Yarn-store goodness

Okay…finally now the story can be told. (I’d better type quickly; I’m already pushing my luck that someone won’t wake up and need me any second.)

After spending all Monday sorting and washing clothes, we decided to just go for a drive yesterday. Get out of the house, get the kids to nap, all that stuff. The only bad part was that since I’d be driving, there would be no knitting time for me. The good part was that my ulterior motive was to head towards Appleton and see if I could find a yarn store. Last year, Mr. Beth and I tried to track down a couple with no success.

Well, our drive took us all over the place. I had a map on hand to help me get home, and it was starting to look as if I’d need it when I saw a sign that indicated I was less than ten miles from Appleton. Ta-dah! I turned onto 96 and headed east. Passed up the Fox Valley Mall, passed 41, kept going and going. The neighborhood got more and more industrial and manly for a while, then I spotted, of all things, a chocolatier’s shop.

I figured a yarn shop couldn’t be far, but I was really startled when I was right. The yarn radar was functioning perfectly! I had to drive east for a while more before I found a good place to turn around, but then there it was — Iris Fine Yarns.

The shop was beautiful and freshly inventoried (as of the night before!), and everyone was so friendly. I got a complete tour (and enough “alone time” to be able to drool all over everything), then ran into Ann K. in the book and magazine room. I don’t know how we figured out that we were both bloggers and Harloteers, but pretty soon we were old friends and she was hauling project after project out of her gorgeous knitting bag (that she made herself; she sells them) to show me.

(How do you know when you’ve spent a little too much time in the knitblogosphere? When someone shows you a half-finished sock still on the needles and you correctly identify it as a Blue Moon Sock Club pattern in the Monsoon colorway because you recognize the color pooling.)

I had an awesome time and felt just a little guilty that my children and my mother were down the block, sitting in the minivan. And I bought this and these.

Do I have any pictures of the outside or inside of the store? Or of Ann or her wonderful projects? Of course not. Why not? Because I had my digital camera in the inside pocket of my coat the whole time. I’m a freakin’ genius.

The needles are wonderful wonderful wonderful. I sat at home last night wondering how much of the Irish Hiking Scarf I could get done, then succumbed and started on a new something instead:

God, I love these needles. They are wonderful and worth every penny.

And for Michele, here’s a picture of my stash. After I took it I realized I left out three skeins of Red Heart blue camo yarn (and one skein that doesn’t match the dye lot — don’t know what I’ll do with that, since the rest is for a hoodie pullover for Jack). Michele, see anything you want to swap for? (Don’t look in the blue bin on the left, those are my keepers.)

Good night, good night, good night — I’ll try to post some Actual Knitting tomorrow.

The booklist meme

I have so many exciting things to write about and take pictures of, but until I have the time to get all that together, here’s my version of the book meme that’s been going around. (I’m sorry it includes no chocolate.)

Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) - I think this is the true Great American Novel
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Oh, consider yourself tagged, by the way!

Photos and stories later, tonight if possible.

Nothing to see here…

Mom’s here and we’re working on de-cluttering the house. We’ve done (OK, she’s done) dozens of loads of laundry, sinks full of dishes, sorted out four dressers’ worth of kids clothes to be sold, discarded, or given to Goodwill. Mr. Beth cleaned out a big chunk of basement (and all the garage) so we could move forward. I have uncovered two full enormous plastic buckets of clothes that even Little Tommy the Mighty Mite is now too big to wear. The Lowe’s guy came over to measure the kitchen area to give a flooring estimate. What else did we do?

Ah yes…we went to Herrschners.

Don’t worry, it’s not for me. It’s what Mom picked out when I insisted I was going to teach her to knit. It’s acrylic, but it’s soft, pretty, and worsted weight.

Our errands today include the post office, the bank, and a slight possibility of dropping by a yarn store to get her some needles in a comfortable size. If some sock yarn falls in the basket, I ain’t sayin’ no.

Tea time!

It’s snowing. Mom is on her first flight of two as I type this, and will probably be on her second flight as I post this, and it is snowing. Go figure.

But it’s tea time! Here, have some Irish Soda Bread:

But make sure you are properly dressed for tea:

James would also like to show you his improvised tie tack, since I wasn’t able to knit the loop on the back of the tie (as he requested! This kid is great!). It’s a Norton motorcycle pin.

