2006 in Review

Instead of knitting pictures, I have decided to share a couple pictures of the last sunrise of 2006. It seems appropriate to the topic at hand.






2006 was a rather big year for me, as far as knitting is concerned. (& other things as well.) This year I returned to knitting, after setting my pointy sticks aside when my younger son was born, 9 years ago.

But I wasn't knitting yet during the Winter Olympics this year. I heard of Stephanie Pearl McPhee's Knitting Olympics through some other mothers at my online Mom board but wasn't moved to get back into knitting & participate. I had a wedding to prepare for! I didn't have time for getting back into knitting! (Because I knew myself well enough to know that if I picked up the pointy sticks again, I'd be HOOKED.) So instead, I spent my Winter Olympic watching time with EMPTY HANDS. It's not as if I got any wedding prep done during the Olympics anyway, so I might as well have been knitting. The irony is not lost on me.

It was less than a month afterwards that I went into a craft store looking for some wedding supplies & walked out with some clearance priced yarn, new knitting needles, & some poncho patterns, in addition to the necessary print-it-yourself wedding programs that were the purpose of the shopping expedition. My daughter's first poncho turned out more like a shoulder cozy than a poncho, but her teddy bear likes it just fine.

By the time that I finally made it to one of my online Mom board's Knit Nights, it was a few days before the wedding, & stood in place of a bachelorette party. I was working on the third poncho of many, the same one which I knit on during Stephanie Pearl McPhee's visit to St. Louis, this past spring, hosted by the Greater St. Louis Knitters' Guild.

That introduced me to her books, & to the wide world of online knit blogging. I started this blog shortly thereafter, with pictures that I took that evening. It's been an eye-opening revelation, how many more knitting resources are available online compared with when I last was knitting.

Blogging has led me to meet -- whether in person, or "just" online -- many wonderful other local, or not-so-local knitters. (Everyone in my sidebar, consider yourself linked here. I'm just not going to retype you all.) World Wide Knit in Public Day was especially fun.

It was through online blogs that I discovered Threadquarters, an LYS in my area, was closing, which lead me in search of sales on better needles & yarn than I'd purchased at the craft store. That's been a bit of a slippery slope, which is why I'll be participating in Wendy's Knit From Your Stash in 2007.

Blogs led me to Podcasts, including Lime & Violet & Cast On & Sticks & String. I caught up on older episodes of many podcasts, & it's been amusing to see which one were from before I started knitting again (mentioning the Knitting Olympics, for example) & which podcasts came after I resumed knitting. (Such as those that mention World Wide Knit In Public Day.) I'm still catching up on Brenda Dayne's Cast On & during my vacation time, I've been listing to her series on the Knitting Muses. Knitting memories, & knitting history have been themes I've heard & thought over this week. So I decided that a "Knitting Year in Review" post was in order. I've come a long way in my knitting over the past year, but I still have many more projects I'd like to try.

For 2007, in addition to knitting from my stash, I'd like to try felting, & I'd like to actually FINISH my first pair of socks. I've never done either of those things. I'd also like to finish an adult sized sweater, which I haven't done for 20 years. That & managing to stay semi-current with my blog are my "knitting resolutions" for 2007.

Last Saturday Sky for 2006

I've enjoyed spending this past week with my kids, but it's made for not much computer time for me. You might have guessed that from the lack of posting. I have been getting knitting time in, though, & finished the "Lace Dream" shawl today. It's currently blocking & will be ready for New Years Party time, at least. If I have more time later today, I'll post some pictures of it.

A week in pictures, as seen by the cats

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday this year. I know I did. My cats were not sure what to think of it, though. We had everyone over to our house for a birthday party, & then again for Christmas Day. Lucy loved having all the extra attention, even from my adorable toddler neice, but Joxer hid for most of the time that there were extra people in the house.

















Edited to add commentary for the pictures:

The top two are of Lucy at a family birthday party. The "Birthday Tree" decorations are a small compensation for having a birthday so close to Christmas.

