I'm Not Dead Yet

I've just been one busy lady this week. The Boy was sick with some nasty lung butter, the Garden is hating me, and I'm running off to join the Rollerderby! The Boy is all better and back to school (finally) after a weekend of spending lots of time in his room hunched over the vaporizer breathing in the menthol fumes.

Here is the story with the garden hating me: On Sunday I was ready to kick that guy Mel who writes the square foot gardening books. We went to Lowes and got all this 1/2" pvc pipe to make little greenhouse supports over each bed. That was a total pain cause the pipes are 10 feet long and had to be strapped to the roof of the car etc. etc and Steve dropped one on my toe. (ouch!)

We followed the directions in the book exactly, and ended up with a bunch of broken pipes and the garden beds still not covered. grrr. There goes $20 down the drain. I'm going to try something else this weekend. I need to get my onions and strawberries and lettuce and things planted NOW. If I do that without a way to cover everything with netting the squirrels and skunks will just dig it all back up for me. This is highly frustrating.

My friend (and fellow stitcher/bitcher) Courtney decided to start up an all-girl flat track rollerderby league in Northwest Arkansas. I love skating. I don't really care if I get bruised up a little, and I need some exercise so I ordered some new speed skates and signed up. The first meeting to organize the new league was this past Saturday. 25-30 people showed up and everyone is way excited. There are a million things to do. I'm making 1" buttons on the button press every spare minute this week plus doing research on pads and helments so there hasn't been a lot of the knitting or spinning or weaving going on.

I DID manage to finish the Noro Kureyon Charlotte's Web shawl, get it fringed, and get it blocked. I LOVE this thing. It is spectacular in it's awesomeness. I'll post pictures maybe tonight. I wonder if handknit socks will hold up to the skates.

The Pictures! They are FREE!

First The Yarn
One Skein Scarf from Stitch-N-Bitch Crochet done in Wool Ease leftovers


One Skein Scarf a'la saloon dancing girl done in pink Cashmerino Aran and black Lion Brand Cashmere Blend


Secret Pal GOODIES! Fleece Artist sock yarn, a cute patch you can barely see, some candy, and another rockin' mix cd. Thanks Sissy LaRue!


And Now The Yard Tour
This is the front yard after the storm drains barfed up leaves all over it. ewwww!

Steve mowed all those up yesterday so now it looks decent again.

Out back, we have Red Hot Peony Sprouting Action!


We also have Yellow Tulipy Goodness!

Actually, that may not be a tulip. It might be some other bulb thing I planted there. I forget exactly what all I put out in the fall because those bastard squirrels ran off with about 80% of everything. I guess we'll see as it opens more. Right now it still looks a little green and not fully opened.

Finally, here is a shot of the Square Foot Garden area. It looks pretty much just like it did before except now there is half a bale of rotting hay and the boxes are full of dirt ready to plant.

It needs to hurry up and be mid-April already.

Found It!

The camera's USB cable has been found!

You'll never guess in a million years where it was.

Go on...try.

It was in the very bottom of one of the magazine box things on my desk. It was burried under two stuffed beanie baby type lambs, a makeup case full of stitch markers and notions, the big long latch  hook thing for the loom, and three hair picks. How it got there, I do not know. That's where the slightly different usb cord that goes to my cell phone lives to keep the cats from chewing it up so maybe Steve stuffed it in there last weekend when he put the other cord away. Oh well. We can all rest easy now that the cord is home safe.

I'll free the pictures from the camera as soon as I get home tonight.

 

This weekend I had planned to do more yard/garden work, but the weather guy says we're getting two or three inches of rain instead so now I plan to clean house and finish up the shawls. I have just four loooooong rows of knitting left on the Charlotte's Web before I can bind off, and there are only about fifteen more nails to go on the tri-loom weaving. I think I'm gonna run out of yarn around nail ten. I may end up with a plaid shawl that has an unusual solid block right straight down the middle of the back. Oh well, um...it's a DESIGN ELEMENT...yeah, that's the ticket! I designed it this way for my wife...Morgan Fairchild.

I have pictures in my camera of the following things from this weekend:
~ The world's girliest/most victorian-tacky crochet scarf
~ My Square Foot Garden boxes all full of actual dirt and just about
ready to plant some lettuce, onions, carrots, broccoli, and
strawberries in next weekend.
~ My yard after the storm drains backed up. It's not a pretty sight.
~ Actual tulips that I planted back in the fall and thought those
bastard squirrels had run away with sprouting in the bed I planted
them in, but in different places than I put them. (I guess the
squirrels decided to just re-arrange things?)
~ A new package of Secret Pal 7 goodies that arrived Friday or
Saturday. (thanks pal!)
~Maybe some pics of the cats too. You'll have to wait till I find the usb cord and see.
I spent the weekend mostly doing yard work and then listening to the radio and watching the weather radar on tv waiting to see if we needed to go hide in the shower because of a tornado. We don't have a storm shelter, so we hide in the shower stall. What?
The tornadoes mostly stayed either way north or slightly south of us so we never did have to run and hide. I distracted myself by making the scary girly scarf. It's the One Skein Scarf from the new Stitch-N-Bitch Crochet book, but made with pink and black cashmere/merino yarn in a horrible/fabulously gaudy scheme. It totally
screams old west dance-hall floozie.
I also worked on the triangle loom shawl a little bit and did a couple rows on the Charlotte's Web shawl too. I just realized last night I have no good place to block that thing unless I can get the yarn room floor totally cleaned off by the time I finish. The yarn room is still pretty scary and junked up, so that is a job I'd better get after again.

