Month: January 2007

Seasons of Beauty

Sarah General

I know most people hate winter. And ice in winter is even worse. But how can you not admire something like this?


(click to make it bigger!)

I adore this tree. Even if it does leave squishy crab apples all over the ground in the fall. Check it out in the full glory of springtime:


(this one also gets bigger with a click.)

I just hope it survives this winter-that-isn’t-really-a-winter. I didn’t really check it out before the ice, but I know there are (were) new leaves on our rosebush out front and new growth on just about everything else in the front garden…

The Deadline Approacheth

Sarah Knit Mitten Kit Swap

Carrie is modeling the bag I’m knitting for the knit mitten kit swap. It’s currently on it’s second trip through the wash cycle. It looked pretty good after the first trip, but it was a bit bigger than I’d planned and I thought it would be sturdier after a second felting. Hopefully it won’t be too small when I go down to check on it in a few minutes! And then I just have to hope it dries in time to do the needle felting embellishment and get it in the mail on Tuesday.

I have to confess, I love these colors so much that I went back to the yarn shop yesterday to get more. I’m going to try to make a Janda-style sweater, but as a cardigan. I got a lighter green as well, thinking I could make a Carrie-sized sweater. Because, of course, I have no other yarn anywhere in the house that could be made into Sarah- or Carrie-sized sweaters. The yarn is Cascade 220, so it’s already pretty cheap, and it was on sale for 25% off. How could I pass it up? Or the skein of sock yarn (oranges, purples, yellows and greens!) that somehow magically appeared in my basket when I was checking out?

My goal for the week: find all the sock yarn in my craft room and put it in one place. I’m pretty sure, after going to this huge sale at my LYS no less than three (3!) times, that I now qualify as having an obscene amount of sock yarn. How many socks can one person knit, anyway?!?

Joining the 21st Century.

Sarah General

After seeing mention of bloglines all over creation, I’m finally going to try it out. I switched from using Safari to using Firefox a couple of months ago, and I never re-subscribed to all the RSS feeds I was watching. I didn’t even import my enormous bookmark list, and surprisingly I haven’t really missed them. But I have fallen behind on the blogs I was reading, because I don’t have the time to click through all of them on the off chance that somebody updated.

Hopefully this will be a good substitute, and if I ever change browsers again it won’t matter!

Snap!

Sarah Carolyn, Music

OK, now that I’ve played for 5+ hours of auditions, I have West Side Story music permanently embedded in my brain. (This condition, of course, will last through the end of the show – and probably a bit longer than that – in late April. Sigh.) Can’t you hear it? Snap, snap, snap, snap…

Anyway. Carrie’s been singing a lot lately. (I’m starting to even hope that she might not be tone-deaf, since if I sing along with her she’s starting to try to match pitch.) But she doesn’t quite get all the lyrics right. My two current favorite mangled lyrics are:

“Do, a deer, a e-mail deer” – I guess she’s heard the word “e-mail” a lot more than the word “female”! The scary part is she knows all the words to this song. Too bad it was last year’s musical. Maybe I can teach her the “I feel pretty” song from WSS?
“Where is pumpkin? Where is pumpkin?” – this one’s a little odd, since she does know that the handy-dandy opposable appendage on her hand is called a “thumb”, but she insists that it’s “pumpkin”, not “thumbkin”.

Deadlines

Sarah Knit Mitten Kit Swap

Uh-oh. Somehow the days (weeks, months, etc.) have gotten away from me. I didn’t get started on my bag for the mitten kit swap until Saturday. So I have to finish knitting it, felt it, embellish it, fill it with goodies, and mail it by a week from tomorrow.

The good news is that it’s a fast knit. But with auditions for West Side Story starting tomorrow I’ve been having to split my knitting time with rehearing the (insanely difficult) piano music. If I can get everything knit, sewn up, and in the washer by Saturday afternoon I think it will be OK. I think. Otherwise, hopefully my pal will be understanding if it’s a day or two late…

Anyway, I’m excited about the colors and pattern for the bag. You can check them out on the project page. As is always the case, I think this one will be hard to give away!

Two Right Mittens

Sarah Knitting

Or, why it’s occasionally a good idea to actually read the pattern..

I think I’ve done something to anger the knitting gods. And it all started with a quest for a hat to match Carrie’s winter coat. I had no idea when I bought it that every shade of pink yarn in my stash would clash horrifically. As a matter of fact, I scoured three yarn shops for the perfect shade of pink in some sort of wool or wool blend, and finally had to settle for using an acrylic/cotton blend. Carrie showed a preference for a striped hat (vs. a cute little solid colored cabled hat) when I showed her some options, so I found four pretty heathery colors (but still, acrylic?!?) and bought one skein of each. Here’s the set as of this morning:

So far, I’ve had to knit the hat twice – despite swatching the yarn and measuring the head in question, the first attempt turned out way to small. The scarf…well, it’s a scarf. It will hopefully look OK when it’s on. The weird wavy edge is entirely my fault, since I figured out after the first stripe that I’d never finish a striped stockinette scarf and just started randomly using various stitch patterns without worrying about whether they would pull in or bow out. I think if I knit fast enough I may be able to finish the second mitten before I run out of pink yarn. (Yes, I know how that sounds.)

Except.

I discovered last night, as I was halfway through frantically knitting that second mitten, that I had made it identical to the first. The first mitten. Which was the right mitten. Yes, folks, these are handed mittens. And since the last time I checked Carrie has one right hand and one left hand, it’s something of a problem that I knit two identical mittens.

Sigh.

This is not a good way to start out my 2007 knitting year. Maybe I should go work on a few quilts or something…oh, wait, my walking foot broke before Thanksgiving. OK, maybe some weaving? No…I broke the warp on my loom and have no idea how to fix it or re-warp it…

I think I’ll go read a book.

The Return of the Routine

Sarah Fitness

I went back to they gym today. It’s been nearly a month – I think I went once in December. I did their core training class, which I’ve only done once before – somehow it’s really hard to get to the gym, drop Carrie in the child-care room, and stash my bag in a locker before 9:45. Anyway. I can already tell that I’m not going to be able to move tomorrow. Ibuprofen is my friend…

I actually couldn’t wait to get back. I didn’t gain too terribly much weight over the holidays – only maybe a couple of pounds – but the scale definitely was going in the wrong direction! I’m thinking I’ll try to lose 5 pounds this month. That’s a really reasonable goal, which I can easily accomplish putting in some time at the gym and avoiding soda and carby snacks. I’m not going to think beyond those 5 pounds and get overwhelmed by the rest of the weight I have to lose, that’s something I can worry about later.

Potty Talk & Lima Beans

Sarah Carolyn

Darn it, I’ve been mentally saving up cute things Carrie has been saying lately, and now that I sat down to blog about them I can’t remember most of them.

One thing that was especially cute was New Year’s Eve: Lisa and Greta and their families came over for the afternoon. Carrie was thrilled to be running around and playing with all the other kids. At one point she asked to sit on the potty, and while I was sitting there with her she asked if we could go downstairs and watch “Sesee Street”. When I replied that she had already watched Sesame Street, and didn’t she want to go play with her friends instead, she said, “yes, watch Sesee Street with my peoples!”

And about that sitting on the potty thing… Carrie has intentionally pooped in the potty twice. I know most kids start out peeing in the potty, but apparently mine just has to do things in her own order. I’m actually not pushing this at all – she asked to sit on the potty both times, told us that she needed to go, and after a bit she went. Whether this turns into full-blown potty-training or not is entirely up to her at this point. She’s asked a few other times and not done anything, but usually it’s because one or another of her friends has just gone and peer pressure seems to work even at this young age.

I also have the weirdest kid ever. Today I convinced her to eat more macaroni and cheese with the promise of more frozen lima beans. I have no idea where her love of frozen lima beans came from, because I can’t stand them – frozen, cooked, or anywhere in between. The ironic thing is that it’s usually the other way around, with parents bribing their kids to eat more veggies by withholding yummy things like mac-o-cheese. (That’s her word for macaroni and cheese. “PBJs and jelly and bread” is how she describes peanut butter & jelly sandwiches.)