Simple Womans Daybook for July 19, 2011

FOR TODAY
July 19, 2011

Outside my window...
its wet. A fast and furious storm blew in and dumped on us for 15 minutes leaving half an inch of rain behind.

I am thinking...
the summer is going too quick. I wish our summers were longer here.

I am thankful for...
life, however fleeting.

From the kitchen...
Ruth has just finished doing dishes. I've got chicken marinating in a pineapple/Mango sauce. I'm planning on barbecue for dinner.

I am wearing...
a pale turquoise v-neck t-shirt with purple and yellow embroidery around the neck and some navy blue knit pants.

I am creating...
my second Flirty Fir sock. I'm doing the heel flap now. Hurray! I see the end in sight.

I am going...
into Coeur d'Alene tomorrow for my monthly blood test. Yarnies has been cancelled because Andrea moved the shop over the weekend and she wasn't sure she'd be open yet at the new location.

I am reading...
Murder She Knits by Vivienne Fagan. It's about a woman who loves to machine knit and murder people. It's been very entertaining so far.

I am hoping...
the wet chilly weather doesn't stick around much longer.

I am hearing...
"Hip Hip Hooray!" on the tv. I've got a 1946 movie starring Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, and Stewart Granger playing called Caesar and Cleopatra. I'm having a hard time believing they talked like that in ancient Egypt. Lol!

Around the house...
all the kids are napping, both fur and skin.

One of my favorite things...
Potatoes. It's good that my husband brought me to Idaho to live. I may have been born in Washington state, but I'm Idahoan at heart. I love potatoes. I will eat them fried, boiled, baked, roasted, blended in soup, chipped, chunked, mashed, shoe-stringed, and frapped on toast. Mmmm, potatoes.

A few plans for the rest of the week:
The blood test on Wednesday, of course. If she needs it, I'll help Andrea unpack all the yarn and put it on the shelves for her. I plan to take Ruth to see the new Harry Potter movie too, maybe on Thursday. We'll see.

Here is a picture for thought I am sharing...

Aren't they pretty?

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Live long and prosper. \\//

Looping a Net

The weekend wore me out. On Friday, and part of Saturday, I helped my friend Andrea move her yarn shop. You don't really know how much yarn is in a yarn shop until you have to pack it all up and haul it to a new location. My goodness there was a lot of it. There were 5 of us who showed up to help on Friday. I had a blast. It was so much fun, though exhausting work. I went back on Saturday to help move the furnishings. I could only help for a couple hours, but we got a lot done before I left and the whole job was finished later that day.

Saturday afternoon was a family get together. A birthday party for my nephew Brendan, who is now 16. (Where did the time go?) Nephew Tyler, who joined the army last March, was home from boot camp for the first time. It was good to see him and has shaved head.

Sunday I spent some time beading on a fair project.

This is what the beads wanted to be. I am so much happier with this idea than the original. It's an exercise in embellished netting stitch. I'm about 1/3rd done with it. If you'll remember, the gold seed beads and 4mm pearls are from the sweater that belonged to my sister-in-laws mother. The fair has a category for recycled things. I'm recycling these beads into a jewelry piece.

For the Twisted pendant, I've decided I'm going to do some tubular peyote for a necklace to hang it on. I'll enter it in the fair in the peyote stitch category.

I got 3 inches done on the leg of the second Flirty Fir sock. Yay! I think I'll have them done in time for the fair. I got a couple inches done on the summer sweater too. I worked on it at the party on Saturday.

My foot is slowly healing. I'm still hobbling, and I get pain at night, but during the day I'm having pain free periods now. Considering all the work I did Friday with the moving, I'm quite pleased with how it's doing. I did wrap it up, and babied it. I was careful about not overdoing it too.

For me, as Superintendent of Knitting, fair stuff starts next week. We're having a planning meeting. Then in August it's workin' time. I'm looking forward to it. In fact, I'm downright excited.

Live long and prosper. \\//

Twisted

Oh my goodness but this project is fun to do! I wanna make more!

Wavy Triangle Pendant

 It stands up all by itself.

Side view.

Into the Vortex! (Just kidding)

Mount Twisty!

Now, what am I gonna do with it?

Live long and prosper. \\//

Edited to add link to pattern:

Twisted Triangle

Just Fluff

Not a lot to say today. Just wanted to share these pics I took.

I love the way the sun glints through this fuzz. Can you guess what it is? (Click on to embiggen)

A Salsify puff ball. They're kind of like giant dandelions. Grow wild around here. The ball is about 3- 4 inches in diameter.

My roses have started to bloom. The color is very striking.