More Stitchin Drama

It has happened again. I got another copyright infringement notice
from Yahoo about the SNB_Arkansas yahoo group. I have no idea what
those twits over at SFSE are complaining about this time. The group's
name has been changed. All reference to both offending words have been
removed from the front page. What else do they want me to do? Are they
now going to demand I not use the initials "SNB"???
Should I use my vacation days this summer to fly up there and sit in
front of their store every day handing out flyers to their customers?
Kristi in Jersey, you wanna have some guys egg their storefront for
me? (Just kidding...honest)

Meet My New Little Friend

Isn't he just the cutest?

They're 2 for $10 at Wallgreens. There is a white one and a beige one.
Now, on to the My So-Called Scarf

I used one skein of Manos and some leftover Yarn Bee ribbon yarn on the fringe. The only change I made to the pattern was to cast on 20 stitches for a slightly more narrow scarf because I am a short woman with a stumpy little neck. haha

& Now The Weaving Pictures
Here is the loom all set up in my living room so that I can weave and watch TV at the same time. I'm a loom potato.

Here is the weave at an angle:

Here is a close-up:

I've been told that it will tighten up a lot when I take it off the loom and wash it, but I don't know if it works that way with acrylic yarns or not. I hope so, cause right now it's kind of burlap looking. Cute, plaid burlap, but yeah.

The Triangle Loom

Sorry for another pictureless post, but I just want to say this.

1. That line in the ads for trilooms that says "Weave an entire 7-foot shawl in less than a day!" is total bunk when you're a beginner. Maybe if you take "a day" meaning 24 hours, but certainly not in an afternoon or evening. I wove half a shawl Saturday night, then off and on throughout the day Sunday in between laundry, lunch, a trip to the store, dinner, and the Oscars I wove another 1/4 of a shawl. The going gets slower the closer you get to the middle because there is a lot more actual weaving going on. That takes a while if you want to get through it with no skipped strands etc. 

2. Get yourself one of those big plastic hair picks right away. I killed my fingernails and fingertips on Saturday night working without one because I was too lazy to go to the store and in too much of a hurry to get started.

3. Weaving on a big triloom is a full body workout. If you're not used to standing in pretty much one place for a long time and reaching around a lot you'll need to stop once in a while to do some knee bends and stretches.

4. Don't use a yarn that pills fairly easily. There is a good amount of dragging going on, and it can get kind of icky looking there in the middle. I'm using this TLC acrylic crap yarn and I've already had to defuzz the center part twice just so I can keep dragging threads through there without them getting tangled up on pills. (damn junkie threads)

5. If you use a varigated yarn it plaids itself and you only have to switch off when you run out of one skein and start another. This is really good since it's a total pain to try to get the knot lined up on the very edge so it won't show in the finished product.

6. Don't turn your back on the cats. They think the loom is a giant jungle gym you built especially for them.

 

Pictures tonight. Stay tuned.

So last night I finally met the "lady who is opening a yarn store" here. Sadly, she has had to give up the dream and won't be opening a store after all. Oh well. Her name is Mary, and I already have secret plans to drag her with me to the Winslow spinning group in a couple of weeks or make her drag me there if she's already going. She spins. That makes three people (including me) I know here in town who spin. I wish I'd thought to get her phone number or email or something so that I could more effectively bother her.
We were talking about how there are three very different knitting groups meeting around town. One Mary goes to meets Tuesdays at the local Hobby Lobby and pays $5 each to the teacher there. It seems like more of a come get help with your projects kind of thing to me, but she says its really social. I'd go, but I don't want to give that lady $5 for the pleasure. I don't think she has all that much she could teach me that I couldn't pick up here on the internet for free. Another group meets on Monday mornings at the Cancer Support House to knit chemo caps and things. They're mostly older and retired etc. I don't know how much overlap there is between the two groups, but I do know none of those people come to Stitch N Bitch on Thursdays with us younger, more potty mouthed people. It would be really cool to get everyone together somewhere sometime. If I had all the crap cleared out of the patio room and we didn't have the world's stinkiest 17 year old dog living in there I'd have enough room to have a party.
Tomorrow I'll be in Tulsa picking up my used 7ft triangle loom. I've already got three projects planned using yarn already in my stash, so this should help cut down on the volume of yarn in the yarn room if the weaving goes as quickly as people say it does. I've been kind of sad looking at pictures on google. Some of the color combinations people are weaving make my eyes hurt. A lot of scary plaidness is going on out there, and I don't want to contribute to that so I'm picking my yarns carefully except for my big test run thing. It's going to be this really awful acrylic nightmare extravaganza. I don't want to waste the good stuff while I'm just learning do I?