This Week

This past week was our first week of "summer break"- the kind where I'm not working at all and we're figuring out a different groove for the summer months. We get about a month to get used to the schedule before I start teaching the summer session (which is tremendously lighter than the school year) and by then we usually know what's going on. This week we worked on catching up the house and laundry so that we can get along with the business of summer.

On the Needles...

Finishing the purple socks, and swatching for a few things to decide what to take for travel knitting. 

I read...

I've been working on our next set of school plans for the last few weeks so I've mostly been immersed in The Well Trained Mind. I started Son by Lois Lowry last night.

Learning all the time…

We're in "grid mode" for school right now along with keeping up on reading and math for the summer months. The grid is 5x5, and in each box is an activity based around a schooly area- reading, geography, science, etc.

Watching (Spoiler Free, of course...)

I finished the last 2 episodes of this season's Doctor Who, and !!!!!! I saved this whole season on the DVR and plan to re-watch over the summer, and probably again just before the next episodes come out. I keep trying to talk Brian into watching Doctor Who with me and he made it up to the second episode of David Tennant before stalling out. I really need someone to discuss episodes with!

Listening...

As always, I listened to the most recent episode for the lovely Knitmoregirls, and I also caught up on the last several episodes of cogKNITive. I took my first listens of the SpinDoctor podcast and really enjoyed it

Garden...

I've planted a LOT of flowers and pulled out a LOT of dead things. The space is tilled for the vegetable garden, but I haven't had the chance to plant out there yet. I will get going on that shortly.

In Stitches...

A funny thing happened last week. My mom quilts professionally and got swamped with so much long-arm work that she passed on a project to me to finish! She had been making pajamas for my kids and got all the way to the hemming before deciding she'd have to put them away for the time being so that she could get her paid work completed. I guess my boys asked so frequently about when they would be finished that she gave them to me to take care of since she can't get to them probably until August. And by then my boys will have asked her a MILLION times if they were done yet.

This is why I rarely tell them before I make something for them- they will harass you for ages to finish. They want their handmades and they want them now!



I didn't get to...

I think I can say that I got all the necessities crossed off my list for this week. YAY! That so rarely happens, but now we are ready to get properly started on summer.

This weekend...

I'm afraid my brain is stuck on sun and sand. :)

Yarn Along

{Yarning Along with Ginny this week...}

More sock progress in the last few days. I turned the heel on sock #2 Monday night and got a bit of time with the foot last night after the kids got to bed. A few more inches of stockinette before I'm all the way to the toe and can finish this pair. Maybe by next week? We'll see what kind of time I can find around the children.

I'm still deciding on yarn to take on our little trip. I think I'm a little nervous about taking lace in the car for that long without a back up project since lace can be mentally complex and I'm not sure I'm really up for mentally complex while on vacation. Maybe it's the socks and the mitts for me. 

Do you see why this decision feels agonizing? I obviously can't haul a sweater's worth of yarn with me (husband might lose it on that one) but 2-3 skeins for socks or mitts or lace might be okay... But it also has to be the right project so I don't feel stuck knitting it- or else I know exactly what will happen. I will end up not knitting at all because I would rather not knit than to knit something that is annoying me.

If you were heading out for a week or two, what kind of project(s) would you take along?

I'm not reading anything exciting right now- I'm taking another pass through The Well-Trained Mind as I start prepping for next school year with the kids. I do have Son by Lois Lowry on my nightstand though, waiting to go next. I'm excited to finally have some closure on the series.

Yarn Interviews, Part 2

More yarn to share today, along with potential projects.

This is a red lace weight, though it's actually a much richer wine colored red than shows up here. I had the hardest time photographing this color accurately, and this was as close as I could get to the true color. I have about 1300 yards of this red, and I bought with the intention of it becoming a shawl someday. I'm open to suggestions for it though, if you have any to offer.

This is a Claudia Handpaint that I bought with the intention of fingerless mitts to wear in the studio in the winter. I really love the colorway, but the pattern will be key to making the yarn work well.  Pooling in general bothers me, so I haven't been quick to cast on- I want to find just the right thing, but haven't found anything yet. Unless something amazing pops up in my search today, I doubt this yarn will be going with me, even though I love the colorway so much.


At this point I'm leaning toward taking the Regia for socks as a back up plan in case project A doesn't go as desired. But, what is Project A going to be?

Still no idea...

Thoughts for either of the lace weights:

Laminaria

Aeolian Shawl

Featherweight Cardigan

Yarn Interviews

A round of storms did us in over the weekend. Nothing like a message cancelling baseball due to "threat of tornadoes and severe storms."

So I made some progress on my yearly socks instead of spending the whole afternoon at baseball games. I finished the first sock a long while back and in my mind the second sock was somewhere around the start of the heel flap and I had convinced myself it would take a half hour or so to "find my place" when I opened the project bag. Sometimes I want to just get to the knitting, and having to think before getting started seems like too much.


I finally opened it up this weekend to find that I had actually only gotten through the 2x2 cuff and was ready to go on to the simple stockinette leg. Right to the knitting- love that. After spending Ellie's afternoon nap with the leg yesterday I'm ready for the heel flap if I get a moment today. I think our hopes of a little run-away trip are coming to fruition, so I'm spending today and tomorrow doing the things it will take to get us there.Terrible for the knitting time for a day or two, but ultimately a LOT more knitting time while we are gone.

I'm currently interviewing yarn for the trip:

Some pretty grey Regia with just a bit of coral for color in there. I hate to admit this, but I've actually never knit with this particular yarn before. I'm only a serious sock knitter in my dreams, so I guess it's not terribly shocking that I'm just now getting to Regia, but there is is- my first Regia. I'm thinking that socks are very portable, I have my sock pattern memorized and therefore don't have to take (and potentially lose) a pattern. If this is the only knitting I take for a week of vacation time I'm pretty much guaranteed a completed pair of socks when I get home (or pretty close to it).

Some gray heathered lace weight. I have a touch over 1300 yards here. Lace goes a long way for knitting. I probably wouldn't finish a project in a week of lace, but it would go a long way in getting me started on a pretty shawl.


There are other yarn options too, but today these are the two serious contenders.


I was also briefly tempted to bring 3 or 4 smaller things to finish out of my basket,, but I'm pretty sure vacation knitting time isn't really meant for seaming and binding off. I'm pretty sure knitting rules state that you have to start a new project on a trip and designate that one project to the entirety of the trip. The only scary part of it is if I find myself really wishing I was knitting something else-- and then I'm stuck with just the yarn I brought.


Hence the yarn interviews. It's important to have just the right fit so that the project will not go south and I shall not find myself wanting for different yarn. (Or maybe I'll bring the sock yarn as back up...)