Hidcote Progress Report

As you may have noted from my earlier Cardinals-Watching picture, I'm still working on my Hidcote Garden Shawl.



I finished chart 9 last weekend, & started on the final chart.



However, after successfully managing to work on it through most of the World Series, I hit a snag on the final night. Friday evening I started a row & the numbers were not working out. There was no way that I was going to be able to concentrate on trying to find the cause of the trouble, so I started something entirely different.

Today I managed to figure out the issue. I'd accidentally knit only 3 together in a spot where I was supposed to knit four together. Now I'm back on track, & did 3 rows while watching the Cardinals parade & rally live on local TV this afternoon. I've only got 8 rows plus the bind off left to go, so I'm on schedule to be able to block my Hidcote over Thanksgiving break.

Here it is as of this afternoon:



The picture color comes out dramatically differently inside versus outside, but the true color is pretty close to the outdoor picture. It's a moss green. Although I thought that color would go well for a garden themed shawl, I am getting a bit tired of men asking me if I'm knitting a tent. Yes, I realize it is similar in color to the old Army-surplus-style Boy Scout Tents. No, I don't care about that & no, I am NOT knitting a tent. (Can you tell I've been asked that a few too many times?)

Bonus Saturday Sky.

Due to Blogger being flaky, it double posted my entry for today. So I decided to modify the second post to show some bonus Saturday Sky pictures.

(It also double-posted my entry on Fall Cable KAL 2006 I'm not sure yet what to do with the second entry there.)

Saturday Sky. On Saturday for a change.

We spent the afternoon out in the country hanging out at a great outdoor birthday party/ bonfire / smore roast. It was a nice, mellow, enjoyable afternoon. A couple of us even got some knitting time in. With the World Series over, there was plenty of icebreaker topics for the guys to talk about, but no distraction of everyone wanting to go inside & check game scores. I also got some really great sunset pictures.

I've gotten more knitting done this week than usual, due to the amount of time spent in front of the TV.

But watching the Cardinals win the World Series doesn't make for much time to blog. I have progress pictures to go up in my next post.


Go Cards! Woo Hoo!

An Ideal Tuesday Night / Recommended Reading

Knitting in my hands.



Cats on my lap.




Winning Redbirds on TV.



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Recommended Rhinebeck Reading/Viewing:

In the process of enjoying Rhinebeck from afar, here are some of the best posts I've come across. (Outside of the most "famous" bloggers.)

Detailed review of both days.

Terrific long series of posts.

Great review of blogger bingo & excellent mix of non-knitting & knitting content on the blog.

Wonderfully named blog! ;-)


Flickr set from someone who appeared to be there more for photo ops than for wool. (That or he can still take amazing pictures when distracted by fiber!)

Plus a bonus Cardinal shirt picture!

Saturday Sky from yesterday

I was busy working at a fundraiser for my son's Scout Troop last night, so I didn't have a chance to post these until today. These were taken on the way to the fundraiser. Click on the photos to see them larger.

Birthday stash enhancement/ LYS review

Now that we have a break from Post Season Baseball, I figured it was about time I got this blog entry up. As Jenn points out, there's a derth of knitting related posting going on right now. This will give folks something to read while waiting for the Rhinebeck posts to start flooding the internet. (Not to mention the fact that no one will be much interested in reading about LYS trips once there are Rhinebeck Reviews up to be read...)

Last Saturday we went to two different LYS's in Kirkwood, Missouri. The first was Knit & Hook, a fairly new store in a newer building on Kirkwood Road. Very new, & very nice, with the yarn arranged by color instead of by fiber or brand, which I found to be very soothing to the eyes.



They had a limited area of stuff on sale for 50% off, & I found some yarn there which I just had to have.










From there we went north on Kirkwood Road, turned onto Manchester Road, & went to Pennie's Place






Pennie's Place is going to be closing & will re-open under a new name:










Behold the day's haul.

Not all of it was birthday present. I did break down & supplement the stash enhancement when I found out that everything at Pennie's Place was on sale for 30% off.

From Knit & Hook:

The bright red mohair blend lace-weight -- enough yarn & the right color for a Christmas shawl. The pattern at the back & the three yarns on the right hand side were also from Knit & Hook. The olive green will be some sort of cabled scarf for me. The two balls of eyelash yarn are for edging-instead-of-fringe on a black poncho I plan to make someday, & the grey/blue mix in the lower right corner is for some combination of hats/mittens/scarf, perhaps for one or more of my kids.