And for those of you who want to know the whole story (you know who you are, and I think I do, too), I didn’t finish it at the library. Colleen discovered that I actually planned to leave the house after the babysitter arrived. Half an hour after “Rosalyn” arrived, since I was still frosting my shamrock sugar cookies and baking a pizza for dinner and doing other assorted things. Colleen burst into tears. She clung to me, staged a sit-in, attempted to bargain, explained why she should go to the knitting meeting too. All to no avail. It was rough, but I picked up my “used to work in day care” self and left, promising to return. As I drove to the library her crying face was pressed against the living room window, watching me leave.

Rosalyn said she cried for five minutes and was perfectly fine (after an attempt to put on her coat and follow me).

I searched the library for the best place to sit and knit. I wanted to be visible and do my best to Represent! but ended up downstairs in the children’s area. They have the best chairs. They also had a friendly librarian with a yardstick, who helped me measure the tie-so-far. To keep things simple, I put a few stitch marker rings on a paper clip, attached it to a live stitch, and worked 12 inches from there. We both agreed that the length (I had brought the shirt with me) would be perfect. I knitted happily away until the children’s department closed, then stationed myself in front of checkout and knitted some more. I got enough done that I knew I could finish it at home.

Which I did (thanks, Pierce!). Here is the evidence, although the time stamp is incorrect. Add one hour, please.

Time to start my Represent! hat and resume work on the IHS, the Moebius, and the little-seen SKP. Thank you for your support. (If you are of a certain age, doesn’t that make you want a wine cooler?)

Insert tie joke here

“It’s a tie,” “All tied up,” whatever you like. Ha, ha, ha.
Here’s the tie at 8am this morning:

Here it is at just before lunchtime:

I still have to make the shamrock cookies this afternoon for tomorrow’s tea party. The dough is resting in the fridge, but the Little Miss Perfectionist inside me doesn’t like my plastic four-leaf-clover cookie cutter (see the picture of the birthday cake, below) and needs to run to the hardware store to get their last shamrock cutter. (Yes, the hardware store. I called many many places this morning, and this is the place that has one. Just one. Wal-Mart probably has fifty of them but I am so not going to look.) Then, after school, the kids and I get to roll, cut, bake, and decorate. Pray for me!

So this means The Rosalyn Plan is in effect for the completion of the neckwear. The babysitter will be arriving at about 6, and I will take my knitting to the library for two child-free hours, and knit the rest of this wretched charming tie. And while I will take pictures of my eldest son in his striking handknit tie, I won’t get to post them for a while. Right after I drop him at school tomorrow, I need to hightail it to the airport and pick up my mother, who will be with us for ten glorious days. We are proceeding immediately (well, after a McDonald’s run) to my favorite quilt store to pick up the backing for the T-shirt quilt. Then grocery shopping, then home, then to pick up James from school, after which there is an ice skating party I’m going to with him. This time, I get to skate; at last year’s party I was seven months pregnant. Now I have taken skating lessons and am ready.

If you can find some posting time in that schedule, let me know! But I will try.

And no, Rosalyn isn’t the babysitter’s real name. But it’s the name of the babysitter from one of the best comic strips ever written, and I thought it would make a suitable alias for any babysitter I ever hire for the rest of my life.

Poison

First off, the birthday party went pretty well. JC was actually surprised that two of his friends came over. That was enough to put him over the top. They both brought presents, everyone loved the cake, they even liked the little cardboard containers I put their popcorn in.

Here’s the cake. It’s a Hershey’s chocolate cake from the recipe on the cocoa box, with generic buttercream frosting with one part yellow food dye and one part blue food dye. Unfortunately, the blue was a pastel, so I didn’t really get the green I was hoping for.

The green in the picture is actually nicer than it really looked. The shade of green it really was, was the shade you would have picked for a cake for someone enlisting in the Army. Just sayin’. A little too close to lima-bean green, but since I didn’t want to spend all afternoon adjusting the color of frosting, I just spread it on the sucker.

James happily announced the cake to his friends thusly:

“My mom made a green cake! But don’t worry, it’s not poison!”

