Flying Geese Afghan...

...is finished!
Yarn: Peaches & Creme solids and ombres
Needles: size 6
Triangles: 306
Finished size: approx 50" x 36"
Pattern: Flying Geese Blanket by Ann Hahn Beuchner from Mason-Dixon Knitting
Happiness Level: 4 smilies :) :) :) :)

Charity Knitting Spotlight, part 2

...in which I continue to natter on about charity knitting...

Remember this sweater? Well it finally got mailed off to Knit for Kids. I don't really remember how long it took me to knit it--those were the days pre-Ravelry before I could easily record the start and end dates of my projects--but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say it took longer to get it to the post office than it took to knit! Which brings me to:

Reasons to knit for charity, 4-5:
4. If the charity is in another city/state/country and you have to mail it, it gives you a chance to work on your follow-through for getting things out the door and to the post office.
5. Knitting for charity gives you the chance to learn new knitting skills, stitch patterns, etc. while helping someone else be warmer and feel loved.

Errata

Due to circumstances and technology beyond my control, the "Charity Knitting Spotlight, part 1" post ended up being posted before it was completed, and I can't seem to change anything in it. I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with Tulip the Cat sitting between me and the keyboard.

So, here's what I left out:
The gals at Mason-Dixon Knitting will be collecting the tiny hats for mailing to London, so check with them for mailing info. Or show up at Stitch & Pitch at Shea Stadium on the 25th. It could happen.

And if you need further inspiration, watch this video and realize that those cute little ladies knit faster than you!

Or you can just imagine Miss Marple feeling chilly in January.

Charity Knitting Spotlight, part 1

...in which I natter on about the why and for whom of knitting for charities...

Behold the tiny hat with big plans to keep older Brits warm in the winter!


thebigknit2008

Reasons to knit for charity, 1-3:
1. As Scrooge's partner Marley said, "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business." Or, in other words, if we're put here to help our fellow men, women and children, then why not knit for them?
2. Small projects like the Big Knit tiny hats don't take much time or yarn, but can be really fun.
3. Charity knitting like the Big Knit encourage the spread of knitting know-how.

Books, books, books

Found this on StarKnits, and felt compelled to play:) Not sure how some of these books made the list, but then, I'm a book snob. Resisting urge to send a list of books that should have made the list to the Nat'l Endowment for the Arts, with lots of Anthony Trollope, some P.G.Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, and Jan Karon. And HELLO? Where is the Mark Twain??

The National Endowment for the Arts believes that the average American has read only 6 of the books on the list below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read only 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen--probably my fave of Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens--I tried to read this, does that count??
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro great movie, great soundtrack, haven't read it
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, all of them!)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl the org. movie is my fave.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Onward to 2010

Bob Costas called and said he's got jetlag, so I've got to do my own Ravelympic update.

SuperCraftyDancerGirl brought home 4 medals in 3 events. You've seen her performance in the Free-For-All Freestyle and one from WIP's Wrestling. Here's another WIPs Wrestling




and one HatDash:
In addition to my WIPs Wrestling medal for the Shawl to end all Shawls, I got one for this Springy scarf:


And this little retro number won me a medal in the Home Stuff Hammerthrow:



And lastly, Ravelympic gold in the Scarf Stroke:


Now, in addition to waiting for our endorsement deals, we're gearing up for Top Secret Christmas knitting. Which is a real stretch at the end of August when the heat index is 91 degrees at 9 am.

Ravelympic Me

Finally! Thanks to the magic of the Ravelympics, I have completed the Shawl to End All Shawls. It's long, luxurious, and way to hot to use just yet. It's even a bit too hot to knit, but I guess that's what ceiling fans are all about, right?

Thank you to all who organized the Ravelympics and gave me the motivation I needed to get this monstrosity off the needles and into the wardrobe!

Ravelympics are in the Bag

Doesn't this look like some scene from a pretty little French village? Either that or the heat is getting to me! This great picture is brought to you by the SuperCraftyDancerGirl, who has completed this bag in the WIP's Wrestling event.

First across the finish line...

...is SuperCraftyDancerGirl, with her very own pair of fingerless gloves made from her very own pattern. She's made some for friends, but this pair was for her, and it was the first completed Ravelympics event in our household.