The next two, of the cats bracketing either side of the tree, show a much quieter time, after everyone had gone home & Joxer had come out of hiding.

On Christmas day, Lucy was determined to be in the middle of the action though, & managed to find a spot where no one could step on her. Then she retreated to my closet for a quick nap, & was in such a perfectly curled circle that I had to get a picture of her again. After her beauty sleep, she came out to greet her adoring public again.

Each picture may be viewed larger by clicking on the picture.

Dawn

All kinds of knitting update -- all my PIGS

December has become Knitting ADD month. I've been knitting on several different things, but not finishing anything new, except for that scarf. Perhaps that is why Christmas gift knitting can be a good thing -- it forces things to actually get completed.

I recently came across the acronym PIGS, for Projects In Grocery Sacks. It made me laugh, & it so, so applies to my life.

Here's what's currently on my needles:

Black rectangle shawl/stole that didn't get done for office party -- 75% complete.

Jewel-toned multi-color 3/4th's square garter lace shawl -- 75% complete

Icarus in smaller size for scarf -- halfway through the next-to-last lace chart. Need to find the next ball of yarn before I can continue.

Two sets of mittens/fingerless gloves for my boys -- hope to get those done over their Winter Break, while they are home & available to try them on, so I can test for things like thumb-hole placement.

Black diamond shawl -- in time out due to broken yarn several rows down that I will need to repair before continueing.

2 sets of toe-up socks -- put on hold while working on other items. Likely stalled due to needing to look up instructions & figure out which heel I want to try.

Ribbon yarn summer top -- put in time out when I realized it's turning out too large even for me.

Top-down raglan sweater -- Sack for this PIG went MIA & I've only recently found it again. Most of the way done with the yoke part. I *might* get back to this now that I've found it again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Misc ponchos -- somewhere in my house I still have at least two more ponchos on the needles. I'm not particularly motivated to look for them right now.

Sheesh. Considering that I only picked my needles back up again last February, it appears I've lost my mind. My poor husband; he had no idea I even knew how to knit, since I didn't do it for the first four years we knew each other. It's kind of his fault though. If that Clearance-Priced-Michael's-Yarn hadn't jumped into my basket while I was looking for wedding related stuff last winter, I wouldn't have started knitting again. ;-) So if he hadn't asked me to marry him, I'd never have been looking for self-printable wedding invites at Micheal's & would never have seen that yarn...

Just in time

The holiday party shawl did NOT get completed on time. Perhaps if I had started a week earlier, or if I would have been willing to bind it off shorter than I'd have liked, it would have worked. But since it was only for me, I made the executive decision to concentrate on other holiday preparations last week. (More in-progress-knitting report to come later, as time permits.)

I did, however, finish my X's & O's (a.k.a. Besotted) scarf in time to give it to my sweety today.



We first met 5 years ago, on December 19th, 2001. It's been the best 5 years of my life. I've finally found someone who loves me *because* I'm weird instead of in spite of it.

I've been tagged!

How can I be weird if I'm one of the group? Cindy tagged me with the Weird Meme, so here are the rules & my answers. (If you were to ask my brother, he'd wonder how I could possibly restrict this to just six things about me, but whatever...)

"Six Weird Things About You" Meme Rules:

THE RULES:Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.' People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged' in their comments and tell them to read your blog."

Thing 1 -- Cindy isn't short for Cindy. As you may already know, Cindy in my case is short for Lucinda.

Thing 2 -- My singing voice is low. Very LOW. I have trouble with the normal range of melodies written for women, in fact, & my father can sing higher than I can. (He's an excellent tenor, who is singing with the Saint Louis Symphony Chorus this year. Go Dad!) Because of trouble hitting the high notes on most hymns if I try for the soprano melody, I just switch to singing an octive lower, with the guys. One time in church, I even had the lady in the pew in front of me tell me what a wonderful tenor voice my son had. I didn't confuse her by telling her that he hadn't even been singing.