They were suitably wary at first, but being brave Wolf Scouts they soldiered on and eventually had seconds. And gave compliments, bless their hearts. Then I made popcorn and in a stroke of genius put theirs in the little cardboard popcorn containers that came with the popper when we bought it for Father’s Day. They were flabbergasted. Wow, it was just like the movies. (They didn’t actually say that.)

Speaking of which, here is the Transformers movie from 1986 that they watched a little bit of, when they weren’t running up and down stairs playing spies.

Right then, they were playing spies.

Two hours of two extra boys was just enough! Both parents dropped the boys and ran, but really everyone acted their age, which was fine.

I was kind of itching to get started on a command performance knitting project. Here is what I have so far:

The reason it’s being moved to the top of the list is that JC’s second grade class is studying Britain and Ireland right now, and they’re having High Tea on Friday. All the girls and boys are encouraged to dress up a notch or two. I picked up the shirt at Target, but since they didn’t have any little-boy young-man ties and I didn’t have any money anyway, voila! I’m trying to make it a little wider than my “I Love the 80s” sensibilities want it to be, but I think it’s a little too wide. (Yes, I’m going to narrow it after about 12 inches.) I just don’t know how wide the eight-year-olds are wearing their ties these days.

Mr. Beth says the length should be 2 times the neck to waist measurement, plus the neck around, plus 1-2 inches for the knot. Sound about right? (Lisa, please limit yourself to the executive summary.)

So that’s what I started working on after I finally got Jack to sleep at almost 10:30. That, and the 6th episode of Remington Steele, plus a little featurette about Season One that they snuck onto that disc. Why, since it was only halfway through the season? Because that disc had room on it, I guess.

Since even JC doesn’t think I’ll get it done in time for Tea, I’d better get back to work!

2pm update:

Eight

This may confirm all rumors of my insanity, but I’m hosting a small surprise party for JC, who turns eight today. Because we weren’t able to hold a big blow-out type party for him this year (birthdays in this area are usually big communal deals involving renting a bowling alley, and providing tons of food and goody bags), we declared this to be Birthday Week and are trying to do something special for JC each day.

Sunday’s special thing from me was that I stacked his seven peanut butter crackers into a tower at his snack time, so that should give you an idea of the scale of things. But Dad went and got him the DVD of the original 1986 Transformers movie, so I arranged for a couple of scouts from his den to drop by and watch it with him this afternoon, with popcorn and birthday cake.

Yep. Insane. Although “a couple of Wolf Cubs” should rate pretty low on the trouble scale.

So we blew up eight blue balloons, hung up a “happy birthday” banner, have the cake in the oven, and I did actually buy him a birthday present. (No, it’s not yarn.) We’d better be careful from now on, as this kicks off the Birthday Season at our house — one birthday a month through July. And Colleen is old enough to remember the last birthday we celebrated, so by the time her birthday comes around again (December), she’ll want do to everything that everyone else already did. (That. All of it.)

So shhh! Don’t breathe a word!

Knitwise, I did one repeat of the Irish Hiking Scarf last night. Guess which row I had to tink back because of some bizarro goof at the end of the previous row? Yes, row 8, the one where you cross the cables. I am sure I twisted a couple of purl stitches while I was going backwards, but I am equally sure that it’s not worth the effort to hunt them down and try to redo them. No picture. It’s just five repeats.

Tinking back the IHS sucked out all the time I would have had to do some Moebius.

And when I put the baby to bed I forgot to grab Pierce, so phooey. I knit away listening to the kind of 1970s singer/songwriter stuff that drives Mr. Beth nuts. But I know all the words, so what the hell. It keeps me happy. But I am going to find Mr. Brosnan right now and put him where I can find him.

Flylady update: yesterday I cleaned my stove vent filter, got rid of the cobwebs in the kitchen, washed the kitchen curtains, and cleaned off the ceiling fan blades in the kitchen. (Ewwwww!) It made me almost feel like I could have Scouts (and their moms) over to the house. Except that on the curtains — WTF? — the bottom row of stitches for the curtain rod casing fell out of each curtain. Just the bottom row. But on each curtain. I’m still trying to figure out whether I should try to fix this before this afternoon (machine or hand sew?) or just pretend I don’t have curtains in my kitchen.

Time to go to the Harlot’s and see what Joe thinks of the bedroom makeover!

I saw a real live knitter!

Whew! I’m still all breathless from the experience!

