The Minnesota State Fair.

We went.

We ate.

We conquered.

...until today. uuuuhhhhhhnnnggghhhh. I'm not feeling so well. And to overwhelm myself with my stupidity, I ate a pound of fried green tomatoes and washed them down with a Diet Cherry Coke. I feel so yucky.


++++++++


Finished SocksStats:
Needles: US 3
Yarn: All Things Heather Handpainted Superwash Merino, colorway "Bucky"
Pattern: plain old socks - no pattern

Also, I finally finished this sweater by hiring someone to sew the zipper into it. It looks fantastic - fits perfectly and is my absolutely favorite thing I've knit so far.

Stats:
"Vidiot Sweater"
Pattern: Supersize Me by The Yarn Girls
Yarn: Berroco Peruvia, colorway "Sea Turtle - 7125"
Needles: US 7


PS. Come and join us for March Sweater Madness in Autumn. It will begin on September 15 and end on October 15. It's a great excuse to get your sweater knitting mojo into gear for this autumn.

J'aime tricoter!

My GOD! I'm like a junkie. I AM a junkie. I stayed up until 2 am on a weeknight finishing this yarn. I spun some creamy alpaca . . . (really chunky and irregular) then took the colored stuff and spun that up (thanks to Kathleen for all of her amazing help. Truly. The advice, the links, the inspiration! Thanks to everyone one of you who encouraged me!!!)


Then I took both yarns and spun them up into this glob. I know - it's a ball of yarn that only it's mother could love, but I am in love. It's amazing. I've only got about 24 yards but if I knit on some big-ass needles, I think I can stretch a hat out of it. I may blend it with my yummy chocolate alpaca I got from my best friend . . . who, by the way, has moved away from me all the way to Texas. (hello Skype)

And I ordered some roving with money I. DO. NOT. HAVE!!!!! (don't worry, DyeabolicalYarns the check won't bounce.) It's diabolically green and I'm loving every inch of it!And about that best friend who moved away - we're planning a rendezvous in France for our 40th birthdays. (She says Italy, but she also says Tomahto and Pohtahtoe). So I'm off to learn French while I knit.

Au revoir!

Keep on a-spinnin'.....

Hey there.

I'm back from a great little vacation with the family. I made a trek down to St. Louis, MO for a my sister's wedding reception (another one). There was quite a fuss - it was a 'big fat Italian wedding' reception with kids, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, uncles and food and wine. A lot of food. I ate so much that I was feeling rather large and lethargic for the majority of the weekend.I brought my knitting and knit furiously through Iowa - cruisin' on my sleeves until I came to the increases and realized I had left my pattern back home. Hmph. It was a little like torture to look at that knitting bag and know that I had nothing to knit. To make it worse . . . I was about 2 miles from The Loopy Ewe and never made my way over there! I didn't have my own car and the family was too busy preparing and entertaining. Bringing myself to ask someone to drive me to a yarn shop (which was probably closed anyway) was out of the question. AND we stopped in Hannibal (the boyhood town of Mark Twain) briefly and as we were about 15 miles out of town I read in a brochure that they have a knitting shop with hand-painted yarn. OH, the misery.

While up in Ely, I did the rest of my spinning. It was about 3-4 oz. of creamy soft alpaca roving. My results were . . . well take a look.
It's a spindle full of strange, fat and skinny, soft alpaca yarn. Now what? I have no idea what to do next? And how do I know how much yarn I have? I suppose I can wrap it around something and measure it. As frustrating as it is to spin, I think I have found another passion. It's really fun. I have a wad of colored stuff here:...but I'm not sure how to separate it and proceed. I'm going into my LYS (local yarn shop) for a lesson this fall. My family was watching me with my awkward drop spindle and said, "Why don't you get a spinning wheel instead?"

A spinning wheel is $600. A drop spindle is $10. That's why. For those of you who don't know what a drop spindle is - it looks like a top with a long handle. You hang some fiber from it and spin the top while letting it hang in the air. That's it. Sounds easy, right? Yeah. Right.

Just keep spinning, just keep spinning . . .

Hey folks! I'm writing to you from downtown Ely, Mn. That was our sunset last night. Yup - loons and all. Very picturesque.

This post will be full of myself because. . . well. . . I am full of myself - and why, you ask? Well take a little looksey at this!



That's right! Blue ribbons, baby! YEAH! don't know what that pink ribbon is for. It might mean I'm sort of second place blue ribbon. And, well, I think my socks were the only socks entered, so I was kind of a shoe-in. I think I actually competed with this little ditty. It was in the same lot as my socks. Hmmmm.That's right. Now you, too, can enter the county fair competition even if you can't knit. However, you will need a huge box of Legos.

And look at the cake winners. WOW! That is really impressive.

This was my favorite. Achem. I'm sorry to say it did not win a ribbon, which I thought it should have because of the very creative positioning of the pandas.

Panda Free Love!! Whoo hooo!

I'm back . . . again.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings. And I apologize for my very sporadic and lame attempts at posting lately. I've been so busy (lazy).
My BF bought me this scrumptious suri-alpaca yarn from Livingston, MT. It feels like down and the color is a rich dark chocolate. Problem: there are 50 yards so I'm not sure what to make with it. So, after "conversing" with Kathleen, I bought myself a little gift. Here, let me show you. We can open it together.


Yup. It's a drop spindle and some alpaca roving from Silver Sun Alpaca. Since I've fallen in love with alpaca and it's a bit too spendy to become a habit, I figured I should start spinning it myself. That's what it took . . . suri alpaca. I stayed up last night until about midnight spinning terrible, clunky, uneven, bulky yarn. About two yards of it!

I also watched several Youtube videos and I think I'm ready to start actually dropping my spindle (instead of parking an drafting . . . SEE!?!? I KNOW THE LINGO!) Wish me luck. Kathleen reassured me that actually dropping the spindle to the floor would be normal for the first few days.
That there is my lovely Central Park Hoodie. Knitting with wool this summer hasn't been the curse I thought it would be. Minnesota has had an unusually cold summer with almost NO humidity and temps below 80. Lovely and fall-like, but weird and foreign - and my tomatoes are STILL GREEN. Many believe Minnesota to be cool all year, but our summers are usually steamy and hot. I met a gentleman once on an airplane flying home to Minnesota. He was from Georgia and when we landed, he grabbed a WINTER coat out of the overhead bin. It was August!

"You're not going to need that," I told him.

Wild Tomato, I am still planning the ultimate furmiliation for my new cat, but she still has not forgiven the world for her transplantation. She hates us. She only comes out to play around 11:30 pm and then only with me.
Beware, Lydia, beware . . . mwooo hoo ha ha haaaaaaaaa...... to be cont.

As some of you know, I have an aversion to spiders. This is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill discomfort - chills, etc. This is a fear that will sometimes leave me outside in my driveway trying to not hyperventilate and too terrified to go back inside.

I have made some progress. My technique has been the kind of therapy that exposes myself to monstrous spiders so that the little ones won't bother me so much anymore. In fact, the climax of this therapy was a few weeks ago when I took a short stroll to our outhouse (cabin thing) and on the door was an enormous fishing spider. You can google that if you'd like. I'd rather not see it. Anyhow, Mr. Darling heard my cries for help and came running and bravely swished the spider off the door into the woods. And the thing actually thudded when it hit the forest floor. Like an apple falling off a tree. Thump. Aauuehhhhh - shudder.

So last night, I'm trying to sleep and I'm just about gone when I am suddenly awakened by a noise. It was most certainly the scurrying noise of a spider.

Ok. Now. See? You're rolling your eyes. That's not very supportive. But I speak the truth. This was not mouse-scurrying noises. Spiders do make noises.

If. They're. Big. Enough.

I became an instant Olympic athlete and vaulted out of bed doing a sort of lying down and kicking my legs out into a standing position 15 feet away by the door thing. Lights went on. Mr. Darling was woken and told to search the premises. We found nothing! This is the worst case scenario. I did not sleep well for the rest of the night but I did move to the other side of the bed hoping that when the monster spider came a-lurking, he'd have to cross over Mr. Darling first and get bored with it and go home. I don't know . . . something like that, I was tired.

So today, I am diligently vacuuming the house and I moved the thin curtain by the window that happens to be inches from my pillow and there was a horrendously thick and sticky spider web about a foot wide.

So guess where I am. Outside with my laptop. Too afraid to go into the house. My little spider catcher (Lumpy) is at a friends house and my other two kids are worthless. Both are squirmish about spiders.

Anyway, I do have knitting to share. And pictures of our new kitty. But I don't want to go in and get my camera, so it'll have to wait.

Shudderingly yours,
Rani

Pandora's Box

I mean it. Literally. I suppose you have all heard of this Pandora Radio thing, but I have just recently discovered it thanks to my friend Caroline. It's free. And it's so cool. And you don't have to download a thing. Here's the deal.

You type in your favorite music artist or song and they create a whole radio station based on that same sound. So if you like Little Feat - you'll hear Allman Brothers, JJ Cale, Lowell George, etc. Or if you like Justin Timberlake - they'll play him and his cronies until your heart is content! I typed in Sting and have been listening to Sting, John Mayer, Clapton etc. It's really fun! If you like old jazz and blues, type in Dizzie Gilespie - you'll have GREAT dinner music. Show-tunes, rap, whatever! It's really cool!

Anyway. I don't have any knitting to show. Next time . . . maybe. In the meantime, it's my almost-forty birthday and my husband is making me dinner and my kids are watching a move and I have a new little teeny tiny laptop by the name of MacBook Pro and I am absolutely beside myself GIDDY! So word up, peeps. I'll be back.

knitting with raw hamburger

Mwooooohooohahahaaaaaaa.

And yes, I am knitting. Here's the proof.It's the back of my "Central Park Hoodie" sweater. I am no longer sure about the color, but the ride has started and I can't get off until it's done. The pink is reminding me of raw hamburger. Hopefully no one else will have that imagery in their head when I wear it to school this fall.

One more laugh:

Flying Lesson

I can do this. Just focus. Concentrate. Remember to flap my ears as hard as I can.


ok, here goes nothing. Flap. Flap Flapflapflapflapflapflapflap
I've done it! I'm flying! I'm . . .
damn.

Our Amazing Weekend.

A Wedding.

A 4th of July parade.
Some illegal fireworks.
Some people I may or may not be related to.

Government-sanctioned, legal and permitted fireworks.
It was a remarkable and magical weekend. Thanks mom and dad, Patty and Dan!
Congrats to S and P!!