- Signed, Sealed, Delivered -

Today so far is a Very Good Day.

I woke up and almost immediately my ears were filled with the sound of massive giggles coming from my son as he and Peggers tickled each other on the bed and were generally Quite Silly. That's a stunningly good thing to wake up to.

Then I had a slice of the farmhouse oatmeal bread that I made on Tuesday smothered in creamy peanut-butter and a mug of ginger-peach black tea with a splash of milk for breakfast while I read the ending of Greenwitch. It wasn't bad. Not as good as The Dark Is Rising, but still not bad. The series is shaping up to be a decent way to work your way down from the crushing disappointment after finishing HP#7, if I do say so myself......


Then I came into work and packed my Sockpalooza package:

She hates yellow, and I've been teasing her for ages now that I was knitting her a pair of Tweedy-Bird yellow socks, so I couldn't resist covering up everything with this yellow tissue paper...

Absolutely anything and everything looks better packed in a nice basket, don't you think?

We have starting at the top and going counter-clockwise: finished sockpal socks (!), Tarantulas Gummies, a mini skein of sockpal pink yarn for darns or whathaveyou, a lavender sachet, some Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, and a greeting card with a little note from me plus a printout of my blog page from the day I posted about signing up for Sockpalooza 4 in the first place. Dead center (hidden somewhat by the insanely-pink ribbon) is a lavender aromatherapy candle. Also scattered in the basket are some salt-water taffies from a local candy shop.

And last but not least, the all-important Care & Washing tag to let my Pal
know how to care for her pink lovelies.

Everything was carefully packaged up, sealed, addressed, and then stamped via Priority mail - and finally entrusted to Carl, my lovely local postmaster. As she's only over in PA I'm wondering how quickly this will in fact make it's way to her. I'd like to think Saturday, but I'm guessing in fact next Monday. Now all I can do is hope that the box doesn't get lost in transit and when the socks arrive and she pulls them out her face doesn't immediately fall with disappointment!!!!!

I showed the basket and contents to my two new co-workers and they both ooh'd and aah'd over the goodies and the socks - and the two of them were BOTH wearing pink shirts today - so there was no need to ask if they liked the colours! - so I took that as a good sign.

There is no new painting news to report, as I took a break this morning to not only eat breakfast but to also do the dishes and tidy up the house a bit - something that hasn't been done in nearly two weeks (the tidying, that is - dishes have been dutifully washed while painting was going on!) I also worked a bit more on my EZ Baby Surprise Jacket.

Pattern: BSJ from EZ's Opinionated Knitter
Yarn: Gedifra 'Dandy' in this insane yellow/green/purple colourway
Needles: Addi Naturas - size 7 - 4.5mm
Finished Size: 3Tish or thereabouts
Mods so Far: like many others, I've done a provisional cast-on so that I can add length to the sleeves as necessary once everything else is finished...

I started this Tuesday night and managed to get a good amount done yesterday evening while eating cheese fries out of a plastic baseball helmet, watching our local minor league baseball team play - and lose - over 7 innings. Good times. Tonight is the bi-monthly Boys Night In - where Peggers and his mates all congregate in our dining room until late in the evening - and while I shut the french doors between the dining room and living room and happily curl up on the couch and knit and watch DVDs or listen to books on CD. No idea what I'll be watching or listening to tonight, as we've no new Netflix DVDs to watch and I've seen all of the ones we already own, and I've listened and re-listened to every book on CD that we likewise own. Hmph. A visit to the public library might be necessary before I go home tonight. Oh shoot. They close at 5 PM tonight. Damn budgetary cutbacks! Looks like I'll be hitting the Redbox $1 DVD setup in the grocery store instead this time! (hmmmmmm........maybe I can get that monster bag of peanut M&M's that I've been craving ever since I read Franklin's comment about how peanut M&M's are his favorite movie food......)

Speaking of Franklin I was thrilled to see that there is a Dolores Devotees group in Ravelry - you can betcher' bottom skein that I ran right on over & joined that particular group as soon as I found out! Isn't the banner for it just fantastic???

