Warning: Pictures Ahead...

A fair few, to boot. So sit back with your favorite beverage in hand and allow me to take you on a leisurely stroll through this past weekend. And just a head's up: if you aren't into American history, scroll to the end of the post because there are indeed some fiber-y and FO-related pictures down there.

Ok...we begin our tour at Mount Vernon, home of George and Martha Washington (the US's first president and first lady, for those of you in other non-US locales), located on the lovely Potomac River just south of Washington, D.C. Kevin and I drove down Saturday morning, and we arrived around noon-ish. It wasn't the brightest of days, but the rain didn't start in full until after we were mostly done walking around, so I can't complain too much.

George and family were on hand to greet us when we arrived...


I assume these are meant to be life-sized statues. However, I'm 5' 4" and according to one guide, Martha was only 4' 11". She's bent over a bit in this statue and is still nearly as tall as me. I don't remember...maybe the statues were on some sort of plinth that added height. Anyway...

We watched the introductory video about Mount Vernon that was narrated by Alex Trebec, which I found an odd choice of Mount Vernon spokesperson, but whatever. From all of our Founding Fathers studies that we did last school year, I have to say that the video was really a very accurate account of many George Washington hightlights. Accuracy. I like that in a history-related experience, and it isn't always guranteed.

From there, we wandered about and I soon realized that Mount Vernon is lousy with sheep. There were sheep at every turn! How cool is that?

At one point, we actually stumbled upon this little guy...

...who had literally just been born moments before. (Not so clear in the picture, but the umbilical cord is still hanging out the back of Mom. LOL)

With so many sheep around, its no wonder they needed this...


...the spinning room! There was also a huge floor loom in this room, but I wasn't able to get a very good picture of it. Still...cool! :)

The line to wait to get in to tour the actual house was a bit lengthy, about a 45 minute wait in the drizzle, with me hiding my camera under my jacket to try and keep it dry. (It was at this point Kevin and I were most glad to have come without the kids, lest we be hearing, "I'm cold!" "How much longer?" "Are we almost done?" and other general whining.) Pictures were not allowed inside the house itself, so I snapped a few from the outside.

Here's the house from the end of the bowling green...

(I posed the question to my husband as to why it is known as a bowling green...he didn't know...I guessed it was because they would play lawn bowling there, and he rolled his eyes clearly indicating he thought I was silly. Well, according to Wikipedia, that is EXACTLY why it was named that! And what's more, before the lawn mower was invented, sheep used to be grazed on it in order to keep it closely trimmed. So there! I was right, AND sheep were involved!)

(Also...in case Cheryl is looking at this picture above and wondering, yes, I did Photoshop something out of it! LOL)

The house features a cupola...

...which I think is pretty neat. I could imagine looking up and seeing ol' George standing up there, looking out over the Potomac behind the house, or watching the sheep bowl on the front lawn...ahem...

The view from behind the house...spectacular!

I could so sit out on the back porch and sip my morning coffee whilst drinking in this vista, couldn't you? Apparently so could over 600 people in one year, which was how many guests the Washingtons are reported to have played host to at one point. No wonder they had their own private quarters!

We visited the museum last, after warming up and getting a bite of lunch in the food court. Standing around in the damp so much was wearing on us, so Kevin wasn't much in the mood for posing too animatedly with our original Commander-in-Chief, but he humored me nonetheless...

I told him I needed photographic evidence that he actually went on this trip with me. LOL

Those were Saturday's highlights. I'll spare you the gory details that were involved in both finding our Annapolis hotel that evening as welll as being assigned a room that a) did not have a family of ants in the bathroom and b) that did have a working heater. We did, however, score an excellent crab-oriented dinner at Mike's Crab House...totally hopping place. Gotta love fresh seafood.

Sunday dawned just as rainy as Saturday had been, but thankfully the Homespun Yarn Party was indoors. ;) It was also packed! We arrived right before noon, when it opened (and yes, I said "we," as Kevin was going to just walk through it with me as he had nothing else to do), and there was a line of close to 200 people serpentining around, waiting to get in. My dear husband's words? "You've GOT to be KIDDING!" Not that there was a line, per se, but that there was a line of this many people waiting to get into a yarn event. Poor guy just has no idea how many of us there are. LOL

At that point, he opted to take his chances in the rain and wander around outside while I enjoyed the yarn and braved the crowds. It was lovely. Lots of very nice stuff. I was only going to buy roving, but you know how that goes. Yarn at these things just reaches out and grabs you and won't let you leave without it.


The two on the left are Vesper sock yarns from Knitterly Things from right up here in Pittsburgh (the red, black and gray one being for socks for my son, as he loves those colors...the colorway? "Hell Fire." LOL). The pink and orange is Sock Hop sock yarn by Dancing Leaf Farm in Barnesville, MD. And the blue colorway (Poseiden's Revenge, I think?), is some cashmere and silk Gaia lace from Dragonfly Fibers, who shared a booth with The Sanguine Gryphon (who is just too cute!).

And of course...fiber...


The first is a Crash into Ewe roving, colorway Bed of Roses. It is a Merino/Targhee/and something else blend...I'll have to double check on that!

The middle one is unlabled so I have no idea what colorway it is, but it is from Three Irish Girls. I've often wished TIG sold roving, so it was awesome to find some at the show! I've bought from TIG online a couple of times, so it was nice to meet Sharon -- and absolute doll when it comes to customer service! -- in person! I meant to get back to her booth and pick up a skein of one of her new colorways she was sneak previewing there, but her booth was always very busy when I went by, so I never got to do so. Bummer. :( (I believe she is officially unveiling her spring line of new colors tomorrow, though, so check it out!)

The two on the right are from Serendipitous Ewe, Happenstance Roving, South African Wool, in the Tulip colorway. I saw some yarn there also in this colorway...very pretty! Nice springy colors. :)

I bought two other things at the show as well, but they are for a swap partner, so I can't show them to you here! But they're yummy! :)

Lastly, the fruits of my many hours of car and hotel knitting this weekend! First, a FINISHED Februarly Lady Sweater!


Yes! Look at those sleeves! Note the length! Yes! They are about the same exact freakin' length as shown on the pattern. The same length I've been fighting for over SIX MONTHS. And guess what? The length is perfect. I am stupid. But at least I have a finished sweater that fits wonderfully and is light enough that I can still get some wear out of this year. Wore it today, in fact. Perfect!

Lastly...


...my first finished Monkey sock. Looks lovely, no? Yep. Does it fit my foot? No. No it does not. It is exactly 3/4" too short. That is about how long one pattern repeat is. And I measured it and thought, "No, I can't do one more repeat or I'll need to do toe decreases within it and gawd I don't want to do THAT." Of course, this was me measuring the sock in the car on my lap, after I knit it in the car and in line waiting to get into the HYP and then in the car again. I should know better. Again...I am an idiot. My plan is to knit sock #2 then go back and rip the toe out of #1, do another repeat and redo the toe. Damn. :::sigh:::

I also made significant progress on my 2nd Blackberry Jam sock. No pictures of that. But all in all, a very good knitting weekend!

Wow...

...bad blogging week! Sorry 'bout that!

Happy to report that my restless funk from Sunday passed, for the most part. It's still been a weird week. But it's FRIDAY now, thank goodness, so I'm just chalking it up to full moon-induced hormone imbalances. LOL It's as good an excuse as anything else, right?

Ok, so, I feel like I probably took pictures of something blog-worthy this week, but I can't remember what and I haven't the gumption right this moment to check my camera, so this will be a picture-less post. How about I just tell you the noteworthy things I can think of? Ok? Ok!

Big news! I've picked my February Lady Sweater back up and am successfully knitting the second sleeve, which I previously started knitting inside out (twice), which caused the sweater to go into a six-month time out. I'd really like to wear this puppy before it gets too warm. The Elsbeth Lavold Silky Wool is light enough to make it a good spring sweater, even if the color (a rusty red) is much more amenable to fall. 

At any rate, I tried it on before starting the sleeve, just wanting to make sure it still fit ok, as 3/4 of my current wardrobe is in a pile to go to Goodwill at the moment because it's all too big. (Yeah. That's a mixed blessing. And the fact that my Lotus Blossom Tank that I knit last summer is among the woefully too-big? That's really painful. I can't bring myself to give that away just yet, even though it is beyond any hope of being able to be worn.) Thankfully, the FLS started out a little snug due to the the gauge difference of the Silky Wool and the yarn the pattern called for. I was good with that, though, as it is also fairly stretchy and I wanted it a little more fitted than baggy. But it fits like a dream now, which makes me even more anxious to get it done. 

I also decided, in trying it on, that I am only going to do short sleeves that will end just above the elbow. My one finished sleeve now ends just below the elbow and looks stupid, so I knew I needed to do something else with it, but rather than knit them long or even to the 3/4 length called for, I'm going to do short. Short just feels right.  

My other impetus for picking it back up this week is that I am going to the Homespun Yarn Party in Maryland this weekend, and I'd like to be able to wear it there. This is a total spur-of-the-moment road trip. Cosy will have a booth there, along with a bunch of other local, independent dyers/spinners, so there should be a huge amount of unique fiber-y goods to be had. It is a four-hour drive from here, and while I'm not against an eight-hour round trip to go to an event that lasts only five hours (I've done it before, I'm kinda crazy like that), I managed to bribe the husband with the promise of American history so that he'd a) go with me and b) drive, giving me 8+ hours of in-car knitting time. :) 

So we'll be going on Saturday to Mount Vernon (neither of us have been there before, and Cheryl has made it sound wonderfully interesting in her blog!), spend the night in Annapolis and then he'll drop me at the yarn event Sunday then we'll come home. It should be a nice little getaway for the two of us...we don't get to do that very often. Not sure how he'll spend his time while I'm at the yarn party...I doubt he'll go to it with me, though it would probably be to his benefit to do so as I'd be less likely to spend as much if he was there looking over my shoulder. LOL ;) 

Ok...so, that's all the news that is new here for the moment. Hopefully next week's blog posts will be more plentiful than this week's have been. I should have some nice pictures to share from our trip, too! Have a great weekend, everyone!

What's up?

That's the question I'm asking myself today. Maybe it has something to do with the time change. Maybe it's the almost full moon (not that I can see it tonight for all the rain clouds). Maybe it's just some cyclical thing. I don't know what it is. 

All I do know is that I'm restless. I can't focus. I can't knit more than a row at a time without putting it down for something else. 

I'm feeling uncharacteristically anxious, My mood is dark. I keep imagining various scenarios about things that have been on my mind, none particularly good, and it isn't helping. 

I keep listening to the same songs over and over, songs that match this unsettled mood...or are they feeding it? Hard to tell. 

I've had sudden, intense feelings of emptiness lately, almost a loneliness, a longing for things that are out of reach and outside of my control. The feelings come out of nowhere. They catch me short, and I have to consciously push them away. Perhaps today is an extension of this? A gray, rainy day with too little else of substance to keep my mind otherwise occupied?

I have days like this (maybe we all do?) -- acute, not chronic -- but I don't like them. 

Tomorrow is Monday. I can get back to routine. I can go to the gym and perhaps work out whatever it is that is wound up inside me. Hopefully tomorrow will be more settled.

Maybe...

First four chart repeats on the first Monkey sock. Pattern by Cookie A.; yarn by Rio de la Plata.

...I could just knit socks? I love to knit socks. Socks make me happy. I love sweaters and scarves and shawls, too, but they take so much longer for me to make than socks. (Well, ignore the fact I've still not finished my Soctoberfest socks, ok? Usually socks are quick for me!)

Just for the record, I am publicly stating that I fully intend to finish this pair of socks before the end of March (as it is a March KAL project), and I also fully intend to finish the second Soctoberfest sock as well as the second Blackberry Jam sock before Spring Fling in April. AND, I really, really, really want to finish my FLS by then too, so I can take it with me and wear it. It would be divine if I could also finish Cosima by then, but I have the feeling it will be too hot to wear that by then, but I really don't want to leave it languishing all summer, either. We'll see. :::sigh:::

These goals would go so much better if I could just resist casting on anything else! I did successfully manage to not cast on yet another scarf this past week. While I really wanted to do a fun pink-and-black/Good 'n Plenty-themed scarf (and I still do, frankly) (I have the feeling that bright pink is suddenly becoming my new teal...who'da thunk?), it is March, people, and I am thinking if I keep knitting wool things, Mother Nature might get the wrong idea that I'd like more snow. And I so don't.

On the needles, off the needles...

...there's been knitting happening here.

First, finished the back of my Cosima.


I forgot how much I hate having to do decreases within a lace pattern (as experienced first in my mom's Hey, Teach! last summer...gah!), and having to do so required me to tink back several times when I screwed up the chart after decreasing. But it turned out looking pretty nice. The extra six stitches I ended up with on the one shoulder? Yeah. I'm ignoring them and am choosing to be in a state of blissful denial that they will cause me problems later. Please do not try and tell me otherwise. Thanks.

I'd love to have this finished in time to take with me to St. Louis in April...but will it be too hot in St. Louis in April to wear wool? I have no idea.

I do have one front to Cosima started, but I've come down with a case of knitter's ADD, getting sidetracked by some other things. First, a baby gift for our neighbor's new baby...

