Kitchen Knits

So, I received the most delightful surprise in my mailbox the other day - a wonderful set of kitchen hand-knits:

They're lovely and much needed, plus they add color to my very color-less place.  

My heartfelt thanks to Rose the Gypsy.  Great timing.  Very thoughtful.  Wonderfully useful.

In the meantime, I finished the fishnet stole/scarf.  It's blocking at the moment, on purple towels, so the color is a little skewed, but I believe it will serve its purpose well, which is to have a little something that goes with everything.  Plus, this is my second FO for 2013 - woot!  

Unfortunately, Auntie is not doing very well, so I am not at my place using the new kitchen set at the moment.  Soon.  No more chemo, thank goodness she's done with that.  With any luck, she'll be having surgery in a couple of weeks and on her way to full recovery afterward.

New Year's Knitting

Here's the first of my 12 from Stash in 2013- a hat for Boy.  I had an extra hank of black washable worsted for just this thing (Boy does not get anything made with fancy yarn any more).

This will be done soon...it's a fishnet pattern in a very colorful yarn.  The idea was to have something that would go with everything.  I'm very interested to see how it blocks out.  (Hopefully it will be blocking on Boy's bed next weekend after he returns to Chicago Tuesday).

This is a stealth project - to be done for someone who stalks the blog and belongs to Ravelry, so no details.  The yarn was purchased at Borealis before it closed.  It has to be done by the end of April.  I find that I have so little knitting time these days, I'm not going to take any chances, which is why I'm allowing myself nearly four months for a project that is not really that big of a deal.

I also have a pair of socks OTN (no surprise), so that gives me four of the twelve to be done from existing stash/WIPs.  Doable?  I hope so.

For Yarnover I signed up for the dinner the night before and "Knitting Happily Ever After - Ergonomics for Knitters" with Carson Demers.  

I'm all for Happily Ever After!

2013 Goals

I had a lot of big goals last year, and I accomplished them.  This year has a much more modest list.

*Take a trip that is not child- or work-related

*Join the YWCA across the street (not in January)

*Start riding a bike places (when the weather is better - I'm not interested in winter biking)

*Knit twelve things from stash yarn.  This was inspired by Chelsea

*Take three more classes at the Apple store

*Go through at least one box of my mother's stuff each month

*Wag more, bark less

I did manage to finish my Sketchbook recently - the front and back covers posted here.  I'm thinking of going to New York to visit the Brooklyn Art Library, among other places.

Merry Christmas

 Images from Christmas past and present.

Books

I just finished reading my first free-copy-from-LibraryThing book, Interloper at Glencoe.  It was a fun read.  I like historical fiction, and time travel is always entertaining.  This book combined the two well, and the historical event was both obscure and interesting to me.  It is only available in electronic format, I believe.  Check here if you're interested in learning more.


On the home front, I had my windows measured for blinds.  Can't wait to get rid of the hideous drapes (they are truly, spectacularly ugly).  The woman who came to measure said, "I see you're a knitter.  My daughter is a knitter.  She recently moved home because she's going back to school, and when I saw all that yarn I said, 'No more yarn purchases until you use some of this up!'"  I just smiled.

Boy-child is home and helping with the bookcases and unpacking the books.  I even skipped Drunken Knit Night I was so excited to be making such great progress.  The place actually feels like it's mine now.

Those big boxes in the middle toward the left are glass doors.  I'm leaning away from the doors at this point; I think I'll take them back.  I'll have more room for growth that way, and it will be an uninterrupted wall of books :-)


I was at a training seminar for work last week.  They had those blue mints that you used to see in the 1960s, if I remember right.  It was kind of cool.

Cool mints.  Get it?  Really though, it was weirdly nostalgic.