Catching Up Again

Let's see, a few weeks ago I stopped in to see the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Barn Sale:

There were lots of lovely temptations and I do admit that a few of them seemed to leap into my arms and come home with me. I even helped out friend Rachel and brought home a few skeins for her. She really wanted to go to the sale, but with a small child, its hard to sometimes do stuff like this on a weekend. 

I left the sale and went and met up with an SCA friend to learn how to do a fitted Gothic dress (scroll down to the Building a Feminine Silhouette). The class was held in Longview and on the drive home Gail gave me a call. Tina had donated a couple of boxes of yarn to Dina's BSD Project - knitting for Beaverton's Homeless school kids. Gail's problem was she didn't have room to store both boxes until we could get them to Dina at our regular knit night. So home they came with me.

On the knitting front I wanted to knit a couple of hostess gift dishcloths for Kristen to say thank you for hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner at her house. So I started knitting a couple of dish cloths and got on a roll of getting all my cotton knitted up. Knitting with cotton usually hurts my hands but I must have built up some muscles there because my hands didn't hurt, my upper arms did. 

The dishcloths:

There was one 'dishcloth' that seemed a little big, so I'm calling it a hand towel. I also made a bib for nephew Cole who turned one today. He'll get it with his Christmas.

Can you see the Santa face and the Snowman?

The last cotton item knitted up is a sewing pin cushion. I finished it up tonight, but Brandon has the camera with him, so no pics until tomorrow.

I have the piano move schedule for this Tuesday. I had to pack up all my craft stuff and reorganize where things were going to live. It also meant a major reorganization of the extra bedroom we call 'the den'. A couple bookshelves moved into our bedroom and my chest of drawer went into the den. I reorganized the pantry and made room on the floor of it for my bins of yarn and fiber. I figure it would be more easily accessible there, we'll see. 

I found through moving things around an almost completed crochet project. The Easy Ripple Shawl a free pattern from Lion Brand. I was using Lion Brand yarns, so it only made sense. I had kind of created a pattern with the yarns that I hadn't considered when casting on, so had started the 'starting' end again. There were just a few rows that needed to be done so I finished those up and have it all attached. I now just have to deal with all the ends that need to be woven in. I've definitely learned a lot about those and how to deal with them better from learning how to knit. This was one of my last crochet projects just as I was learning how to knit. 

Pics of the shawl before I finished up the end:

I also had a Tudora that just needed a button sewn onto it and it would be ready for gift giving. Its sat in this sad state for a year and a half. I finally got them together and its ready to be wrapped. So where I was feeling stressed because I hadn't been doing all of my planned knitting throughout the year for gift giving, I have been able to throw out those plans, adapt them and just have five things that I *have* to knit and only three of them need to get done in the next week and a half. They should go quickly since they are done on size US 10 with bulky yarn for two of them. I don't want to be overly optimistic and jinx the projects though!

Its been a hectic wheel dealing with family things, Facebook friends are aware but I'm not going to post here. It only took rewriting a paragraph a couple of times to figure that one out! ;-)

Leeloo is almost ten months old - on the eleventh. She's had her first snow and thought it was fun to frolic in it. It ended up not being much deeper than what can be seen here. It stuck around for a few days as the temps dropped into the teens for us. Rather unusual for our part of the world! Leeloo's getting Norbert to play with her a bit more. He's definitely going outside with her more often. She'll check into the backyard through the patio door and let him know if there are squirrels out in the yard for them to go out and chase up a tree. He's also gotten more interested in food since she's been around. He never used to come hang out by the kitchen but does now.

I have ideas for future posts to share, so there will be more in the next few weeks than there have been!  Anyone local to the PDX area want a kitten? I know of some really cute ones in need of a home by this next weekend.