Now she and I both are remembering why our other projects had been languishing unfinished for so long. Let's just say we are living illustrations of slogging. Ravelympics spirit and determination are strong, though, so expect to see completed projects in a few days!

Here is her first medal:


And I'm surprised at how pleased I am to hear things like this from JrBravesFanatic:

"Mom, did you know it's almost 1:00 am in Beijing?"
"Hey, does anyone know where the other badminton racket is?"
"Have you seen my archery target?"

Ahh... Olympics!

Ravelympics

Knitting fans everywhere are gearing up for the first ever Ravelympics. Ok, maybe not, but WE are and that's what matters most, right?



In case you haven't heard, the "real" Olympics start this Friday in Beijing, (a word that is cool because of all those dots), and realistically, this affects about .0001% of the actual population. I mean, how many of us really know an Olympian?? Which may explain why you may not have heard that the Olympics start this week. Hello! BUT. I think it's safe to say that everyone knows someone, who at least knows someone, who knits--or at least crochets. Which means that some of that number are bound to be participating in a Knitting Olympics of some sort, and if they're lucky, the Ravelympics in particular. If I've not publicly stated on this blog how great I think Ravelry is, then let me just say it now. I think Ravelry is great! The ability to cross-reference a pattern or yarn with thousands of other knitters who are using that pattern or yarn, is power, pure fiber power.

As for the Ravelympics, we on Team Kudzu (it's tough, pervasive, found in the South, and hard to get rid of--why didn't we consider it as a mascot before now??) are in training for the opening ceremonies this Friday. In Beijing, that's 8:00 P.M., and here, that's 8:00 A.M. Which just further illustrates what I'm always saying about knitting being so educational--we had to find out what time it would be here when it's starting time there, which led to discussions about time zones and date lines and our whole wacky world. So, what all this meant to us in practical terms (ie, what's this got to do with knitting?), is that we can start our Ravelympics events at 8:00 AM our time.

Events, you ask? What events? Well, SuperCraftyDancerGirl and I are both participating in the WIPs Wrestling Event, which means that projects that have been languishing (is that ever a good word to use in South Carolina in August!) will get brought out and, hopefully, finished by the end of the Olympics. For me it's a certain Shawl, and for her it's a market bag that went into hibernation when a toddler pulled her knitting needle out of all the stitches. I have to mention that SCDG handled this unfortunate event with amazing grace and maturity beyond her years. I think I might have passed out if it had been me!

I will also be participating in the ScarfStroke Event, knitting a "V for Victory" scarf from the National WWII Museum. If I didn't hate humidity so much I'd want to work there. SCDG is also participating in the FreeForAllFreestyle Event, creating some fingerless gloves. Because that's the kind of knitter she is, and I cannot take any credit for it--I prefer to follow a pattern or at least start with one.

So if you're reading this and you're on Ravelry and you haven't signed up for the Ravelympics yet, you'd better get busy! There is a deadline, after all. And while I can't guarantee daily updates or even media coverage, we will keep you posted on our events, our projects and our Ravelympic adventure.

Five more

Five More Easy Rules for Complicating the Simplest of Endeavors:

1) Find a dozen other "must knit now" patterns while I'm working on a big project. Can you say, short attention span? Did you know that if I follow the original pattern, my The Geese, They Are A-Flyin' Afghan will consist of 306 tiny triangles? I did that math in my head, then checked it with a calculator when the number came out so large.



2) Get through the check-out line at Publix and realize I forgot sliced turkey. Do I leave everything and run back to the deli, risking the ire of those waiting in line behind me? Or do I come back another day, knowing full well that it's too hot to get back out and run another errand, and what will probably happen is that lunches will consist of whatever we can scrape together from the pantry and fridge for the next week? Yep, I chose the road less traveled and now we're out of corn dogs, too.

3) Plan a pool or beach outing and it doesn't rain, it monsoons. Is that a verb? SuperCraftyDancerGirl sent me a long list of "you know you're from South Carolina when..." and this was on it: You have actually uttered the phrase "It's too hot to go to the pool".
And I honestly thought--you mean everyone doesn't say that??

4) Clean up after geriatric cats. Yes, animal lovers, I know they are worth the effort, but Clarence the Well Advanced in Years can make some serious messes. Often.

5) Be reminded that I never had a banana seat on my bicycle as a child. Thanks, Kay! You, too, Jani!

6) Land on a blog and find out that I not only missed entering the contest, but the prize was a LIFE-TIME SUPPLY OF YARN AND NEEDLES! Oh, the humanity!

Today's quote(s)

Today's quotes are from Amelia Earhart, born on this day in 1898. I've always admired her--flying cool planes, setting records, lunching with Eleanor Roosevelt.

She said:
"The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship."

She also said these things, which made me think of knitting:
"It is far easier to start something than it is to finish it." (Alpaca shawls on small needles, for example)

"Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done." (Like, say, knitting slip covers for chairs)

"Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price." (As is knitting, and some really lush yarn)

Twelve Signs of Summer

1) It takes more than one trip to water all the flower pots on my front porch.
2) The mosquitoes have joined forces and are working in shifts to make sure they are available to annoy us at all hours.
3) The grass is as high as an elephant's eye, thanks to the daily rain deluge.
---ok, daHubby just cut the grass, so we'll just say it's achingly green from all the rain---
4) There are beach towels and swim suits drying on the back porch.
5) Tomatoes! Lemonade! Watermelon!
6) Ceiling fans are all turned to high.
7) The cats are taking long lazy naps. Oh, wait, they do that all year.
8) New episodes of Monk and Psych.
9) It's too hot to knit with alpaca.
10) The boys are watching a lot of baseball. Oh, wait, they do that all year. (love you guys!)
11) Two words: heat index.
12) The countdown has begun...only 2 more months till the weather cools off!

Many Happy Returns of Degas' Birthday

No, it's not my daughter and her friends, it's "The Dance Class" by Edgar Degas, born on this day in 1834 in Paris. Happy Birthday to one of my favorite painters.

Yeah, I'm old-fashioned, what of it??

95 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Superior Take the test!

Are my eyes really brown?

Over the years, I find I've become increasingly less political. Sometimes I'd rather just "tend to my knitting", if you know what I mean. But, this is an election year---it feels more like an election DECADE---and it seems that most everyone is endorsing one side or the other.

Although I was tempted to put bumper stickers representing candidates from both sides of the aisle on my vehicle, they started dropping out of the race at alarming rate, and it wasn't funny anymore.

So, after having examined the various candidates and their qualifications, such as they are, it is time to decide. Without further ado (mostly because JrBravesFanatic would like to go to Webkinz world now, please) here is candidate "...by what we give" endorses for 2008:



"I stick my neck out for nobody."

Peer Pressure

I am surrounded by people knitting lace, mostly scarves, both in the real and virtual worlds of knitting. There's the beautiful, popular Lace Ribbon Scarf, the Mist Lace Scarf, and the
Feather and Fan. I felt myself crumbling to the peer pressure, and after a few false starts am 51 rows into the Lace Ribbon scarf. Here are some things I've learned:

1) I can read a chart! I finally figured it out! Go me!

2) The row counter is my friend.

3) The life-line is my other friend.

4) I can't knit lace if there are human beings around--they will inevitably ask a question, fuss at their sibling or make some sort of distracting sound, necessitating the use of #3.

5) While the yarn I'm using has beauty that will be almost impossible to truly capture in a photo, it's 100% merino wool and it's summer in South Carolina. It makes my hands hot just contemplate.

6) There's a reason this is a popular pattern (1300+ Ravelry-ites and counting). It's gorgeous. Even when I do it.

Who knew?

I'm not sure what they used to decide this, but who am I to argue with a computer-generated Blog Readability test??

Dish cloths and wash cloths and bags, oh my!

Here's one for me and my kitchen:


I don't know why, but Log Cabin knitting is so soothing.

And here's one for daHubby:



These guys were subconsciously adapted from the Big Bad Baby Blanket pattern, pix of which can be seen here, and daHubby's was finished on WWKiP Day.

And then there's this one that turned out too long:



And then there are the bags...both from the Elisa's Nest pattern:





Both bags have found homes elsewhere, so I'm knitting one for myself--slowly!

Me:"And what shall we name your little pet rabbit?"

Her:"We shall name him....celery!"

Him: "No! No vegetables!"

Me: (snicker, snicker, go to blog)


The object of the discussion: