Sunday, July 29, 2012

Don't You Just Love It?


Ta da!  The yarn for my Classic Cardigan and don't you just love the heathered amethyst colorway.  This is KnitPicks' organic cotton, the same yarn I used for the Lace-Edged Cardi.  I love knitting with this yarn because it is soft, has good stitch definition and is sport weight.  I prefer knitting with sport and DK weight yarns.  I have hardly used a worsted weight yarn in the last year.
Also on the needles--seed stitch scarf-that-would-be-cowl in white merino and Kid Silk Haze AND Pixie Sticks Scarf in light and dark pink instead of pink and white.  I love the pink and pink peppermint sticks I buy at Christmas time so this scarf looks good enough to eat!  This will be a Christmas gift.  The scarf is angled and has a ruffle on the edges, the reason for the provisional cast on.
Weight Watchers is slow and at times grueling.  I have, however, lost 14 pounds and am thankful beyond belief for that much!!  I am losing at approximately .6 pounds a week due partly to my age I'm sure, and to the sedentary lifestyle that accounting forces on one.  I have started taking a mile walk during the middle of the day and have ramped up my evening gardening duties to weed pulling and edging around the raised beds.  Still--SLOW!!  At least the scale is going in the right direction!

After a week of the weeding I am putting a sign I found on Pinterest on my door.  It says, "Ring bell.  If no answer, pull weeds!"

Life is good.





Monday, July 23, 2012

Working, Working....

I did a lot this weekend--a lot of sitting and knitting!  The Two Kaths Hat is finished and the seed stitch scarf that would be a cowl is almost finished.  It started out as a scarf but decided to be a cowl partly due to the tactile joy the seed stitch brings, and partly due to the quickly decreasing amount of the kid silk yarn I have added to the white merino wool.  I thought I had another skein of it but nooooooo.
While I knit DH watched weekend golf and I listened to an audio book--The Third Gate by Lincoln Child.  This is not a book I would want to listen to in the dark as I do sometimes when I can't sleep.   Just a little weird and scary in a Stephen King sort of way!  That was a good thing on Saturday and Sunday because as the plot became more tense I knitted faster and faster!

The weekend also brought a revelation which is, I cannot Not have a sweater on the needles!!  The result of this discovery is that I ordered more organic cotton:
for the Superior Classic Cardigan.  Click on the link and see my next project.  I can't wait for the yarn to arrive.

Life is good!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Among Other Things

I've been reading about people who collect china.  For years  I bought sets of pretty dishes and never used them.  My cabinets were filled to overflowing and I had to do something so I gave the china to family, sold it on ebay, sent some to Salvation Army and kept only my Mother's beautiful Haviland and my own Christmas Spode.

I'm afraid to use the Florentine Haviland, not because it can't be replaced, but because the replacements are not my Mom's.  The replacement dishes are not the ones she used everyday--not like the plate she smashed over the edge of a counter when she found out that I went to a concert with a boy but told her I was at a girlfriend's house.  Not the same at all!!  I sometimes have a cup of tea in one of her cups and I can feel her hand on my shoulder.  I think she is telling me to "Wash that cup and saucer by hand and put them away carefully!"  Due to the visionary talk I don't use her crystal either.
 
That leaves the Christmas Spode.  Yup, that's what we eat on every day.  Every day is Christmas around our house.  Our sweet son-in-law says he hadn't lived until he ate pizza served on Christmas Spode in August.  He says it's nice, in a "My mother-in-law is wacky" kind of way.  I get that a lot when I pull out the Spode!

Then there are our wine glasses--no stems!  They are little round tubby balls of crystal that friends roll their eyes over when I serve wine.  I will not go into the wine glasses right now except to say that the people who think stemless wine glasses are a new thing should think again, because I brought these babies from Germany with me 35 years ago.

I have to admit that I love seeing my friends' and family's china--what they buy, what they use, what sits in their cabinets and is never used.  I believe that nothing is more telling about personality than china, crystal and silver choices.  I hope you will share yours with me and tell me how you came to purchase/inherit them. 
    
Speaking of silver, our was a wedding gift.  I hate polishing it so it sits in the silver chest and is never used.  It doesn't go with the Christmas Spode anyway.

Knitting is coming along:




Lace Edged Sweater finished














 
2 Kaths Hat through Fair Isle and headed toward long back and tassel