Thing 3 -- I've known I'm "weird" since I was about 12 years old, & I've never cared at all. That not-caring-at-all thing made any attempted playground teasers rather frustrated when it didn't matter to me what they said. I've become better at impersonating "normal" as I got older, though, so sometimes people nowadays find stories of my school days somewhat hard to imagine. I've also realized since I started connected with people over the internet that "weird" is much more common than school kids can see.

Thing 4 -- despite being a weird, nerdy, bookish, semi-loner kind of gal, each of my 3 longest relationships with guys have been with former high-school football players, 2 of whom were also frat boys in college.

Thing 5 -- I love travelling alone, & several times in my life I've done what Brenda Dayne calls "Pulling a Geographic." That's given me the opportunity to live in Norway, Northampton, New Mexico, Japan, & the high desert of California.

Thing 6 -- I spent over 4 years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, which accounted for my time in Japan & California. Not a weird thing in & of itself, but not a common thing for women to do.

So now I guess I have to tag people. I've never been all that good at tag, but here goes. Please don't feel obligated if holiday knitting is making you too crazy to participate right now, but here are 6 people from whom I'd be interested in hearing about weirdnesses of their own: djeh_b, Jeanne, Shannon, Rachel, Mary Beth, and Rachel.

A Hawk in the Sunrise

Picture not taken on Saturday, & not posted on Saturday either, but this is the closest I'm going to come this week. Yesterday was devoted to cleaning, & when I was resting, to knitting madly on the black stole. It's about half done, so I have a shot at hitting my self-imposed deadline.





The zoom on my newer camera is SO much more awesome than my older one. It was hard to tell in the early morning half light, but I'm fairly sure it was a red tailed hawk. He, or she, was HUGE.

The pictures of the hawk are a bonus. What I really was going out to take pictures of was this glorious sunrise.

Eye Candy Friday, the Ebenezer Edition

Editted to add some explanation:

This house has had this decoration up every year since I've moved to this area, & from what I've heard, for many more years before that. I'm not sure where it gets stored for the rest of the year, since it's an enormous sign -- at least 10 feet tall. I'm sure the home owners have it up to be funny, because there's also a clearly visible Christmas tree up in a different window of the house.

Just Cast On

There have been a lot of thought provoking posts out in knit blog land lately. It seems to be a thoughtful & reflective time of year, with the darkening of the days. That plus yesterday's news had me thinking of many things on my way home last night. I ran into writer's block when trying to type my thoughts out yesterday evening, however, & ended up just working on my black shawl & watching science shows on the National Geographic channel instead.

Life for most of us in the computer literate world does start out "bright and shiny." When I look at my high school graduation picture, I was so, SO much skinnier than I ever felt I was at the time. There was a whole realm of possibility stretching out before me, & I would never have foreseen ending up where I have now, over two decades later. I'm sure that some of my teachers (& maybe my parents) thought that I was headed for a glorious career in advanced mathematics or physics. I certainly had the test scores & the nerdy disposition for that. (But the reality of my life is that those test scores are only good to get me into Mensa, & I haven't even bothered to do that, since I'd have to either find those test results or come up with some way to get another copy. Not happening right now.) Instead I'm on the "Mommy Track" at work, with no plans to do anything else about it until my kids are grown, at least.

Life changes according to the choices we make, & the endless possibilities that stretch out before us in our teens simply cannot ALL come to be. The 1980's supermom myth is just that, a myth. The trick is not to have it ALL. The trick to life is to have enough of what makes you happy, however you manage to fit that happiness into your life. There are certainly things in my life that I wouldn't mind changing, but there are other things that I wouldn't change for all the money or prestige in the world.

I've recently gotten into listening to podcasts, & was listening to this one earlier this week. It occurred to me that life is like a wonderful big-project's-worth of yarn. A teenager starts out with certain talents & characteristics, when trying to figure out what to do with life, & a knitter starts out with yarn that has certain characteristics when trying to figure out which project to chose. Those characteristics effect the possible choices for what to do with ones life or ones yarn, but even if the first choice doesn't turn out the way that one hoped, it is possible to rip back, re-evaluate, & make a different choice for how to procede from there. In fact, pausing to check the status every once in a while is a good thing. When knitting lace, for example, pausing to see if the pattern is appearing as it should will catch a missing YO early enough to do something about it. Periodically evaluating one's life every once in a while is a good thing also. Maybe instead of one huge sweater out of that wonderful big-project's-worth of yarn, a person might decide to make several, varied items -- a vest, a hat, a felted bag. (Felting is a good representation of the stresses of life, come to think of it.)

If you try to make the yarn into something that doesn't fit its characteristics, sometimes frogging becomes the only sensible option. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't cast on anyway, & experiment & take risks. It's never too late to re-evaluate & do something different instead, though more pain is involved the further along you are into the project. (Or life, sometimes.)

Just sitting by & not making any choices won't preserve those choices in life the same way that it does with yarn. If yarn is stored well, it usually doesn't hurt to wait a while before using that part of your stash. In life it is harder to preserve those options, because life will happen no matter what you chose. "If you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

But sometimes life sneaks up & takes all the options away. I will never forget visiting this ship & seeing my own name among those on the wall. I'm sure the young Marine entombed there had a different first & middle name from mine, but it made me wonder where he was from, & whether he was related to my father's family. (Not too likely, it's a common name, but I wonder anyway...) He had to have been very young, given the rank that was listed on the wall.

I thought of him yesterday, & of the father in Oregon, & the local weather related deaths here in the midwest. I sit here today appreciating that I still have a life where I can make choices. I appreciate the choices that got me here, even though not all of it was enjoyable to live through at the time.

Lace Dream

Or is it Lace Insanity? My red Christmas dress is too tight to wear to parties this year, even though Hidcote would have gone perfectly with it. :(

Instead of trying to diet madly to fit into the red dress, I decided to knit a black stole to go with my black dress that DOES fit.

Now the question is, can I finish it in just under two weeks? I want to have it blocked & ready to wear a week from Saturday.





It's the "Lace Dream" shawl by Eugene Beugler from Shawls and Scarves: The Best of Knitter's Magazine. I've modified it slightly, since I'm using black mohair (Again!) & I want to be sure that the pattern will show after blocking. The needles I'm using are size 7, which is bigger than called for, & I took out two repeats of the pattern, since I have a bit less yardage than is called for also.

The yarn I'm using is the Jo Sharp Mohair that I bought on sale at Chris Needlecraft the evening I saw Jenn & Sharon. It was on sale for 40% off, which is about the only time I'd contemplate buying yarn that's only 95 yards to the ball. I'm already on the second ball of yarn, & very thankful that with mohair, I only need to double up the yarn I'm knitting with for joining the ends, instead of having them to weave in later. Both balls have also had breaks in them, so that makes three joins already, before I even get to the third ball of yarn. The yarn does feel good to knit, & I'm happy with the results, but not so happy with breaks in the yarn balls -- so I'm not sure if I'll ever buy Jo Sharp yarn again. (Well, knowing me, at least not at full price...)

What Happened to my Favorite Spot?

Because these pictures are just TOO funny not to share, I present Lucy's reaction to snow on her favorite chair.























She finally found a spot with a bit less snow to worry about.

Saturday Sky, the Ice & Snow Edition

We still have plenty of ice & snow from when the storm hit earlier this week. It made for a really gorgeous sunrise & early morning at my house.

Snow to Start December

No knitting today, as I was working from home all day. My area of the world got hit with several inches of sleet & ice yesterday afternoon/evening, followed by several inches of snow.

Even though I was working, I did manage to get some good snow pictures when I left the PC to go get my coffee & my lunch.