Caps for the Cure

So I’m getting frustrated with the Matt socks (they are taking for-ev-er sandlot style) and the lace is to the point of requiring concentration (it's too hot to concentrate) …. So I needed some feel good knitting - simple, mindless, instant gratification, and for a good cause. Check out what I found:


Caps for a Cure.

The goal is to knit chemo caps for cancer patients. It’s a really good cause and what could be more zen in knitting than a hat in the round? It’s almost as foolproof as a felted bag! So last night I cast on with the leftover Cotton Fleece that I have from my Green Gable (I so want to link to pictures of my finished gable but I haven’t posted any yet! Hopefully next post….) and threw in some ladder yarn from a belt that I made for Rebecca (pre blog so no pic of that either) ‘cause really, everyone needs a little bling:



I think I’m going to knit a few of these… I wonder what other yarn I have that would be acceptable…

Have a good weekend – and if you’re looking for some easy summer knitting I highly recommend a chemo cap!

Knitting 'n Poker

So….

Jennifer said that I write good posts while the boys are here playing poker… so as not to disappoint…. We’re back into the Tues. routine of me going somewhere and knitting and Matt having all of the guys over. Only tonight I’m back early ‘cause we weren’t “knitting” at one of our houses – also considerably less wine was consumed than normal so I can totally justify sitting here eating icecream right out of the carton (which Matt HATES. But he’s out there smoking a cigar so it balances out. We all have our vices.) I love that we have a patio so they can play outside… 6 guys are here and my house doesn’t smell like either feet or cigars. Bonus.

My brother’s dog just ran in here looking for attention and my little dog stood his ground beside my office chair…there was some growling involved (which for such a little dog sounds hilarious and not ferocious AT ALL.)….can we say jealousy issues? Yeah… I think it’s clear that Dexter has to remain an only-dog…despite how bad I want a puppy after meeting Dublin. Oh well…

I’m gonna go figure out how to DVR knitty gritty now….

And just so I don't have a post with no pictures here's a random one that I took of Nyhaven in Copenhagen, Denmark from when I spent a quarter studying there waaay back in '01. Random... I know... but it's one of my fav's.

Frogging lace sucks.

Note to self: Never get cocky. The second I get over-confident and think I know what I’m doing with this knitting stuff the knitting gods smite me.

So I sit down for the perfect afternoon of knitting and bad tv – Matt’s out on the boat fishing, Dexter has a bone, and I finally have the mental capacity to pick up the lace I hadn’t worked on in 2 weeks. So I take a look at it to try to figure out what row I’m on (mistake #1: not using a row counter. What the hell was I thinking with that one?! Just because I didn’t need one for the Adamas does not mean that I could handle this.) and I notice that half of the shawl looks like this:

When it should look like this:


And this is not a shawl I can fudge. This is for my grandma. My knitting guru. Someone who would not only notice the error but question why I didn’t go back and fix it. I had no choice but to rip. Which wouldn’t have been a horrible thing if I had used lifelines like I had done with the Adamas. (mistake #2: I thought that since I didn’t need the lifelines in Adamas there’s no way I’d need them with this, much simpler, lace pattern. HA! I didn’t know the cardinal rule of lace knitting - if you use lifelines you won’t need them. If you don’t use them you will.)

I’m sure I made the mistake about 13 rows back during the car knitting when we got out to get grub. I stopped mid row came back in and started knitting on a different row of the pattern. (Why, oh, why did I not use a row counter?)

Just breathe.


Because I had no lifeline (I am stoopid) I had to rip to the only point where I was certain of where I was in the pattern… the increase row…. 17 rows in total.

Keep breathing….


Ok. It’s back on the needles. That wasn’t so bad! I can do this….


So then I proceed to do the increase row, and knit the plain row afterwards… adding the stitch markers as I went…. And I get to the end of the round and I’m missing 4 stitches. (Mistake #3: not counting the stitches I just laboriously put back on the needles before starting up with the knitting again. Did I seriously think I had made NO mistakes in picking up 96 lace stitches??? That I didn’t miss at least a yarn over or 2?!)