.....and my day just keeps getting better & better! See what I found waiting this afternoon when I got back to my desk? It took the journals folks almost 10 weeks to have these sent off to the bindery, bound, and returned to me - but for less than $20 I now have four full years of Interweave Knits in sturdy, bound form safely at the ready for my reaching hand whenever I need them. Hooray to no longer hunting down that one last elusive issue, or finding that an issue was wrinkled and squashed underneath a pile of comic books, a pile of cooking magazines, or a large Tonka dumptruck!

Happy Weekend everyone - I'm home with the Munchkin starting tomorrow until Friday the 10th, so don't expect more than one post from me - if any - in that interim time. I'll be too busy painting the house, taking the little guy to the beach, and hitting the zoo to once again check out the Stinky Buffaloes!

All good things must come to an end...

...and others must begin.


Work continues on the painting front. Many thanks for your kind words - both as to our efforts so far and as to our colour choices. Green is apparently not a traditional or popular house painting shade - and we've gotten many a raised-eyebrow because of it. We, however, like it very very much.

Tomorrow is August 1st. Tomorrow is also for a group of some knitters Get Your Sockpalooza Pal Package Prepped & Ready To Go Day, as the official send-out day is August 2nd.

I have ready to go in my package:

• One finished pair of bright pink knee-high sockpal socks. (check!)
• One mini skein of bright pink sock pal pink sock yarn for darns (check!)
• One package of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans (check!)
• One lavender-scented candle (check!)
• One package tarantula gummy candy (check!)
• A large handful of locally-made saltwater taffy (check!)
• One tongue-in-cheek greeting card (check!)

Hopefully the gummy candies and candle will suitably distract her in case the socks don't fit or are too short or too slouchy or just..................not to her Sockpal taste. So that package will get prettily wrapped up and packaged up tomorrow and then first thing on Thursday I'll walk it to the post office and send it off 2-day priority mail. As the package only has to go about 2 states over I'm guessing she'll get it by Saturday. I should say, I'm hoping she'll get it by Saturday.

So that is ending. But what fun it's been!

And tomorrow (yes tomorrow!) the official Dish Rag Tag begins! I'm one of the 200 or so folks that joined up to play in Emily's fun race - and I'm on the Cotton Commandos Team. We've been discussing and plotting and chatting for the past several weeks, and we've got a loose strategy in place and know where we're mailing things and how - so all I now get to do is keep one eye on the team's forum page and keep the other on my mailbox!

Also today at work I got a lovely message in my inbox:

Dear Susan ______

A loan that you had requested:
Loan Title: The opinionated knitter : Elizabeth Zimmermann newsletters 1958-1968 /
is now available for checkout.

So what fun, too! That means that a BSJ is soon to be working it's way on my needles. The first of (probably) many. This particular BSJ will be worked up in an eye-blazing yellow/orange/green/purple yarn that I have absolutely tons of - and the jacket will be (of course) for The Munchkin.

I can hardly wait - even though the first few lines of the pattern look like gibberish at the moment. However I've always found that with the yarn and needles in hand most patterns tend to make sense after a bit of head-scratching and squinting.

Progress on all fronts will certainly show up here - including the Belle Shrug! I picked a cuff pattern and cast on yesterday and am up to the crook of my elbow as of this afternoon.......

End of the Week Update

Exciting news! Lots of exciting news!

Icarus: I am half a row away from finishing Chart #3 on Icarus - and baby, I'm roaring towards Chart #4! Unfortunately said chart is a whopping 25 rows (doesn't sound like much, I know, but I'm somewhere around 450 or 500 stitches at this point, I think, so it's actually a LOOONNNNG row every row, every time!) Still - I'm getting closer! My deadline is Memorial Day Weekend, and I'm having serious doubts that I'll make it, but still - I'll see my dearest Grams that weekend regardless and will certainly bring my knitting with me, so at least she'll see what will be coming to her sometime in the month of June......... My friend Sandy is also knitting Icarus, and is a chart or so behind me with a similar deadline. I feel like dropping her a virtual challenge to RACE! and see who can get done first. What do you think, Sandy, are you up for a little friendly competition among knitting librarians???? ;)

Sockpalooza socks: after several lovely e-mail discussions with Jessie she and I settled on a set of colours for my sockpal socks, and today I got the glorious news that the yarn was dyed and dried and ready to be shipped out. Here it is in all it's pink glory:

It's PINK, isn't it? It's beautiful - reminds me of the shades that a really lovely peony flower petal go through on their way from tip to center....................and as peonies are my Absolute Favorite Flower I think that's a very very cool thing indeed. I love how there are little tiny subtle bits of the lighter pink that show through every here and there - I think it's going to give the socks that lovely little edge that they'll need to go from being Nice Socks to Super Special Socks.



