Sunday, September 26, 2021

Fright Club Hat

 Hi all -

Fall is in the air. It's starting to cool off here and the leaves are starting to turn. It's a beautiful time of year! Here is a picture of the aspen grove on my property right now:

The colors are more beautiful than I could capture on my camera! And to show how beautiful my property is, here's one of the boulders framed by a lone aspen tree:

And the beautiful view from my yard, including a bit of the pond across the street and a couple of the ridges just south of me:

I find it all breathtaking! I just wish the pictures could come close to what it looks like in person!

The main thing I've been working on is the smaller Jimmy Beans Wool (JBW) Fright Club project. Every year, JBW puts together a couple of "advent" calendar projects for Halloween that they call their fright club. There is a larger calendar that has 31 little surprises that you can open up each day in October, and there is a smaller project that has 13 little surprises. I usually get both projects because I think they're a lot of fun. Since I have the larger project to do in October, I decided to do the smaller project in September. The smaller project is the All Treats, No Tricks hat designed by Amy Gunderson. The surprises for this club came in cute little boxes:

Fright Club Boxes

Most of the boxes contained little balls of yarn for knitting the hat, but several fun surprises were also mixed in:

Halloween Tag for Hat on Day 4

Halloween Stitch Marker Necklace on Day 7

Candy and Fake Tattoo on Day 10

Finishing Supplies on Day 13

The project is a hat. I chose the bright colorway:

All Treats, No Tricks

This is a stranded colorwork pattern, which isn't my favorite technique but I'm getting better at it. Here's how my stranding looks on the inside:

 

All Treats, No Tricks Inside
It has a cool double brim that has ribbing on the inside to keep the hat secure.

 

All Treats, No Tricks Inside Ribbing
And I put the tag from day 4 on the brim for some extra jazz. I'll probably get a fun fake-fur pom pom to put on the top. Grocery Girls has a black pom pom with multicolored highlights that I think would look really cute. I just have to get around to ordering it (and hope it's in stock).....

The other knitting project I've been working on is my Comfort Fade Cardi designed by Andrea Mowry. I've got the right sleeve finished and am now working on the left sleeve:

Comfort Fade Cardi
After I finish the sleeve, it'll be on to the collar/front band. That part will take a while since it's got a shawl collar, which will be quite a bit of knitting.

I've also been really into hand embroidery lately. I've had my Birds on Parade bag kit, designed by Sue Spargo, sitting around for a while so I decided t finish it up. I had finished the applique and embroidery called for in the pattern a while ago and had decided to add some extra applique and embroidery on the back of the bag since it seemed like a waste to not decorate that space. I just had a little bit more embroider to do on the back, then I was able to sew the pieces together into a bag. Here's the front of the bag from the pattern:

Birds on Parade Front

And here's what I added to the back. It's so hard to decide when to stop with the hand embroidery!

Birds on Parade Back

And, just to be complete, a peek at the inside:

Birds on Parade Inside

I decided to use some of my own fabric for the lining rather than using the fabric that came in the kit because the supplied fabric was directional, but was cut so that it would be sideways inside the bag and that bothered me. I also changed the way the bag was constructed from the directions in the pattern. The pattern directions would have resulted in raw edges inside the bag and I like a clean lining. It was a pain to construct the bag my way because the outside was designed as a single piece, but I figured it out and really like the result.

The other embroidery I've been working on is a pair of pre-marked pillowcases. I picked these up at Joann's as a little prize for myself on my birthday while I was in Kansas City. I'm still working on the first pillowcase:

Retro Cats Pillowcase

It's been kind of fun working on an old-fashioned project and I think it'll be fun to sleep with these!

Nancy


Tuesday, September 7, 2021

I'm Back....

 Hi all -

Sorry for the long absence. It ended up being a long summer for me. My biggest concerns were my sister and Lance. 

My sister has had a lot of knee pain for several years and she finally started looking at knee replacement surgery. She is the one who lost her husband in January, so she is newly living alone. So I wanted to be there to help her out after the surgery. She was able to get the surgery scheduled for early August and I came out to help her for 5 weeks. Luckily she was able to schedule it so that her daughter, who is a traveling nurse, was able to be there, too, to help out. I mostly took care of the dogs and encouraging my sister to do her PT while her daughter mostly took care of the nursing. The first week after the surgery was a bit tough because the drugs, the pain and the worry made my sister a bit grumpy, and she can be pretty grumpy when she wants. I think one of the things that got to her was the in-home PT person used the worry about not breaking up the scar tissue in time as an "encouragement" for her to do her exercises. She would say that she had to work hard to break that up because otherwise it would be permanent and the replacement would be a waste of time. What she didn't say was the time period where you need to worry, which ended up being on the order of 6-8 weeks rather than 6-8 days. Once we realized this and once my sister started making progress, things got a lot better and it was a wonderful visit. My sister had been thinking about getting both knees done at once since she's a "get it over with" type of person, but she ended up being very glad that she decided on one at a time for this! She's doing incredible now and is working on scheduling her other knee. She's hoping to get it done in December so it counts towards this year's insurance to save money.

Lance is doing really well, but there are always more concerns and more work as he gets older. He's now 14.5 or 15 years old (he was a stray so we don't know exactly) and he has degenerative myelopathy, which is a spinal cord disease that makes his back legs weaker and weaker. So he has a difficult time walking and has trouble with incontinence. To add to the fun, he also had a liver biopsy earlier this summer. It's pretty major surgery for a dog his age, but the vet had found a possibly-cancerous liver nodule during an ultrasound and it was early enough that he could remove that nodule before it could spread so we did it. It turned out that it was benign. The first week after the surgery was tough because, although he ate at first when he got home, he stopped eating after a day or so and ended up losing 3 lbs in a couple of day. He also couldn't use his back legs at all for a couple of days and his incontinence was out of control. We ended up taking him off of the after-surgery meds and he got back to his usual self.

Because this just wasn't enough, my washing machine decided to break down and it took about a month for them to be able to deliver my new one. I live in the mountains so delivery trucks only come up here once a week so it can be hard to schedule. And my house was hit by lightning which knocked out everything that was connected to the outside world -- internet, land line and satellite TV. It took about a month to get everything replaced and set back up. But we're back to normal now!

On the plus side for Lance, I was talking to the lady at the Post Office one day and we talked about how expensive dogs are as they get older. I mentioned that Lance had DM and she told me that she had a doggy wheelchair that someone had given her for her dog, who passed away earlier this year, and she had been looking for someone to pass it on to. It turned out to be the perfect size for Lance so she gave it to us. We got it just before going to Kansas City, so I was able to teach Lance how to use it on flat land before coming back home to use it on rougher terrain. Here is a picture that my niece took when she passed us on a walk one day:

It's not a great picture, but you get the idea. The wheelchair is designed so that it supports his back end, but he can still use his back legs a bit so they get exercised. It's not something that he uses all the time because we want him to use has back legs as much as possible and it's not practical in the house or in my yard, but it does allow us to go for short walks again.

But that's enough personal stuff. Now I can share what little I've been working on. The biggest project I've been working on is my Open Minds MKAL shawl designed by Laura Nelkin. An MKAL is a "Mystery Knit-Along" which is a knitting project where you don't know what you're making but you get a little piece of the pattern periodically until you have the project finished and finally see what it looks like. Some people chose their own yarn based on Laura's guidelines, but Laura also offered some kits and I was able to snag one of those. I kept up fine at the beginning, but got behind when I visited my family for a week in the spring and haven't finished the project yet (story of my life....). This pattern consists of 6 "clues." Here is my shawl after the first clue:

Open Minds -- Clue 1

And here it is after the second clue:

Open Minds -- Clue 2

The third clue was the mirror image of the second:

Open Minds -- Clue 3

This is where I fell behind. So I started getting the clues and seeing how the shawl went together, without actually knitting it. Based on the construction, I decided to skip clues 4 and 5 and go on to clue 6, which fills in the back of the shawl:

Open Minds -- Clues 1, 2, 3 and 6

The reason I did this is because clue 6 uses a specific amount of yarn while clues 4 and 5 are written so that you can use up your yarn. You are told to reserve a specific weight of yarn for clue 6, but by doing clue 6 first I didn't have to fudge that measurement so should be able to use more of my yarn than I could have by following the clues in order. Now I just need to finish up.....

I also made some more progress on my Comfort Fade Cardi designed by Andrea Mowry. I've finished the body and still need to add the sleeves and the collar. Here is the front of the cardigan:

Comfort Fade Cardi -- front

And here is the back:

Comfort Fade Cardi -- back

I hope to make more progress on this soon because I'm really loving how it's turning out!

My final knitting project is the Rock & Roll Scarf designed by Amy Gunderson:

Rock & Roll Scarf
 I started working on this because I needed an easy project to work on while at my sister's house. This is a simple pattern, but each row takes a while because it's knit across the scarf rather than end-to-end so there are 500 stitches on the needles. I'm making this a little bit wider than specified in the pattern because I want to use up as much yarn as possible. I have about 6 more stripes and I'll be done.

I also did a little bit of sewing. A friend of mine is retiring after working 40 years at NCAR, where I worked for 23 years. As a retirement gift, I decided to make her a project bag. She loves chickens and used to raise them so I used some chicken fabric for the bag:

Chicken Bag -- outside
Chicken Bag -- lining

I think she's going to love this!

Well, that's all for now. I'll try to keep in touch better in the coming weeks.

Nancy