I couldn’t handle ripping it out again. I just couldn’t do it. So I slipped each stitch individually onto the circular needle… lining up where the patterns should be with the rows below. Where the center stitch didn’t line up I knew I had missed a stitch somewhere…. luckily I found one that was just hanging there… but the other one had disappeared somewhere into the lace. From there on the next lace row whenever I had only 7 stitches between the markers instead of 8 I just omitted the knit 2 together. It’s not perfect… but it worked out ok.

Here’s the shawl now (after staying up until midnight knitting like a madwoman determined to get back to the point at which I started):


Notice the row counter? There is no lifeline, though. I’ll add one of those in after this pattern repeat.

It is possible that I will never learn…..

Congratulations, Dad!

10 years ago this week my dad started his own company. My mom equates this with jumping off a cliff… I was only 16 and just remember the whole thing being very, very scary. I can only imagine how scary it was for them with 2 teenagers to support/educate! But 10 years later it was all worth it. Thursday night we went to the anniversary party. It was really neat to see… and amazing to think about how far they’ve come. It’s no small task creating, sustaining, and growing any company over 10 years… but this is a manufacturing company in the US….Pretty phenomenal when you get right down to it.

Anyway at the party we presented the super-secret project that my brother, and I (and Matt!) have been sweating blood into over the past week:

Peerless Metal Products

It’s a webpage for their company. The link won’t work as it isn’t online just yet – we wanted my dad and his partner to have approval before we uploaded it. I’ll re-post the link sometime next week once we finalize and upload everything. Before Thursday they had no web presence… no domain name… none of that. And we designed, wrote, and completely created all of it for them from scratch. They were thrilled! It still needs some work but overall I’m really starting to be happy with the way it turned out. So yeah…

Congratulaions, Dad!

Where I’ve been….

Well… I’m so very very behind on the blogging thing. This week (and all of last weekend) was completely sucked down by the super-secret project that my brother and I are working on. That will be its own post soon, though. Until then here’s a pic from harborfest last weekend. We managed to get out on my dad’s boat for literally about 10 min before we got blown off the lake by a thunderstorm. It was enough to buzz a few of the tall ships, though!
And despite the complete lack of knitting time the Matt Sock has grown considerably:

It’s amazing what you can get done on the bus!

I’ve also been cooking and using things from my garden.


Those were the peppers I last posted about… they unfortunately did not become stuffed peppers (I didn’t have time b/c of the super secret project) but were excellent sautéed up over grilled brats! I also used this:

To make white chicken chili. It was faboo – I love fresh cilantro….although the Hungarian hot pepper was much, much hotter than I thought it was going to be! Good thing we like spicy food.

In other news tomorrow is our second rowing race. Apparently we’ve become the novice team to beat! If you’re in Cleveland and are looking for something fun do early, early Sat. morning our first race is at 8:10 AM. Our second race is at 9:40 but I won’t be on the boat for that one….Matt is coxing it, though!

Oh yeah... and congratulations goes to Jennifer for the newest addition to her family!

Have a great weekend!

Hot.

Well here’s some pepper pics I wanted to post on Friday:




Don’t they look yummy? I’m going to take your suggestions and attempt to make stuffed peppers tonight. I’ve never made those before but Matt is really excited about the idea. Should be fun.

Speaking of Matt…. Do you guys think these socks are manly enough for him?


I dunno… with the striping and all…. But I’m sure they will be super comphy and warm for him to wear in the winter so I guess I should get over the manly part (let’s hope he does, too!)

I haven’t knit at all this weekend – we’ve been holed up in our air-conditioned house with my brother working on a super-secret project. I can’t post about it until Friday but trust me, it’s pretty cool…

Stay cold!!

Peter Piper

So I took some nice pictures of my garden this morning but sadly did not have time to download them…. I’ll probably add them to this post tonight… Anyway…

In my garden I have 3, beautiful, wonderful, ready to be picked green peppers! These lucky peppers will be the first things that I’ve grown and eaten myself (herbs don’t count). I’m so excited! But I need something special to make with them… something summery and yummy that shows off how amazing home-grown veggies are. Any ideas?

I’m going to have hot peppers and tomatoes soon… and my cilantro is taller than the onions! I can almost taste fresh salsa…..

In other randomness… on Tues. my mom and I went to the sit and knit at Birds of a Feather. Thanks to Knitting Nurse for inviting us! Btw. if you check out her blog she has pics of the new planter she built - it was inspired by our patio! Which is just so flattering and cool... Anyways...It was a fun group… I’m looking forward to going again sometime soon.

Oh and there’s lots of stuff going on in Cleveland right now… Harborfest and the Ingenuity fest… and what’s super fun is if you watch this Spiderman 3 trailer the part where the big dude is busting out of the building is in Cleveland! Guess they used all of that footage they shot here…

Happy Friday!

Progress

Well I have lots to post about but no time to post….so I’ll just put up some shawl progress pics:

Here’s the one pic I took of our road trip this weekend… right before my camera battery died…. And I didn’t have the charger with me.


And here’s the shawl now:


It’s hard to get a good shot of a circular shawl since right now it’s basically just a lacy pouch. I did get over my annoyance of lace on double points, though. It’s really not that big of a deal once you get the hang of it!

Serious Stash Expansion

So blatantly copying Turtlegirl's idea I bring you Yarn P_rn Friday:

The weekend before last River Yarns was having a going out of business sale where everything was 50% off. I went with my mom and bought all sorts of fun stuff...

A really cute novelty yarn trimmed felted bag (and some doggie feet):
A large felted tote bag:

A Lotus Blossum Tank Top:

And an Hourglass Sweater:

I even picked up a pair of socks for Matt:

And some new tools:

Luckily I have nothing to do all summer but knit (HA! I have something major every weekend for the rest of the summer… not to mention rowing… and the fact that my house is trashed right now from last weekend… and my garden… and work being crazy right now…)

Oh and I started the cherry blossom shawl last night... lace on wood double points sucks. The tips aren't pointy enough to do the k2tog's and the yarn overs confuse me when they're between needles. I'm starting to get the hang of it though!

Have a great weekend!

Best. Weekend. Ever.

Yeah. All the pics I have are on the photoblog if you’re really interested… I’ll add to them as I get them from people (HINT! Send me your pics!)

So yeah. Everyone I’ve talked to said we were nuts to have this many people at our house for this long. But it’s easy to do when you have the best friends ever. Check out what they made for us:


Unfortunately this was the best pic I have of it... but it’s our very own cornhole (aka beanbag toss for those of you not from the ‘nati) set. It even has our monogram painted on it. They designed and made it for us!!! How nice is that!

Anyways… We started the weekend off at Don Pablos – it’s a tradition for the group of us hailing back to the days when we used to spend every single Tuesday afternoon drinking $3 margaritas there…. Aaaah college.


Notice my short hair and my green gable? I got so many compliments on the green gable btw – probably because once Matt had a few beers in him he kept telling people "Can you believe she made that?!"… but I don’t have a good pic of me in it so that will have to wait until my friends send more pics (HINT).

Then we went back to my place to grill out and play lawn games.

My brother brought a kiddie pool. He’s clearly a genius:


That night got a little crazy…

I stopped taking pictures somewhere around the hula hooping.

The next day the guys tried to go fishing but got blown off the lake… which worked out ‘cause we had a ball just playing games all day. And then we busted out the slip ‘n slide:


There’s all sorts of warnings on it that it’s not for adults and that if you’re over 110 lbs (HA!) you shouldn’t us it. Whatever.

Even the trip that we made to K-mart to buy more dishsoap for the slip ‘n slide was ridiculous amounts of fun…


Then Monday some people had to leave (sadness) and the rest of us went out on the boat to swim and attempt to waterski. Matt’s the only one out of the group of us who can even get up on the skis but it’s fun to try!

Cannonball!

And the obligitory group boat shot… I had no idea that I was still rockin’ the sweet farmer’s tan from Memorial Day.

That night we partied it up Osam style over on the east side. But I have no pictures of that yet (HINT). True to form Lori Beth and I invented/inspired a new martini that will soon be on the Fairmont’s martini list. According to our waiter (who at first thought we were nuts) "it’s GD delicious!" It will either be called the rocket pop, the bluez, or blue rain… so if you’re ever out that way you’ll have to check that out.

Tuesday everyone had to go home. Our house feels weirdly huge and empty now…and I don’t think the dog has been out of his bed since everyone left. It was a great weekend and I’m pretty sure everyone had a great time… In fact the group decided that since the fourth is on a Wed. next year we’re all going to take Thurs. & Fri. off…

Best. Tradition. Ever.