Live long and prosper. \\//

Twisty Fun

Every once in awhile I get a hankering to make something so strong I have to just do it and put everything else aside. That happened over the weekend. Oh, I got plenty of knitting done, to be sure. I've got 6 inches done on the sweater now. But there is this beading project that has been percolating in the brain for quite some time. I saw the pattern a few months ago in a Russian beading forum that I inhabit. It was pretty cool looking but I had something else going on at the time. Then, over the weekend, I happened to notice an ad for a class taught at the Bead and Button show (which I didn't go to). There was that project I'd been thinking about, only it's being taught as a very expensive class by an American (which irked me). Not by the person who wrote the free pattern I saw originally. I did some digging and found it, printed it out, and today I spent part of the day making the first half of a very interesting pendant.

 It's named the Totally Twisted Triangle. It looks incredibly complicated, but it's extremely easy to make.

If you can make a peyote stitched triangle, you can make this cuz that's what it is. It is the use of different sized beads-just like Cellini spiral (or flat Cellini spiral)- that makes it twist. To finish this pendent, I will make a second triangle like the first, then weave them together at the edges so it's double sided. I'm thinking about doing the second side in a different color just for fun. Then I'll have two pendants in one.

I had a very pleasant evening last night. I had planned for a barbecue steak dinner. We ended up taking our steaks over to BIL Dan's house and having dinner with them. Afterwards we sat in their hot tub and watched the sun set. Since I'd spent quite a bit of time earlier in the day de-weeding the front yard flower beds, I really was happy to get in that tub because I was sore.

It is getting rather threatening looking outside. It's hot, muggy, not a bit of breeze blowing, and dark black clouds are rolling in. I expect a thunderstorm is gathering itself. A little storm would kind of be nice.

Live long and prosper. \\//

Edited to add pattern link:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/166492517445931761/

Clover on the Parkarosa

Right now the wild Clover is blooming all over the Parkarosa. I took pics of the ones growing closest to the house. The variety is astounding. These are just a few. They all have the 3 leaflet style leaves on them. But the flowers are unique for each variety. Please click on the pics to get a more detailed view.

I call this lawn clover because it grows in our lawn but technically it's White Clover (Trifolium repens).

It came with the grass seed, so I guess technically it's not wild.

This is a Least Hop Clover (Trifolium agrarium). Each plant stands straight up, 6 to 8 inches high, and the flowers are about half an inch across. Notice the leaves are thin.

This is another yellow clover. I've been unable to find it's name. At first I thought it was the same as the above yellow clover because they are living right next to each other all mixed up in the woods, but it's actually a totally different species. It's flowers are teeny tiny and much more complex in structure. Until I saw this photograph, I had no idea it was this fascinating. The leaves are much rounder. It gets to about 6 inches tall maximum but mostly it grows along the ground spreading tendrils out like a ground cover.

This is called Red Clover (Trifolium pratense), though it looks purple to me. These flowers get up to an inch in diameter and grow 2 feet tall.

 I love the colors in this Pink White Clover (Trifolium repens). So bright and feminine. It stands about 12 to 18 inches tall and the flowers are about 3/4th inch across.

This is called Yellow Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis). It grows very tall. I've got pictures of my husband standing in a patch that grew 10 feet tall one summer, but most of the time it's between 4 and 5 feet tall.

The flowers themselves are about 4 to 6 inches long. It smells wonderful! The air is thick with a sweet and tropical odor when it's in bloom.

This is White Sweet Clover (Melilotus alba Medi). It has the same basic structure of the yellow, just a different color. This is NOT an albino of the yellow. It is it's own species. What's very interesting is that some years yellow dominates the landscape and other times white dominates it, all depending on what kind of winter and spring we have. If spring is early and a bit dry, we get lots of white Sweet Clover. If spring is cold and wet, we get lots of yellow Sweet Clover.

I hope you have enjoyed my little article on the clovers of the Parkarosa.

Live long and prosper. \\//

So It Begins

After a bit of close personal time with my calculator, paper, and pencil, I have come up with a pattern for a short sleeved sweater that should fit me perfectly if all goes well. I cast on immediately and have 3 inches done on the back already.

A close up of the stitch pattern. (Click on the pic to embiggen.)

I'm using a variegated yarn and a matching solid in chevron stripes. I'm enjoying the stitch pattern. It's garter stitch, but it's not boring with the increases and decreases every 9 stitches. The fabric feels good too. Not heavy, like I was expecting.

The cooking experiment was a resounding success last night. It was the best roast beef I've ever cooked. I will be doing that gain in the future.

