I finally made it to sit & knit last night…and cross-stitched the whole time. I think I’ll be able to get this wedding gift done in time, but it’s going to be close. No knitting for me until it’s finished. <sniffle>
Well, maybe I’ll put in the random row here and there on my kureyon bag and the second sleeve of Janda. I’ll have to set a timer, though, or I’ll end up with a finished bag, a sleeve, and an IOU to give as a wedding gift.
I finally got to see Pirates of the Caribbean last night. We tried to go see it a few weeks ago, and ended up in a theater with a faulty projector that flickered…we notified management, but they didn’t fix it, so we walked out.
Anyway. Did I say yet that this was a fantastic movie? Well, it was. And if you haven’t seen it yet (I know, I probably was the last person on the planet who hadn’t seen it) go see it!
Just don’t go to the theater we went to. They had it in the oldest, furthest theater, which smelled like a dirty gym locker. And that’s saying something, since my sense of smell is somewhat diminished because of my allergies. I was afraid to put my purse on the floor, which was unbelievably dirty, and the seats were wobbly. After we had already exited the building, I realized I should have picked up a comment card. Oh, well.
Either I’m getting picky in my old age, or the theaters are really falling apart around here.
My allergies haven’t killed me yet, although they sure are trying! We had a fun visit with our twin nieces and twin niece and nephew this weekend – four kids have way more than four times the energy of one kid…it definitely follows the rule of the sum being greater than the parts. We went to the Strong Museum for part of Saturday with Lisa and Henry, which the kids definitely enjoyed!
I did manage to get a little knitting done, too – I finished a pair of socks, and (you guessed it) started another little project.
I’ve been in kind of a knitting slump lately – I don’t know if it’s just that I’m bored with the projects I have, or if it’s just allergies, but I haven’t been knitting nearly as much as usual. Or blogging, for that matter! Plus, I’ve been pretty bummed about missing Sit & Knit for two weeks in a row now.
The other thing is, I’m actually spending most of my crafting time on my cousin’s wedding gift – he’s getting married in three weeks, and I have to finish stitching it and have at least a week left for framing. The race is on!
Lately, we’ve been working on our basement family/guest room. (Yes, our guest room is in the basement, but it’s walkout – to the pool – has two full-size windows, a full bathroom, and is huge.) Anyway. We came up with the grand idea of building built-in cabinets and bookcases, plus a window seat, to store all the books and games we have down there.
Long story short, the building project began about a month ago. It isn’t done, but we have company coming (with four small children) tonight, so we installed the pieces we had finished last night…except, somewhere along the line, something must have been measured wrong, because we couldn’t fit all four cabinets along the wall. Oops. Thankfully, we haven’t stained the pieces yet, so we might be able to take the too-big piece apart and re-do it…
Wait, the whole point of this entry was to talk about the books I found! All of my books have been boxed up since…well, I think since I left for college…so it was neat to find some books that I want to re-read. I probably put about 500 books on the shelves last night. There are at least two more boxes, plus a couple stacks in my bedroom and craft room, but we still have another bookcase to build, so I’m not too worried.
I found a Nancy Drew book that was published in 1933 (I used to love those books!), and one from 1965. There were plenty of…ahem…Star Trek…cough…books (yes, I’m a geek), as well as cheesy romance novels, better sci-fi, Sherlock Holmes, and Shakespeare. I guess the Virginia Woolf books I read for my high school thesis are in another box. Pretty much, if you name it, I’ve got it – well, anything except non-fiction. I even found a couple of kids books in Spanish that I think I had to translate in AP Spanish class.
The best treasure I found, though, was tucked inside an old journal: a birthday card from my Great-Grandmother. Based on the dates in the journal, it must have been the last one she gave me before she died. She was my most favorite person in the whole wide world when I was little, and got me addicted to crafts by teaching me to crochet when I was seven. I am so glad I kept that card!
(So much for keeping a long story short!)
My baby brother left for college today. I’m 10 years older than he is, so I distinctly remember the first day I met him. I’m sure he’ll have a great time, but I’m a little sniffly… <sniffle>
I baked him his favorite cookies last night, and sent a huge tin of them with him. (They’re Cinnamon Chip Apple Cookies, which are truly the tastiest cookies ever!)
The Mystery Quilting Project – now known as “Starry Starry Night” – is officially done, and revealed!
After I put this all together, I had a few moments of panic, thinking it was almost dizzying…but I think it turned out ok, and is almost what I had originally envisioned. The Don McLean song, Vincent (Starry Starry Night), kept going through my head while I worked on the quilt, hence the name.
This is only the second quilt I’ve ever actually finished. I have plenty of quilt tops in various stages of piecing, but this is only the second I’ve quilted, bound off, and given away! I should really try to finish the Wildberry Vines quilt, or the Christmas quilt, or the two Jo-Ann’s quilt-block-of-the-month quilts from several years ago, or the hope chest cover quilt that I started a couple of years ago…one of these days. (Does anyone else see a pattern here? I think I need deadlines to actually complete things!)
Now, just as soon as we’re done with the basement remodeling – which is something that does indeed have a deadline – I can get back to my regularly scheduled knitting!
I realize that for many people, yesterday’s blackout was at the least an inconvenience…but I thought it was great! Let’s see…I finished the first sleeve of Janda. We dined on shrimp (easy to thaw) and potato chips…then I managed to cook rice pilaf in the microwave.
How? Well, during the most recent ice storm we bought a generator. And then, despite the fact that this sort of thing only happens once a decade, we paid to have an electrician hook it up to our circuit box so we could switch over to the generator when needed. So, we had TiVo (the cable was down), lights (in a couple of rooms), a fan, and a working fridge.
I dug out the battery-powered radio to find out what was going on (no internet and no cable make for a very uninformed Sarah). Is it just me, or does this look like E.T.? (Or, at least, a face?)
Anyway. After all that, we extricated my old telescope from a closet to check out Mars and the moon. Spent some time stargazing, turned off the generator, said a quick prayer that the power would still be out tomorrow (you know, like a snow-day), and went to bed.
(The power eventually came on, sometime around 3:30 this morning. Oh, well.)
The UPS guy just dropped off my amazon order: Cinderella (the original Rogers & Hammerstein version, circa 1965) and Veggie Tales: The Ultimate Silly Song Countdown.
OK, so I have strange taste in DVDs. :)
OK, so maybe procrastination is not such a beautiful thing. I just finished priming and painting the basement room. Who knew 14′ x 16′ was that much wall space?
Fingers crossed that it won’t need a second coat, please!
No priming done. No painting either, of course. (Although I am so tempted to skip the priming…but I already did it for one wall, so I suppose I ought to do the rest.) Just the thought of the cleanup process was enough to make me decide to put it off.
I did, however, finish piecing the top of MQP. I even basted it together and started machine-quilting it.
See? I occasionally do something other than knit! Actually, since the TiVo remote was, um, damaged, I haven’t watched much TV, which is when I usually knit. Thankfully, in a fit of unmitigated geekiness, Denis hooked up the TiVo to our home network…which means you can actually control it from a laptop, so I could watch TV if I wanted to. But it’s especially akward to watch TV with a laptop on your lap, and even I don’t have enough lap space for a laptop and knitting…and two large, attention-seeking dogs. So, no TV for several days makes for productive painting, quilting, and puppy-playing time.