Two pair of baby socks. The pair on the left will fit the child when he is maybe a year old? Heh. At least that's how big they look, despite the fact that I made them roughly to the dimensions of a supposed 3-month-old baby's foot. Thus, I made a second pair, casting on 28 stitches instead of 40. Not sure how well they'll fit either, but hey...it's the thought that counts, right? (And the Dropkick Murphys CD is apropos of nothing...not part of the gift...it was just sitting there, so I used it to help illustrate the sock sizes. And because I love the Dropkick Murphys.)

One thing about baby socks...they take, like, NO time and virtually NO yarn to make. Great for sock yarn leftovers (which didn't dawn on me until I made the first pair using a brand new skein of Harry Potter Opal, the Harry and Ron colorway. Duh. Still have plenty to make a full sized pair with it, though. :})

Finished another afghan swap square...


Can I tell you how big a fan I am becoming of the mitred square? They are so much fun to make, they go fairly quickly, and this one, in Noro Silk Garden, was amazingly fun to watch emerge in its various colors.

Lastly, another KAL with the Loopy Spring Fling group on Ravelry. This month the theme is doing a Cookie A. pattern. Almost all of her patterns are sock patterns, and seeing as I'm still working on my second blackberry jam sock, and I have yet to finish my second Socktoberfest sock, and I just did those baby socks, I didn't think I wanted to add more socks to my life just now, so I wasn't going to participate. But...


I've never made a pair of Cookie's Monkey socks, and I feel like I'm probably one of the only knitters in the world who hasn't (kind of like the EZ Baby Surprise Jacket, which I've also never done), and I've had this gorgeous hank of Rio de la Plata multi-colored yarn in my sock yarn stash for a while now and I've been dying to use it. Dude. Check out those colors! I'm only a few rows in on the twisted rib cuff, but...dude! The colors! They are awesome! The picture doesn't do them justice, really (not to mention the actual knitted bit is blurry...just look at the ball...bask in it's prettiness). I cannot wait to see how the sock looks once I get into the actual patterned part of it.

:::happy sigh:::

Project Spectrum

Project Spectrum 4 officially started today (well, yesterday, as it is now after midnight). I've never participated in PS before, but I'm looking forward to it. The theme for this incarnation of PS is Cardinal Directions. (You can read more about it on Lolly's blog.) The first direction is north, which is associated with the season of winter and the color green. Those things do not go together in my mind, so I'm using these elements to try and stretch my mind a bit.

The "rules" for PS are pretty loose...they're more guidelines than they are hard and fast rules. That was a little disconcerting to me at first, but now I'm starting to warm to it. I'm free to explore the themes however feels right to me. My goal is to try and do something related to the theme every day throughout PS, even if it is something small. For the first day, I decided to put together this "green" mosaic. The first 11 pictures are my own, while the last 5 are random ones I pulled from Flickr. I'll probably do several mosaics, just because I love the medium of photography. Future ones will probably be more deliberate than these random photos, but I figured using photos I already had on hand was a good place to start. So, we begin...north, green, winter...  

~~~~~~~~~

By the way, I'm happy to report that my cold from last week never got too far off the ground. That's the second germy bullet I've dodged this winter (knock on wood). I'm crediting my recent health binge (three months now of regular gym activity and eating healthier) and my quick intake of zinc and echinacea at the first sign of a cold for boosting my immune system. 

And speaking of my three months at the gym, this Tuesday will mark 14 weeks of kickboxing, martial arts and eating better, and my weight loss is now down to 25 pounds! I was quietly freaking for a bit because it seemed to have stopped, but it picked up again. I guess that's how it is going to be. If I can remember that, I'll be all right. What's very cool is that, while my clothes have been getting looser over the weeks, I finally got to a point last week where I could not wear my old jeans anymore. They were literally falling off me, and I was constantly hiking them up and looked like a dork. So I went shopping, and guess what? I'm now wearing jeans three sizes smaller than the ones I was wearing back in November when I first started this whole crazy kickboxing adventure! Dude! How cool is that? Color me happy! :) 

Sniffle, sneeze...

We interrupt the nothingness that has been happening here to assure you that we are still alive, however we are sneezing like crazy and sniffling and have watery eyes and kind of feel icky. We assume we have a cold, however we also went out last Saturday and spent a good many hours at a very smoky bar, which we haven't done in a long, long time, and we think that might have something to do with our current sinus issues. And we are not sure but somehow it seems this current head situation has impinged upon our ability to write about ourself in the singular. So. Hm. More later, when we can function without a box of tissues at our side.