You can bet that as soon as I got her message in my inbox I ran RIGHT out and wrote/mailed the check to her ASAP!!!!!

Also in related Sockpal news, I'm a fairly regular reader of Wendy's blog - she is Queen of the Socks, let me tell you! - and was really interested when I saw her post the other day about toe-up socks done with a gusset and heel flap. Cuz you know that I want these Sockpalooza socks to be HIGH socks - and what better way than to do that toe-up? Plus that totally eliminates all the worries of staring the socks 1/3 of the way into the pattern and then adjusting for the heel accordingly - - and gives me a good sense of how much to increase the socks to make sure that they fit my SockPal's legs by the time they reach their final tip-top measurement! Jessie did the above skein in a full 7 ounces of fiber - which comes out to a staggering 760 yards (bargain-conscious folks take note of this : a veritable TON of custom-dyed merino/bamboo/tencel sockyarn and all for just $30 including extra-speedy shipping!!!!!!) - so I should have plenty to make the socks nice & long - but doing toe-up just seems to make sense, you know?

But how exactly do you DO that - translate a cuff-down into a toe-up? I'd wondered about it before, but never had the courage to try it - so when today I read Wendy's latest post about doing just that - a cuff-down pattern knit toe-up I screwed up all my lurker courage and actually posted that question to her on her blog. And do you know a mere hour or so later I had a message in my inbox from Wendy herself giving me the basic specs and advice on how to do it?????

WOW!

So between her two original toe-up gusset sock patterns (for both fingeringweight & sportweight yarns - is she good or WHAT?) and her personal advice to me I'm totally committed to giving this a try. I'll probably sneak the yarn into work and use a Very Accurate scale in the biology department to make sure that I divide the 7 oz. into two even balls, but in the future for this exact sort of thing I might see about getting my own scale a-la Grumperina.................

To round out this post I take great pride in showing how last weekend went - not only did I get my Panera breakfast fix twice in one weekend (ahhhh....I splurged and had a chocolate croissant Sunday for breakfast!) but I was also gifted with THE most adorable pair of pj's ever. Peggers chose as my Mama's Day gift not only a pair of pj's for me (via a setup called 'pajama-gram') but also went whole-hog and ordered a matching set for Munchkin. Here we are looking like total dorks, posing as Peggers told us to:

I always always always forget to even explain or address this, but in case anyone caught sight of this pic & was wondered - my BRIGHT RED right arm is due to a stunningly large birthmark - specifically a port wine stain that made my life a living HELL in the elementary school years but around high school turned into a Very Cool sort of thing to have and in college became a total non-issue........ I actually remember a few years ago reading out loud one of those absurd Cosmo or other girlie magazine quizzes to Peggers about compatibility or something - and the quiz asked "if you were to put just your right hand out with a hundred other peoples right hand, could your husband/boyfriend figure out which one was yours and why?" and just SNORTED in response. ;)

....and here is a lovely little picture of the Munchkin and I snuggling in our matching pj's on his Big Boy Bed, which currently is made up with some very sporting monkey sheets.........




Happy belated Mama's Day, and Happy Weekend to Everyone as well! Here's to springtime knitting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Running Around

Today is a Running Around kind of day. This morning after dropping off my son at daycare I picked up our cleaning woman & we went back home to clean the house for an hour & a half. Sounds very la-di-da, doesn't it? What if I tell you that our official Cleaning Woman is 15 years old, the oldest daughter of our home-daycare provider & that she did the vaccuuming and dusting while I did the bathroom cleaning, the floor washing, the sweeping & the taking-out-the-garbage -ing?

Yeah, not so glamorous. But damn, my ducks, if my house isn't CLEAN - and as we've arranged to try this out every Friday for a month or two it's going to stay that way for at least a little bit. What a lovely thing to wake up to on a Saturday morning after a hard week's work!

Once at work I worked for 2 hours on the desk, then went for a 45 minute walk in 81 degree heat (ah, thank you back-up deodorant stashed in my desk!) , then drove home to get the dog, then to the vet's, then back home to drop off the dog, then back to work. (It takes 1 hour do do this, unfortunately.) And now I'm here at work for all of 45 minutes before I go to meet Kim for our twice-weekly knitting meeting.

Yes, indeed, you all SHOULD feel sorry for me! LOL.

Happily my weekend will be much calmer - tomorrow AM I'm springing for breakfast at our favorite place - Panera Bread Company - after which we are going to load up our trailer with two loads of compost (one for friends who are trailer-less and one for me) and then I head off to work (ahem, to KNIT) for 4 hours in a peaceful, air-conditioned library. After that, who knows? Fun and revelry with The Munchkin and Peggers. Sunday - on Momma's Day - I'm going to ask for yet another Panera breakfast (hey, a girl has her preferences!) and then we spread out the compost on the garden & cut some oak plywood for the built-in bookshelves we're going to install the weekend after next. All Glamor All The Time - that's the motto here at Chez Pointy Sticks!!!

I have been having some absolutely FANTASTIC e-mail exchanges lately that I just have to clue you in on. First, from my To:Sockpal (i.e. the one that I am mailing socks TO) - she is a sassy & hysterical thing, and I adore reading her blog and we've had these e-mails exchanges that just crack me up. I can't say too much about her for fear that I'll totally give it away, but she's also in the field of education which is fun, and has the mouth of a sailor, which I totally adore as well. She loves the colour pink and does NOT like any shades of yellow, which totally threw me for a bit, as I'm definitely NOT a pink sort of girl, but I did some scouting and looking and have come up with some majorly beautiful options for her socks (and again, I'm knitting these in a slightly shorter version, in case you don't remember...).....................which leads me to my second set of e-mails that I've been loving lately.

Jessie (as in Jessie from 'What Housework?') was a top choice of mine all along to do the hand-dying for this yarn, as I've already scored - what - about 5 or 6 skeins of Gryphon's sockyarn and while I just LOVE it I figured I really should branch out & not be a greedy pig and take all of her stash. (Altho' reading her most recent post it appears that as she has a whopping 25 pounds of un-dyed sock yarn there might actually be more than enough for everyone to get some at the moment!) So I shot Jessie a heads-up e-mail some time back to see if this prospect would be okay with her, and sure enough - she was up for the challenge. Of course, with such an amazingly beautiful yarn studio just opening up for her to work in, I don't blame her at being interested in an excuse to play around in there!!!! So yesterday Jessie and I had this huge e-mail exchange about colour and fiber and suchlike - and the upshot of it was that I finally settled on this luxurious sounding merino/bamboo/nylon blend that she just got in (sooo soft and perfect for spoiling my sock pal!) in a host of subtle pinks. These are the pictures that I e-mailed Jessie to give her the gist of what I was talking about/thinking of:

(The beaded Tilli Thomas skein is probably my favorite, but the coiled Pink Posies is also lovely, and the Handmaiden Rose is beautiful too, and I also love the shocking silkiness of the hot pink T. Thomas as well.....all beautiful shades!)

Despite the fact that I'm not a pink girl I'm seriously getting wired-ly excited about these. There's something about the ultra-feminine shades that I think we're going to end up with here, with just that tiny wee bit of sassy sexiness mixed in (not to mention the fishnet-stocking-seam invoking lace windows that go right up the back of the leg!) plus the soft and silky yarn that is - hopefully - going to make these socks true winners. I figure heck, anyone who works in the educational field (and people, let me tell you without going into surprise-revealing-detail that this woman isn't just an educator, she's an Educator!) needs some pure luxury every now and then......

Even better is the fact that I've started Chart #2 on my Icarus, which means that the end is officially Within Sight, so despite the fact that the rows just keep getting looooonger and loooonger every time, I'm excited and having a lot of fun with that particular knit. Plus knowing that some huge bundles (I asked Jessie to make about 700 yards of this for me, as my Pal has muscular calves & I'm making these almost-knee high & lord knows I don't want to run out!!!) of pink and silky goodness are making their way towards me in the next few weeks gives me extra incentive to finish the shawl ASAP!

And now - finally - my final e-mail happiness lately. Have you seen in the comments section the messages from my From:Sockpal? (I.e. the one who is making me [!!!] a pair of socks?) I had guessed this at an earlier comment of hers, but with her last post she cinched it - she's Foreign!

Do you guys know how much I **adore** foreign??? I have briefly lived in New Zealand, and I lived for a longer time in Botswana, Africa, and I used to live very close to the US/Canadian border and as such have a total love of All Things Canadian - so my suspicion that my From:Sockpal is from Canada (she mentions crossing the border with studied casualness - ooh! aahhh!!!) is just absolutely making my day. Nay - making my week! Not only is she foreign (ah - another person who sticks a "U" in the word 'colour'!) but she's also working really hard to produce a pair of sock that I'll like - how could she not be my new Bestest Pal as a result? Plus she's also in the educational field - what are the odds that both of my pals and myself all do the same thing, huh??????

That's it for me for now - off to meet with Kim to knit Icarus myself and to peek at her Gryphon Traveler sock (it's a thing of beauty!!!) and drink coffee. I will leave you with one last picture - I'm not nearly good enough to do an Eye Candy Friday every week, but this picture was taken 2 weeks ago with that end in mind, so here it finally is - a tree peony blossom from my back yard. Tree peonies typically take 5 years to bloom once they're planted, and the blooms are very ephemeral, but oh! Aren't they worth the wait and their limited delight??????

What's an annoyed (knit)blogger to do?

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.........................



I've knit two Shetland Triangles from Interweave's Scarf Style. I'm 3 pattern repeats into the second half of my Backyard Leaves Scarf from the same book.

(Left: Shetland knit out of stash yarn for my grandmother's 90th birthday. Right: Shetland knit out of Artyarns Royal Silk as a birthday gift for the friend of a friend. Center: Backyard leaves photographed Easter weekend in - where else? - my in-law's backyard...)

....and I'm also 2 e-mail requests in to join the Scarf Style KAL blog and have yet to be answered.


Likewise I've sent two e-mail requests to join the Icarus KAL blog and haven't gotten a reply back there, either! It's been maybe - oh - two weeks for both, and while I went to both of the blog owner's individual pages and saw that yes indeed - one chica has been very busy with thesis and conference and suchlike, I had imagined that she'd have been able to at least reply with a "I'm busy, but I'll get to you eventually" message. The other chica doesn't seem to be busy - 20+ weeks pregnant as all get-out - but not frantically busy like the first.

(Icarus, photographed in the middle of typing this post - somewhere around the 4th or 5th repeat of Chart #1. Doesn't matter, really, as I'll probably do at least 2 more repeats before moving to Chart #2 just for good measure...)

What's the etiquette on this one? Post a comment on the main KAL blog(s) somewhere asking to be added, explaining that the individual e-mail request didn't work? Post a comment on the owner's individual blog asking to be added? Just wait and sit on my hands? Drop it and just knit the damn scarf and shawl and be done with it????


On better news, I am as psyched as all get-out about Sockpalooza 4. I already know what socks I want to knit for my Pal - the ones from Handknit Holidays - but in normal calf length instead of the over-the-knee extravaganza that the original 'recipe' calls for.....

(ohhhhhhhhhhhhh............aren't they BEAUTIFUL????)

I really, really hope when I get my Pal's info that I find out that these sort of socks would be acceptable! My heart isn't **totally** set on knitting them for my Pal (if Pal says no, then I'll knit them for another friend of mine!) but I'm totally drooling over this particular part of the sock and I've just GOT to knit it.........





Tell me that isn't one of THE coolest heelflaps that you've ever seen!?!?!?!?!?!?!



p.s. did I mention that I get to go to Sheep & Wool this year? It's only about 2 hours away - so it's a cakewalk in terms of travel. I'm truly truly excited about it, even if it does currently seem an eternity away at this very second....

p.s. OMG it's here! It's time!!!

Oh! oh! oh! look at what I just signed up to do!!!!!!!

(along with - as of 9 AM today - a whopping 725 other insane sock knitters!)



Oh yeah, baby, I've been waiting a very long time to do this!