Dang, I'm A Bad Blogger

Yes, it's been ages since I posted last, but it's been a busy time. First of all, I had a TKR (Total Knee Replacement) on my left knee in early June because of  bone on bone arthritis and now I'm getting ready for replacement of the right knee in early October. I went through 5 weeks of physical therapy, was able to shed the walker at the end of the first week for a cane & by the end of the second week I found myself forgetting to grab the cane when moving around the house. I still use the cane if I'm going out because sidewalks & cracked parking lots can be tricky.

I've kept myself entertained by reading - list on the sidebar and those of you who follow the blog & get a notice of an update, chances are I just added a title or two to the list. I had to miss over a month of my knitting groups out at the Sr. Center before I could drive again. This time around, I think I'll use the NOTA bus afterwards as while I could drive with the right foot for both gas & brake, I don't know how that will work when it's my left foot that's the "good one"..

I have to confess that while I took my knitting to the hospital, I barely cast on one dishcloth & only knit a few rows. Since then, tho', I've been busy.

First of all, more toddler sweaters that will go to the Red Bird Mission in KY with the group from the local United Methodist Church again this year.

These last two, I cut back the stitches by 25% to make smaller sweaters but I kept the neck opening the same 32 stitches on each side so they should be easy to put on a smaller child.

Some of the dishclothes I knit before & after my hospital stay.

And some curly crocheted scarves out of mohair yarns - I've made one more since these and just finished a scarf in Paton's Pebble, a thick & thin yarn. With one skein left, I'm going to try to make up a hat pattern to match.

The Seven Sisters Rose that we transplanted from the old house two years ago is thriving - mostly thanks to my  neighbor watering her garden on the other side of the fence. This was the only time I got out in the back yard since early June, but I had to get photos of the rose. It came up again over at the other house & we were able to transplant two new ones down at the other end of the fence. The two new ones even bloomed a few weeks after the established roses! Right now the trumpet vine on the west fence and the rose of sharon that's about 8' to the left of this photo are blooming and we often see humming birds at the flowers as well as at the feeder just off the deck. Last year, the rose of sharon seeded and and I have about eight "babies" that are about a foot high now. The original plant is about 7 or 8' tall now after nine years. Love it when flowers & shrubs reproduce!

Beautiful, isn't it? This is a rose that my Grandfather gave me when I was still in elementary school. I was so glad that we could rescue it from the farm when Mom & Dad moved over here and that it's so stubborn about putting up new shoots over at the old house so it's multiplying.

That's about it for now - and I really will try to post more often.

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!!

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.

Photos, Photos, Photos!!

I finally got around to taking a few photos of recent projects - these are all for my K4 group.

The first is a hat & scarf set knit from WoolEase knit together with a Lion Brand fancy yarn with little pompoms. The photo of the hat is from the top. The WoolEase has flecks of the same colors which made for a neat pairing. This set & the following scarf will go into the case at the Sr. Center in hopes of raising $$ for more yarn.




The second scarf is knit in Simply Soft on the diagonal with garter & elongated stitches for interest. I haven't measured it from end to end, but it's long enough that I had to fold it to get it all in the picture. Max, as usual, is interested in anything I put on the floor.


These two sweaters will probably be the last of the Knit4Kids Toddler sweaters I'll make this year. I'll turn them in on Thursday, then in a week or so, they'll be travelling to the Red Bird Mission in Kentucky when a group from the local Methodist Church travels there for a week of volunteer work.





I'm also working on a sweater for my DH - adjusting the pattern because I think I'm a skein shy of having enough to make it as long as the last one that had pockets & a wide collar. This one will be a bit shorter, no pockets & simple ribbing around the neck. Also on the needles, a knit lap robe (my hands have been hurting a bit when I crochet lately), dishcloths & a pair of socks. I'll try to get some more photos before the camera batteries discharge and/or the cats shed so much fur that I have to run the sweeper again.

Xmas Sale, A Missing Kitty & Charity Giving

I made the mistake of not remembering to take the camera along to the Senior Center while I babysat our K4 Xmas Sale at the beginning of the month so no pictures. We sold enough to keep us in yarn for the next year and had a huge (lawn-size) bag of extras to send off for charity. This is on top of the bags of hat & scarf sets that went to the veterans, the 15 sweaters we sent to Knit For Kids & the earlier afghans & lap robes that went to Beaumont Hospital. All in all, it was a good year, plus the Oxford American Legion Post honored our group with a certificate of thanks for the work we did for the veterans!

The same week of the Xmas Sale, Sadie went missing. All we can surmise is that she slipped out when some missionaries came to the door after 8 p.m. (!!) We searched without any luck the following day and worried because she's an indoor cat & front declawed. The Michigan Humane Society offers a "Lost Pet" template on its website that I downloaded & filled in as well as posting the information on their Lost Cats page. We took the print-out of the poster to the Oakland Animal Shelter & checked through their new intakes just in case she'd been picked up & turned in. (This also gave me a chance to drop off 20 Snuggles for the cat cages.)

Coming home, we pinned the posters to file folders & enclosed them in plastic food storage bags so we could staple them to light posts & mail box stands in our neighborhood. Six days later, we became part of the fortunate 20% that finds a lost pet. A neighbor two streets away called to say that she thought Sadie was under her deck. We grabbed a can of cat food & were there within minutes. Big gold eyes showed up in the far corner of the under-deck space & we recognized the yowl, but Sadie was too scared to come out. I crawled about halfway under the deck with the open food can and, once she got her nose into it, backed out slowly until I could pick her up and get her in the carrier. WHEW!! We're extremely happy & grateful to have her back.



I felt so sorry for all the cats at the shelter. There are so many that Animal Control is offering two for one adoption fee and that fee has been drastically lowered for cats 6 months & older. We have a house full with Sadie, Boomer & Callie, but I'll be taking another bag of Snuggles to the shelter in the near future so the cages will be a little more comfortable while the cats wait for their forever homes.

Back to K4, our project for the start of the year is fulfilling a request for wheelchair sized lap robes for several veterans' hospitals and group members are hard at work. I'm using leftovers from earlier projects and making a version of rag-tag afghans in the Brick (Box, Brain-dead - it has several names) stitch. It only involves a little more work than my earlier straight double crochet versions & I like the texture that the stitch adds.


I got a little carried away on the blue one and after a few rows realized that it was 36" wide instead of 30". Rather than frog it, I decided to do lengthwise stripes.


I'm working on a third lap robe that will have dark ends and a mix of whites & creams in the center.

Playing Catch-Up...

Yes, it's been a LONG time since I sat down here to post.. Let's see, what's happened in those weeks:

1) I planted my garden. Started out with around 24 tomato plants, 4 zucchini & 8 basil.

2) I flew from Flint to Atlanta to Baltimore to visit DD#1 & her family in Pennsylvania. AirTran had good ticket prices, but flying way south to come back north seems a little strange. Had a very good time including helping pick out garden plants & getting them into the ground.

3) Flew home and planted more tomatoes - heirloom ones this time. Eight Mr. Stripy, four Yellow Pear & four Black Krim. We put them in various places around the yard to see where they'll do best. Besides, with the regular garden spot full, we had to sort of fit them in where we could. {g}

4) Went to garage sales, but at one I tripped on the curb, took a tumble & broke a little chunk off the second bone in my big toe. I've been wearing a boot that would look right at home on a StarWars Storm Trooper ever since. X-rays this last Monday show that it isn't starting to heal yet so I'm on mega-doses of calcium & a regular dose of vitamin D.

5) Watched the garden progress very slowly because except for a few days our temperatures have been below normal. Only 64° here at 4 p.m. today. For me, the lower temperatures are wonderful, but I think the tomatoes would appreciate a bit warmer. I have blossoms and a few *small* green tomatoes, but nowhere near what the tomatoes were doing last summer.

6) I've been knitting & reading since moving around in this boot isn't the most fun. FWIW, if you're ever wondering if I'm still alive, check the "Recently Read" list over in the left sidebar - I've been updating that regularly as I use it to check when a book seems overly familiar (I might have read it a year or two earlier). I've just finished the 85th book so far this year.

In knitting, I'm still working on hat/scarf sets for the shelter for homeless vets. I just finished the hat for set #53 and am working on the scarf. Here's the latest batch since the last photo:



I guess that's about all the news. I'm going to recharge the camera batteries and hope to be a better blogger in the future..

More Of The Same..

More hat & scarf sets that will go to the shelter for homeless Veterans in Detroit this fall. At this point I've completed 32 sets and have two hats that need scarves to match.


When I'm not working on hats & scarves, I've been crocheting up more Snuggles with the bulky weight yarns that we can't use for charity because of the way they wash. That includes Homespun, Baby Clouds and other fluffy ones. They're fun to work with, but after a trip through the washer & dryer, they don't look very nice. Fortunately, the cats at the shelters won't mind as long as they have something soft to lay on instead of the metal floor of the cage. As you can see below, the Snuggles have received the "Boomer Seal of Approval" {g}


I also had enough ambition last night to cast on the second sock of the Feather & Fan pair in Wooded Denim. Working on toe increases at the moment. I still have a single sock from Wendy's lace design & I need to get at least one pair finished before Summer of Socks 09 starts on June 1st.

More Than I Can Chew???

I'm still a sucker for KALs, so I signed up for two of them this month.

The Vest-uary KAL on Ravelry & the Toe Up Sock KAL in the KnittingPurls group. The Vest-uary one started on the first, so I'm already behind as all I've done is begin to design the vest I want to make. The Toe-Up one begins on the 17th so I have a little time for that.

For the Toe-Up, we're supposed to work from stash and fortunately, I added these two balls of Bernat Sox yarn to my stash at the end of last month.




The first is Faded Denim and the second is Wooded Denim (can you sense a theme here?) I'm planning on using the Wooded one for the KAL. In preparation, I'm almost finished with the first sock of the pair I was working on when Summer of Socks 08 ended several weeks earlier than I thought it would. I think that sock is destined for a period of "Second Sock Syndrome" until I finish the KAL. Besides, I used a variation of Wendy Knits Seaweed lace and I want to experiment with recharting it so the lace moves in the opposite direction on the second sock. I think it can be done, but I'll have to swatch!

In the meantime, I've been working on hat & scarf sets that will go to the shelter for homeless veterans in Detroit. Here are the first 7 sets that I made in the last few weeks.




That last poor set was hiding when I took the shot of the first six. I have another set that just needs the last decrease row of the hat completed and then yarn ends run in. I'll post a photo of it when it's finished. There's another hat just started on the arm of the chair below. Boomer loves to visit my knitting when I'm not actually clicking needles, but right now, he's curled up on my lap, pinning my left arm down and making it a bit difficult to type this.. {g}


I think he's relaxing after nibbling on the wheat grass we picked up yesterday to treat our furry kids. Sadie loves nibbling on grass - or at least she did when Mom was letting her out in the back yard for supervised nibbling - but she's now a full fledged indoor cat so she was face down in this pot as soon as it was placed on the floor.


I'm still keeping an eye on the continuing saga of the CPSIA law which grows more confusing with each passing day. Check in at CPSIA Central for the latest news and links.