From Pennie's Place:

The pile of aqua just to the right of center is for Icarus. The tweedy blue just to the left of center is going to be a top of some sort -- perhaps Green Gables, perhaps Picovoli. I'm not sure yet. There are only two balls of the dark green, which is going to be some sort of leafy lace scarf, perhaps Branching Out. The multi-color Portrait in the back left corner will be the shawl pattern that I bought that day. & last but not least, the yarn in the lower lefthand corner will probably be a Diamond Fantasy shawl.

World Series Bound!

Looks like I'll be spending the weekend looking forward to more than just the Rhinebeck posts! Go Cardinals!

& the good thing about spending so much time on my sitting on my backside watching baseball on TV is that I'm nearly to the last chart on Hidcote. But now it's always going to make me think of baseball when I wear it...

Secret Knitting Revealed

I knit my mother a scarf for her birthday. It's got easy k2tog, YO lace at each end, of my own design, & the remainder is garter stitch. I used two skeins of wool/acrylic superwash blend that I got on sale at Myer's Barn. (St. Louis area LYS that had a big sale last month.)

I gave it to her when I saw her over the weekend & she likes it very much.

Editted for additional statistics:

Yarn: Sirdar Salsa DK, SH 721, used just under two balls

Needles: Size 7 straights

Yardage: approx 300 yards

Measurements: 9 inches by 36 inches, approx.

Saturday Sky

Yes, that is a small slice of moon right in the middle.


I'm finally posting a Saturday Sky post on time. I actually stayed in town this weekend. The big event of today was my Birthday-Present-LYS-Trip. I won't be able to do it justice tonight, so I'll save the story of the trip for later.

But let me give a tip to the St. Louis folks. Pennie's Place has ALL their current yarn stock at 30% off right now. Every single yarn in the store, the catch is that all sales are final. Go check it out if you get the chance. The store is located on the south side of Manchester Road, just east of Lindberg/Kirkwood road. They are selling off all of the Pennie's Place stock & will be re-openning under another name soon.

Fall Folliage Friday

Well, I finally got Blogger to upload from it's own tool, & thus have captured the html for centered pictures in case I ever need that when the upload tool is being unco-operative again.

These pictures are from the area around Pacific, Missouri. I had to drive out there this afternoon, & had time to take some pictures on the way back.

Did I tell you that it was my birthday recently? Well, it was. My husband & kids got me an iPod Nano, & I've been spending this evening downloading knitting podcasts. (Little did my husband know that he was still getting me knitting stuff -- he said he absolutely didn't want to go into a yarn store!) I'm a complete newbie to podcasts though, so if anyone has any to recommend, please leave me a comment with them.

Unlike my husband, my mother does like yarn stores. So her present to me is to take me to a couple LYS's tomorrow for a shopping spree. I have no idea what I'll get, but I welcome suggestions of what knitting related stuff you would get if someone was taking you on a shopping spree.

Belated Walk With Me Wednesday...

Blogger is being uncooperative about loading pictures again. The pictures I was planning on sharing were not from yesterday/Wednesday, but rather from our trip to Shiloh, Tennessee last weekend. We didn't walk as much as my son & the other scouts did, due to my husband's still healing leg. However, I did manage to get a bit of walking in.

With the great early fall weather & the pretty day that we had, it was hard to imagine that this had been the site of a horrifically bloody battle. It was rather sobering to realize that I was walking the same ground as one of my ancestors & that if he hadn't survived the battle, I might not be here today.

I also got a bit of knitting in. I'm on the next-to-last chart on Hidcote now, & the Black Diamond shawl is to the point where I would have cut short & added the edging, except that I found more yarn to match at a different LYS. (That shawl was begun with 4 skeins on hand, bought at an LYS that was going out of business. I now have enough for it to be the designed fingertip length, rather than barely past my elbows.) I even managed to knit in the car on the part of the trip where I was the passenger. I got over a foot of garter stitch done on my Top.Secret.Gift.Knitting. That was a very good thing, as it is for my mother's birthday this coming Sunday.

EDIT: I copied & pasted HTML from a different blog entry to force blogger to co-operate on posting pictures. Hopefully it worked. The pictures are from along the Sunken Road, a central part of the first day's battle.

A TV show worth watching while knitting...

Tonight, part of my knitting was done in front of this show, "Is God Green?" Very interesting stuff, so it was good that I was doing mostly mindless gift-knitting while watching. (& since I don't have TIVO, I was happy not to miss any of the Cardinals game while I watched it. For once, I don't much mind it being rained out.)