Live long and prosper. \\//

Flirty Fir Progress

I have finished sock one.

The colors have pooled in an interesting pattern. I really like this and have already started sock 2. With any luck, it will look similar.

I've been working away on my beaded fair project but I'm not happy with it. So I'm going to frog it and start over. The beads aren't working with the design idea. I need to do something else. Kicking ideas around.

I knit swatches for 2 days this week trying to get gauge for the summer sweater I want to make. Arrgh! It was very frustrating because I couldn't even get close to it. So I did a little research on the required yarn that I'm substituting and discovered it's not worsted weight like I thought. It's sport weight. Well, no wonder! I still want to make the sweater with the yarn I have, so I've been calculating and rewriting the pattern based on the gauge I'm getting.

Wow! Where did the week go? I can't believe it's Friday already. We're supposed to have good weather this weekend. Maybe I can get some weeding done. The flower beds are getting out of control.We had 2 really hot days on Wednesday and Thursday. It got up to 90F degrees. Totally snow free too. Not one flake fell this week. The evenings have been nicely cool so we can sleep. By sunset, the temps are in the low 60's.

It's cooled way down today. Only 67F.  The wind is blowing pretty hard too, so even though the temperature is pleasant, it would be hard to enjoy sitting on the deck. Kind of like sitting in a wind tunnel. It should be nicer tomorrow.

Oh yes, I wanted to tell you about a cooking experiment I did with Sweet Hubbys new barbeque grill. We are loving that grill, by the way. Anyway, I decided to try cooking meatloaf on it. The grill has 4 burners. I placed the meatloaf on a pan I made with aluminum foil over two of the burners which I left turned off. I turned the two burners the loaf was not sitting over on low. I put some apple wood chips over that part too so there would be some nice smoky flavor. I let it cook like that for an hour. Oh my god, that was the BEST meatloaf ever and I didn't have to turn the oven on inside the house. Tonight I'm going to cook a beef cross rib roast the same way.

We are starting to see flocks of baby turkeys with their mothers in the neighborhood. They are so cute! One hen had at least 12 babies. That's a LOT of turkeys. If all of them had that many, we're going to be over run with them. I hope to get a pic of some of the babies before they get too big to be cute anymore, but they are so camera shy. I will keep trying.

Live long and prosper. \\//

Peonies!

I planted 3 Peonies 15 years ago. They were baby plants put in admittedly lousy soil. It takes a long time for Peonies to establish themselves before they start putting out flowers, but I didn't know it would take this long. They bloomed this year. Hurray!!!

They smell soooooo good. The whole house smells like Peony. My nose itches and my eyes are watering, but I don't care. I have Peonies!

Live long and prosper. \\//

I Have Knitted FO's!

This morning I cleaned the beading stuff off the blocking board on the dining room table just enough to give me some room to block and finish the baby sweater. I figured I'd block the entrelac fingerless mitts that I hadn't done yet too. Then I sewed buttons on the sweater. They are now both officially finished.

Baby Pullover in Lichen Green for Knitwits

Pattern: Easy Baby Aran by Sarah Hoffman
Size: 20 months

Yarn: Red Heart Eco-Ways #1615
Content: 70% Acrylic, 30% recycled Polyester
 
Needles: Addi Turbo Circular size 6 and 8.

Cast on: May 19, 2011
Bound off: June 21, 2011

Comments:  This sweater was a lot of fun to make and actually quite easy. I would recommend it for inexperienced knitters. The stitch patterns are just enough to make it interesting, but easy to memorize so I could carry it around with me for kipping.

The yarn felt a little strange to me. A bit like a plastic feel to it. I suspect it's the recycled polyester that gives it that feeling. After steam blocking it felt much better.

The buttons came from my stash of antique buttons that I 'inherited' several years ago.

I think I will enter this in the fair before I turn it in to Knitwits.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

 A Rainbow for My Hands the Prequel

Pattern: A Rainbow for My Hands by me.

Yarn: Crystal Palace Yarns Mini Mochi
Content: 80% Superwash Merino Wool/20% Nylon

Needles : Addi Turbo Circular size 1

Size: Ladies Medium

Cast On: Februaruy 23, 2011
Bound Off: May 13, 2011

Comments:  These were the prototype mitts for the pattern I wrote. I love this pattern, but then I'm biased because I wrote it. The yarn was a little hard to work with because it splits extremely easily when using sharp pointed needles. (I used Addi Turbo Lace. Very sharp.) So be aware. Other than that, I like it a lot. It feels very nice on the hands and the long color changes look very cool in entrelac.

It feels good to get them done.

Live long and prosper. \\//