a bumper crop of catnip this year, I brought out the pattern I designed for the knitted catnip mouse & made about a dozen of them to sell at the Sr. Center. Instead of the felted wool & silk yarns of the original, I combined acrylic & fun fur in various color combinations & stuffed them with catnip wrapped in sections of nylon stockings. As you can see below, Max seemed to approve of the new version and I had to package them in plastic ziplock snack bags in a hurry before the mice disappeared.


DH was once again on the prowl at garage sales to find yarn for our K4 group at the Senior Center and he came up with some great stashes. A good portion of this yarn has already been turned into lap-robes for the Ann Arbor Veterans' Hospital, toddler sweaters destined for the Redbird Mission in Kentucky and other charity projects.




These next four photos are of the nine toddler sweaters I turned in this last Thursday. As you can see, Boomer & Max thought that they were Snuggles made just for them. My favorite is the one Boomer is determined to hide - the body is white while the yoke & sleeves are worked in a baby pastel variegated.








These are three of the lap-robes that I worked on this summer. With the excessive heat we had in July, it was too warm even with AC to sit under a half-finished lap-robe so I didn't get as many done as I would have liked.






And saving the best for last, meet our new family member, Quinn. We adopted him last Thursday from the Michigan Animal Rescue League just down the road in Pontiac. I'd had a PetFinder search up since the start of the year for another male front-declawed orange tiger, but most of the cats that came up were too far away to drive to meet, make an application & then drive back again to pick up after we'd been approved. Since we had adopted Callie from MARL back in 1998, they just had to call our vet to determine if we'd taken good care of her and we were able to bring Quinn home the same day. Tuesday afternoon & evening were a little wrought with tension but by Wednesday evening Quinn & Max were playing tag and there was very little hissing. We're very happy with our new family member who is just shy of three years old & still more kitten than cat. Quinn is the smallest cat we've had since Callie & the youngest since first Moki & then Tiger who were kittens.

Two Months & One Day Later - Hey, I'm Getting Better!

It's been a while - looking back to when I first started blogging, it's hard for me to believe that I was writing something almost every other day. But I haven't been sitting on my hands. First up, 30 cotton knit dishcloths. I mentioned in my last post that I'd taken advantage of the $1 sale on Sugar & Cream at Michael's so here are the latest results. They're in our display case and will be sold to raise money for yarn for our other projects.


The first of a long line of lap robes for the Veterans' Hospital in Ann Arbor - I turned nine of them in this last Monday. These are all approximately 30x36" and sized for wheelchairs as that hospital gets many of the amputees from the wars. These first four are all crocheted in plain double crochet which lets me change colors more easily as I can work over the ends as I go.






Up to this point, the photo shoot was moving along - and then .....



Boomer decided to get into the act. This one is knit and I tried something new, blending the colors by knitting two rows on one blue & then two rows of a second blue. When blue #1 ran out, I added a lighter shade (#3) & continued alternating with #2 and so on until I reached the correct length.


Another knit one, this one out of the bin of greens.


Boomer says "you're not going to get away with just moving the next lap robe away from the one I'm occupying - at 3' from ears to tail I can easily span both!!"


Three more simple double crochet ones.






This one is in brick stitch and was finished except for running in the yarn ends with a needle. I love this pattern but it doesn't allow for crocheting over the yarn ends so I tend to use it when I have almost full skeins to use so there aren't as many color changes. Boomer was fascinated with the loose ends.


Another one that needed another row or two to be complete. I finished these last two off during Monday's knit/crochet class so they're ready to be delivered. Notice that tuft of white fur just to the left of Boomer?


Just in case you ever wondered why it's difficult to get the vacuum run at the same time as the camera batteries are charged, this last photo may explain it. I think I had less than five minutes before "the boys" were mixing it up again and there was fur flying.


In other news, the garage sale season so far has been very good. I took two large bags of yarn in on Monday & more on Thursday. DH had even better luck Thursday afternoon while I was at K4 and I came home to my chair entirely filled with bags of yarn. Today we went to a community garage sale up in Oxford and I was able to buy 35 skeins of yarn for $4.00 - 18 skeins of beige, 6 of turquoise, 6 of medium blue & 5 of dark blue. I think I'm going to need DH's help to get this all from the car to the craft room come Monday!

Two Weeks Later

My latest projects:


I only knit the hats for this set & the one below. Dee, a member of our K4 group, knit the scarves. Both are double yarn on big needles so I made the hats with the same doubled yarn on a size 15 circular. I used Quaker Stitch (knit 3 rows, purl 3 rows when worked in the round) to give them some texture & an every round decrease to make a flat top.




This set started with a beautiful ball of yarn that shaded from greens to golds & back again. The hat is the same style as the ones above but it left only about 1/3rd to 1/4th of ball when I finished. I made a narrow scarf with double yarn overs every six rows both to make the scarf as long as I could & to allow one end to be slipped between the elongated stitches to fasten it around the neck. Necessity is the mother of invention.. {g}


Above & below are the two latest of the knit lap robes for the Veteran's Hospital. I'm working on another one now with five strands of thin coned yarn in black (2), navy, purple & royal blue. Held together, the yarns approximately equal an aran weight & the resulting knit is pretty. Only problem is that with five cones of yarn being attached the project doesn't transport very easily so it has to stay by the chair in the front bedroom where I watch TV so it's going slowly.


In other adventures, DH's sweater is coming along nicely now that I'm reworking it on size 13 needles. The body is complete & after using a 3-needle bind-off on the shoulders & working the neck ribbing, I've picked up stitches around the armhole for the first sleeve & am about half way down to the cuff. It has gone faster this time because I'm working it in plain old stockinette instead of the aran patterns that I had to frog.