After two weeks on the needles (small, very, very small..size 3 circular needles), the pretty blue Leafprints Shawlette by Anne Hanson is completed. YEA! (Note to self: purchased here)
The picture above shows the shawl after completing Chart A, and ready to begin Chart B.
The edging (shown above) was clever in its execution. There was a bind off of two stitches every fourth row.
Its picture was taken this morning after being washed and blocked yesterday. Here is the link for Soak, a product for bathing woolen objects. It could have been further stretched since its scallops look like more of a wave than a tip.
Another note to self: ensure that at LEAST 400 yd of fiber is on hand to make this shawl. I will make this again.
This is the Leafprints Shawlette shown on Patternfish ... that lucky mannequin.
Beverly hosts Pink Saturday. If you go here, you can see lots of pinks from bloggers who participate.
Here is my contribution, a double pink hollyhock:
Now that fall is here, the hollyhocks are a little worse for wear. Those dang leaf hoppers have been getting to the leaves. Believe it or not, just two days ago I found a leaf hopper and took his picture before he flew off to the cottonwood tree, never to be seen again. This is his 15 minutes of fame:
Here is the very chunky, heavy sweater just finished from the sweater design named ICED by Carol Feller. The pattern is free and can be found here.
It took 8 skeins of chunky weight Lamb's Pride wool (85% wool, 15% mohair). And after all that knitting and pattern revision, I ended up with only 27 inches of leftover yarn. That is right living.
See that yarn? That is the 27 inch left-over tail end from the 8th skein. (Mug by Jenny the Potter.)
It was a bit large, so I threw it into the dryer while it was still damp from water blocking. That helped it come down a bit to size, but the front of the sweater has an uneven edge, likely because I have no chest!
Revision details can be found on Ravelry here. I would knit this up again sometime, but it will be a long sometime before I do it again due to the bulkiness of the project.
A link for summer garden bounty use:... click here
(all pictures by Susan Chang for NPR)
The garden season will end soon enough, in a fanfare of potatoes and squashes and pumpkins and gourds. As the weather gets colder, they get starchier and more like breads themselves, so it takes less and less effort — a little egg and sugar to sweeten and bind them — to get them to shine in a loaf pan.
Quick Zucchini, Carrot and Pumpkin Breads all found here.
In looking at artists' works on the internet, I came across Urban Sketchers and some beautiful pictures. You might find some of the artists' work exceptionally appealing.
Urban Sketchers is a web site that features artwork from over 100 invited artists from 30 different countries. Imaginative, delightful images are found there; it is an absorbing site and a feast for the eyes.
Above is a watercolor from Caroline who lives in Brittany. Her blog is An English Artist in Brittany, where she shows some of her watercolors. She says about this piece:
This beautiful 'maison de maitre' at Dinard was built in the late eighteen-hundreds and is called 'Les Roches Brunes'. It was bequeathed to the town and exhibitions are now held here.
Here is a sketch by Rob entitled Budenfest found here, painted at a train station in Germany on September 10, 2011.
And below is another sketch by Rob from May, 2011, found here on Urban Sketchers where he writes:
It's been a very dry and warm spring in southern Germany this year. I've been zipping around on my little 50 cc scooter with my sketchbook, looking for little scenes like this to enjoy and draw. I pulled off the road at this spot near the village of Hertingen, watching a tractor plowing up the dry soil and enjoying a field of buttercups before me. Warm. Dry. Wonderful!
I love the fluidity and forcefulness, the bold 3-dimensionality, adventurous complexity and all the fun games that are played with curved vs flat surfaces and all the crazy decoration. Today while tidying up my study/studio I came across a print out of a photo I took in Rome last year of a building that I didn't have the energy to sketch at the time.
Judy from the Netherlands sketched this on September 9, 2011. She can be found at her blog where her sketch was featured here where she said...
The room is filled with the colours of the cyclamen. The flowers are totally odourless but when I let their colour "bleed" into the background, I always feel that I am painting flower fragrance.
Below is a scanned copy of my watercolor worksheet. If you are not familiar with this "painting tool" mixture of colors on a grid, it is merely the original color of a certain named color down the left hand side of the page with its associated color painted to the right of the name. Across the top, in the same order, are those same colors. By mixing the colors, one on top of the other (after each color dab has thoroughly dried), the resulting hues are the combination of the two colors listed on the chart, going from left to right and top to bottom. In using this worksheet, one never needs to wonder exactly what shade will result in the mixing of colors.
This is one of my watercolors from 2001 painted from a photo I took before a luncheon meal outside Volterra, Italy:
This is one of my watercolors from a vacation in Greece in 2001:
(size 11" x 14")
And thus concludes a blog foray into sketch art from various climes and times.
After almost nineteen years in the restaurant business, the last two in which she co-managed a restaurant of 120 employees, our younger daughter was laid off this week. And are there any new jobs out there in the marketplace for her? According to The Washington Post:
The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims rose by 2,000 to 414,000 for the week ending Sept. 3. The department said last week that no net jobs were created in August.
(picture courtesy of CBS News)
Last night's speech, in which President Obama said "PASS THIS BILL" (the $447 billion American Jobs Act proposal) more times than I bothered to count, was disappointing and disingenuous. In less than 45 seconds:
Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due. Today’s Congress cannot bind a later one for future spending. A future Congress could simply reverse it.
Currently, roughly all federal taxes and other revenues are consumed in spending on various federal benefit programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, farm subsidies and other social-assistance programs and payments on the national debt. Pretty much everything else is done on credit with borrowed money.
So there is no guarantee that programs that clearly will increase annual deficits in the near term will be paid for in the long term.
... then provided a joint session of Congress with a broadly ambitious list of goals that sounded to many people very much like a lot more spending, like, say, the $787 billion economic stimulus bill of 2009 that didn't stimulate much of anything except that national debt.
I am so disheartened for my daughter Heidy. She is a hard worker and I have been told by many of her co-workers that she rules fairly and with a velvet hammer. Hopefully, she can obtain another position she likes and in which she will prosper.
My thoughts are with all those seeking work.
"It's recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your own." Harry S. Truman
The weekend was spent with our daughter and SIL in York, SC. Julie is feeling just fine, thank you, and is visited at home three times a week by an RN, and less than a dozen times a week by a CNA. Her CA prognosis is up in the air, as a PET scan will be reviewed by the tumor board this week. Her chemo has been suspended for a while as her tumors have responded well to the drugs.
We celebrated her birthday with presents, a lunch in Rock Hill, SC and champagne. This is Julie:
Julie, Jack, Gene and Jack's dad on their porch...very hot and very humid!
Historic York and its ancient cemetery and tombstones gave a glimpse into the past and occupied some of our hot and humid time in the outdoors. Next time, I will take pencil and paper for rubbings so I can get the oldest dates on the marble that have been obscured by moss and the ravages of weather.
Engraving on the stone above shows that Isabella Davis died in 1834, a consort of the Reverend William C. Davis. A consort? That was odd wording, but she would have been born in 1767, so terms were different back then. (Mrs. Davis would certainly not know what a microwave, airplane, digital clock, battery or the internet was, so why do I think the term "consort" is odd?)
To round out the history of the graveyard, a Civil War veteran's stone:
Kudzu, originally imported from the Orient to prevent soil erosition, is an invasive species in the South, growing a foot a day under optimal conditions. This picture showing kudzu covering both land and power lines is around the corner from Julie and Jack's house:
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Historic homes abound in York, SC, population of about 10,000 people. Here are a few old homes on Congress Avenue:
Now we are home. The brief interruption in the South did allow one visit to a Pineville, NC yarn shop. Yes, the credit card was used for some pettable and pretty fibers at The Yarn Shop by Rainy Day Creations in Pineville.
We had a Mexican Sunday lunch that was pretty tasty, IMHO. The husband does most of the cooking, but he cooks only what HE likes. So when I have a hankering for Southern food or Mexican food, or desserts, or anything with more than a few ingredients in a longer recipe, I do the cooking.
Here was our lunch, based loosely on recipes for Chicken Pablano found at this site, and Mexican Fried Rice found at this site, and pinto beans, and tortillas.
Start out with roasted, peeled, seeded and chopped pablano peppers:
For a quick cream sauce to add to chicken that has been browned and cooked in garlic and onions with a bit of chicken sauce and white wine and herbs and S&P, just mix sour cream with the chopped pablano peppers and a bit of cumin for seasoning. Put this atop the cooked chicken in the skillet for about five minutes, or long enough to warm up the sour cream.
Actually, the entree was the easiest part of the meal. Start off by cooking the pinto beans (soaked overnight, but not necessary) with a few slices of bacon, a fresh chopped tomato, cilantro, chopped onions, chopped garlic, chili seasoning, and S&P. It takes around two hours on a low stove top burner to take out the crunch in the beans.
And then there was the rice, browned in a skillet with bacon, chopped garlic, and chopped tomatoes prior to adding the water. I used 1 1/2 cups white rice and about 2 cups water after browning the rice and vegetables and cooked it while covered for about 20 minutes. I also added a can of corn after the rice cooked. Peas and carrots could be added, too. And don't forget to season with all the herbs and spices you like!
(Pretend there is cilantro atop the rice. It would have made a better pictorial essay.)
Knitty Magazine had a free pattern several years ago called "Iced", a sweater knit up mostly in stockinette stitch. A free downloadable pattern can be found here. It uses chunky yarn and is a quick knit. Designer Carol Feller says of her pattern:
I knit this cardigan for my holiday. It was designed to be loose, casual and in a neutral color so that I could wear it with everything. I like to pack light and going to Florida, I didn’t want to bring more than one warm cover up.
However all did not go according to plan. I did bring this cardigan on holiday with me and I also took some very nice photos on the beach with it. What I wasn’t planning on, though, was my sister-in-law. Nicki came to visit, picked up the cardigan and tried it on. It was a perfect match and I just had to give it to her.
Nice sister-in-law!
This is a picture of a completed Iced sweater from the designer's Ravelry page:
I am knitting it up in Lamb's Pride Chunky in the Ink Blue colorway. Here is the cardigan in progress:
Next up on the sewing table is McCall's Pattern 6241. Using jersey fabric, it will be a mainstay in the wardrobe. And all those shawls and kerchiefs will have a nice under layer.
But there are people to see, places to go, things to see before I can get back to these projects. Enjoy your day!
"If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.” Katherine Hepburn
Abraham Verghese brought the story of the beggar's slippers to my attention in Cutting for Stone. It is worth a reprise here. (Chapter 29 is the reference point for this story.)
Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision. At last, even he couldn't stomach the sight of them. But his every attempt to get rid of his slippers ended in disaster: when he tossed them out of his window they landed on the head of a pregnant woman who miscarried, and Abu Kassem was thrown in jail; when he dropped them in the canal, the slippers choked off the main drain and caused flooding. Off Abu Kassem went to jail...Abu Kassem might as well build a special room for his slippers.. Why try to lose them? He'll never escape. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or don't sow, becomes part of your destiny.
Abraham Verghese has one of his characters say this regarding the topic of making up for absences:
I made up for...(father's)... absence by hoarding knowledge, skills, seeking praise. What I finally understood ...is that neither my sister nor I realized that my father's absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves...The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then your'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but our omissions, become our destiny. (Cutting for Stone, Chapter 29)
Over the years, I have tried to rid myself of many pairs of (emotional bondage) slippers: sorrow, grief and regrets are woven into the soles and fabric of my tattered slippers.
After I realized several pairs of "slippers" were mine for a lifetime, they wore better. Even the calluses caused by the slippers have become part of me. I look at them with curiosity and reluctant acceptance. Tough layers of skin... would I want to rid myself of those experiences that caused the calluses? The slippers worn are not comfortable, yet have softened my heart and helped hardened my insecurities. My own tattered slippers have helped mold me into one of God's loved, flawed, creations.
When I saw these molded hand soaps, I knew they would make excellent gifts. And paired with a hand knitted face cloth, a doubly nice present.
Cool? You bet.
Plastic Foliage makes these soaps. They come individually packaged in bubble wrap in a cute little package.
Oh, and that is one of Grandma's Dishcloths that goes along with the little "hand soaps". The dishcloths make excellent facial cloths because of the knitted fabric that gives just enough abrasion to remove makeup, but soft enough for a baby's skin as they are made from 100% cotton.
Happy Birthday, Aunt Mary, you will be receiving a couple of these next week!