There is also a related interview here. My favorite quote from Bill Moyers in that article is this:

"I'm an opponent of the closed mind, whether it's practiced by a corporate executive or an ordinary parishioner in the local church. Reason is a powerful, God-given faculty that has to be exercised. My favorite scripture in the Old Testament is, "Come now, let us reason together." "

Unlike Stephen Baldwin, I believe that humans have a God given obligation to USE their brains. Not to use the brains God gave us is disrespectful to God. Not to take care of the planet God gave us is also disrespectful to God. So sayeth me.

October Saturday Sky

We were in Shiloh & Savannah, Tennessee this past weekend, so my Saturday sky pictures are from there.

(Hubby & I helped provide transportation for my elder son's Boy Scout Troop to take a long weekend to camp & to hike the battlefield at Shiloh. They camped; we stayed in a hotel due to my husband's still-healing broken leg.)

The first picture is some mist that I captured on "film" right at dawn, in the field on the other side of the road from our hotel.

The second is from the visitor center area at the battlefield. There was a motorcycle rally going on in the area this past weekend also, & the weather was glorious for both hiking & for riding.

Last Wednesday

I forgot to say that a week ago Wednesday I finally got together to knit with Heather & Mary Beth again for the first time since before I got married last spring. It was a lot of fun. We also had a couple of blogless friends there two.

Heather brought a hat that she'd finished, & was working on a scarf very similar to this one of Jenn's. Mary Beth brought a very pretty & soft shrug that she was currently working on.

It was great to knit in a group again!

10 Things About Lucinda

I got this meme from Grumperina's blog. "And so, an idea for a new meme - a list of Ten Knitterly Things you don't know about me!"

So here are 10 knitterly things about Lucinda:

1. The first time I learned to knit was in England, using the English style. My mother taught me to garter stitch & to crochet when I was about 10 years old. I was more successful at crochet than knitting at the time, & soon lost interest in both.

2. The second time I learned to knit was when it really "took". I spent a year in Norway as a foreign exchange student, in between graduating from high school & starting college.

3. My Norwegian host mother taught me to knit & to purl continental, & how to knit in the round, work with two colors, & follow patterns written in Norwegian. It took me a while to figure out how to do patterns written in English once I returned to America.

4. My first sweater was rather ambitious, because I didn't know enough to be intimidated. It had two colored patterning, steeking, & shaping techniques. I still have it in a Rubbermaid tub somewhere in my house, but it certainly won't fit me anymore.

5. After returning to the USA, I only knit in spurts, & didn't finish anything. Somewhere in my house are all my UFO's from my college days. Someday they'll make a good blog entry, when I have time to hunt for them.

6. I stopped knitting for about 5 years, until I was pregnant with my older son, when I finally broke the UFO streak & actually finished a baby sweater & a baby blanket.

7. After my eldest was born, I didn't knit very much except for a bit of finishing his baby UFO's while I was pregnant with his brother. Then I stopped knitting altogether for almost 9 years.

8. I've done a LOT more knitting in the past 8-9 months than the previous 8 years. (& the previous 8 years prior to those years, for that matter.) As of this blog entry, I've finished more ponchos than anything else. If you had told me when I started seriously knitting that I would at any point be in the running for the poncho queen, I would have laughed my head off, since ponchos were quite out of fashion in the 80's.

9. I picked up knitting again primarily due to strategically placed yarn at a clearance sale at Michael's when I in there looking for wedding supplies. On the one hand, I am thankful that it got me into knitting again. On the other hand, I'm wishing that I hadn't bought quite so much novelty yarn on sale & had saved the $$$ to use on the "good stuff".

10. I already have entirely too many WIPs at once, despite having only recently started knitting again. I added knit blogging to the mix thanks to a visit to St. Louis by the Yarn Harlot while on her booktour.

Fall Foliage

Here are a couple more pictures from this past weekend.

I did manage to squeeze in some knitting, but none of it is picture worthy yet. The fall colors are too pretty not to share. That's a heron in the middle of the first shot, all the way over on the opposite side of the lake from where I was taking the picture. Have I mentioned how much I love the zoom on my newer camera?

Final September Saturday Sky

Sunset at Trout Lodge, YMCA of the Ozarks.

It was a great family weekend. We saw lots of wildlife while we were at Trout Lodge for the weekend, but unlike this family, no possums!