Of course, I “know” lots of knitters. Like you, for instance. And Wendy and the Harlot and all. But I’ve never actually seen them. Or you, for that matter. I don’t belong to a guild, and there aren’t any knitters in my family. And frankly, I just don’t get out much.

The only Real Live Knitters I have met are my brother’s girlfriend (hi, Alex!), who has a new fantastic job and no more time to knit, and my former mother-in-law Elfriede, who doesn’t knit for herself and only occasionally knits for anyone else. Both of them live in Ohio and I might see them once a year.

But on Saturday…whoa baby! My husband was trying to get some work done at home, so I volunteered to take Jack out for a while. The plan was to drive him to sleep in the car, then pop into the library for a couple of things, then bring him home. It didn’t work. He knew exactly where I was going and was thrilled. So, we ended up going into the Children’s Department so he could play with the Brio setup.

And there she was. She was sitting by the puppet theater, working on a project I recognized — a Wallaby pullover taught in a Herrschners class. With Addi Turbos no less! When I started chatting her up she was friendly, but when I pulled out my own knitting she invited me to sit next to her, and we became Instant Knitter Friends. We talked yarn, we talked about how we learned to knit, we talked about the Herrschners bargain bin, we exchanged stitch patterns, she invited me to a knitting group meeting where they’ll be collecting squares for charity afghans. And we sat and knitted and knitted and knitted. We gave each other our e-mail addresses and talked about raising boys. She watched me knit and said, “Yes, you do seem to be knitting left-handed,” and God bless her, she started to show me how to hold the yarn for tension. (So was so kind.) When she had to leave and I had to leave, she hugged me!

You want to know the funniest thing?

She didn’t think anyone else knitted any more.

Pictures of Progress

Here is Chemo Five, which I worked on at the library. It’s not the six inches it’s supposed to be, but I’m running out of yarn and need to start shaping the crown.

Here is the Moebius, all 43 inches of it.

And here’s the Irish Hiking Scarf. Now that it’s not a secret any more, I got to sit with Mr. Beth for two evenings and knit one repeat of it each night. (That’s the safest way for me not to screw it up. After eight lines, I would probably lose count.) He didn’t say much, but I think he was pleased to see me working on something nice for him. Because after a while he asked if I could make a sweater like that.

And here, meet my date for tonight, with any luck at all.

All thumbs

Well, I’ve figured out what has caused the damage to my hands. It all became clear to be when Jack climbed the baby gate yesterday and I once again picked him up, lifted him high, and set him down. That’s it. Almost forty pounds of wriggling stress, right on those two thumbs. Every time he’s at the gate or going in or out of a car seat. He’s not trustworthy for walking beside me, so I carry him more than I should.

Ironically, after abandoning it for the last couple of days, knitting turns out to be one of the things I can do without pain. So today I’m working on the Moebius scarf. It would be nice to have it done before spring technically starts. Plus, it’s just about the simplest pattern I’m working right now. It’s up to 40-1/2 inches as of this morning.

In the meantime, I signed up with Flylady and am making progress on myself and my house. I have this lady to thank for complaining about Flylady on her blog or I never would have heard about the system in the first place. So thanks, Michele! I have started taking the baby steps (it’s Day Two). Any other FLYers out there? How is it working for you?

Peekaboo!

Ouch!

I didn’t knit last night because my right thumb was too sore and I didn’t want to aggravate it. Unfortunately, it’s still too sore this morning. I don’t think it’s the knitting. I knit in an odd, self-taught way and it seems to be left-handed from what I can tell. Wendy seems to knit in a similar way but she is much, much faster.

What I think is causing the problem is picking up my 36 pound two-year-old (okay, he’s almost three). It’s very similar to how I injured my left hand when carrying my daughter when she was a nursling. You know, oh, she’s so tiny I can hold her right here on my arm? And then your thumb gets all hyperextended and you have to have physical therapy and cortisone injections and wear a brace and all? Ask me how I know.

I don’t want to go through that again! I don’t think I have a wrist brace to fit my right hand, so I’ll just have to remember to keep my thumb closer to my hand, not carry Jack so much, and maybe just try to keep my hands warmer and more lotioned up. (Ironically, wrist warmers would probably be a big help, but I don’t see myself knitting some anytime soon.)

So, here’s what I’m currently not working on:

And this: