8

Today's RAK happened at Panera.  When I got my lunch I also purchased a $10 gift card.  My plan was to hand it to someone as they walked in when I was leaving.  I was slightly foiled because no one was coming in when I was ready to leave.  I ended up standing outside on the curb waiting for someone to come in for lunch.  After a couple of minutes a nice lady came walking up and I handed her the gift card and a note explaining what I was doing.  I started walking to the car and heard her yelling at me to wait.  Turns out she wanted to give me a hug!

Sidetracked

I've been sidetracked from doing good deeds.  What with the chilly weather we've been having, I haven't felt like going outside and looking for opportunities.  Instead I've been sitting in front of the TV watching Netflix and knitting.  I used Ravelry to find some free lace patterns so that I could use up some of the yarn I had sitting in the stash without a project in mind.

I really like making lace because of how dramatically it changes from being a pile of cooked spaghetti to something beautiful with the application of water and stretching.

This first one is the Lila shawl, made with Schaeffer yarn in Anne.  It's really more of a wide scarf than a shawl, but still pretty and it only took one skein of yarn.

This second one is called Yakbeere.  I had to make some  corrections to the pattern because it didn't make any mathematical sense, but after I figured out the right numbers it turned out nicely.  Made from Knit Picks Palette in Wood.

7

While I was at the grocery store yesterday I gave a Dominicks gift card to the lady behind me in the checkout line.  I was hoping for a really random act, but it turned out to be someone who goes to my church. 

6

Last night we had about 4 inches of snow.  That's not a lot by normal Chicago standards, but the last couple of years we've had a lot less snow than usual.  In any case, my good deed for today was to blow out a path for Daughter and her friend so that they could walk down to the bus stop on the sidewalk, rather than walk in the street and risk getting hit by a plow.  The driveway in the picture that looks like it doesn't have a nice path is where I had to detour around parked cars.  I ended up blowing snow out of part of their lawn because the car was parked so close to the sidewalk, but sometimes these things can't be helped.

6? No, I Guess Not

Daughter and I had to buy some new shoes today, as her current pair is attempting to amputate her feet.  When we got to the shoe store, I saw the car above.  I could easily claim that my Random Act for today was to Not write "Nice Parking" in the salt and dirt on the driver side door.  Or that it was blurring out the license plate so that the owner won't be embarrassed to see his or her car parked so flagrantly in the middle of two parking spaces.  But the whole point of this exercise is to be a better person, I'm not going to count the fact that I didn't give in to an evil urge as an actual act of kindness.

But it was REALLY tempting!

5

Yesterday's random act was to buy lunch for the lady in the car behind me at McDonalds.  She didn't order much, but whatever it was she didn't have to pay for it.

1, 2, 3, and 4

Random Acts 1, 2, 3, and 4 were put in the mail and sent off today.  They are on their way to Canada, which actually caused a bit of knitterly musing.  Since Canada is another country (although it hardly seems like it to someone who grew up in the U.P.) I was required to fill out a customs declaration for for each of the packages.  Along with who it was to and who it was from, they also wanted to know what was inside and what it was worth.  Well, there is a small sweater in there, and about 16 hours of my time.  The yarn cost was about $10 per sweater, but I'm not sure how you factor in the value of making thousands of connected little stitches that will one day keep a little person cold on a warm day.  What's the value of good will?  What's the value of concern?  I put down $10, but that seems low from a knitters perspective.

She's Baa aack

Alright, I'm back.  For whatever reason, I sort of felt like I ran out of things to say a year and a half ago. Whatever the reason, I took my hiatus and now I'm back with a plan.

Last year I stumbled across The Birthday Project.   The general gist of the story is that a woman who was celebrating her 38th birthday spent the day doing 38 random acts of kindness, turning her birthday into a day celebrating other people.  It seemed like an excellent idea to me. This year I will be turning 45 in April.  For some reason that feels like a milestone of some kind; I'm halfway done with my life journey, or some such thing.  I've decided that I would like to do the same thing as this woman did, but with a slightly different timeline.

I'm committing to doing 45 random good things for other people, but I'm giving myself all year to do them.  As I was thinking of things that I could do, I decided that I wouldn't be able to physically do 45 meaningful things for other people in one day.  With a year to spread things out over I'll be able to make my goal without making myself (or Husband) crazy in the process.

I'll keep track of what I've done here, so you can share my birthday with me all year long. 

While I'm Waiting

For Mother's Day this year my gift was an upgrade of my MP3 player from a very old, very clunky, very small (storage wise) Zen Touch, to a brand new iPod Touch. One of the things I'm liking most about it is that I can download books from Audible.com as well as from my library via MyMediaMall. Once they're on it I can then go walking/jogging/riding my bike with a good book. The down side is that it takes a really long time to download a book onto first the computer, then transfer it onto the iPod.

So while I'm waiting for Sacred Stone to finishe downloading, I'll update you on the small amount of knitting I've gotten done.

After finishing what I'm calling the "6 Million End" outfit, I decided I'd like something simple, with not a lot of ends to deal with. The perfect project for that is a Wallaby. So I looked around in the stash and came up with some green yarn that hadn't yet found its purpose in life and whipped one up.



It's made with Caron Simply Soft and Lambie Pie. I finished it while my family was here for the baby shower and my mom remembered that she needed a baby gift for another new Mom, and she promptly purchased it from me.

Life Keeps Moving

Life is certainly an interesting thing to experience. You're coasting along, everything is in its groove, and then suddenly it all gets crazy. Spring break Disney vacations, birthdays, funerals, weddings, baby showers, then the next thing you know it's your kid's last day of school.

So I've been busy is what I'm trying to say. So busy that I have done very little knitting. Because of the upcoming baby shower (this Sunday in fact,) I did finally buckle down and get some stuff accomplished.



That's the Zebrafol pattern from the Dale baby collection #129. I made it out of Knitpicks Pallette which is Peruvian Highlands wool. It turned out nicely, but it's certainly not a pattern that I'll be making for casual acquaintances. Because of the number of colors that are used this is what the inside of the leggings looked like when I started sewing in the ends. Keep in mind that I worked about half of them in as I went, so this could have been double what it looks like.



And this is what the pile of cut off ends looked like when I got done:



So definitely a labor of love. Hopefully the Great-Niece and her parents will appreciate it.

Secret Socks

Last time I alluded to some socks that had been working on that I couldn't share yet. Well, I finally finished them and sent them off to my mother as a late birthday gift. They are made out of KnitPicks Stroll yarn in the Deep Waters colorway.

There are a lot of cables in these socks. The pattern is Sweetheart Socks (Ravelry Link.) The pattern on the top is supposed to continue all the way down to the toes, but I would have rather stabbed myself with my needles than have to keep working all those teensy tiny cables.





Socks modeled by Daughter, who declared them "uncomfortable," but she is notoriously finicky about what goes on her feet.

Creeping Along

Yes, I have been alive since the blizzard. I've mostly been working on a project that I can't show pictures of yet, but will be able to very soon. I made something that shouldn't ordinarily take a long time, but because of the persnickedyness of the pattern and the size of the wool and needles, it took me a good while to get finished.

When I finally did finish the mystery project, I immediately started on a sweater for the baby girl my niece is currently working on putting together. I'm making the sweater, leggings and hat on the cover of Dalegarn 129.



In a matter of three days I got the entire body done, as well as one of the sleeves.

This is one of the reasons I like making baby things; even with tiny needles and fingering weight yarn, I can still get a lot accomplished in a pretty short amount of time. The only downside that I can see is that there a lot of ends to be dealt with. The leggings are going to be a real monster in that department, but the cuteness factor will make it more manageable.

I also finally finished my cursed Blackhawkey Sockies. Every time I worked on them on a game day the Blackhawks lost. Now that the socks are finished I tested wearing them on a game day, Sunday afternoon. The Blackhawks lost in overtime.

Perhaps I need to start making socks for the other guys...

After

OK, so after looks a lot like During, mostly because the additional 5 or 6 hours of storm didn't actually happen.



This is the only window that we have on the south side of the house. Because the wind was mostly from the north northeast, this side of the house got a lot more snow than the windward side did.



The dog trying to swim through the snow. He hasn't been able to run around in the yard since Tuesday afternoon. I shoveled out a couple of paths for him so that he could at least get off the patio to do his business.



Husband got the sidewalk next to the house shoveled off (it's on the south side of the garage, which is again why so much snow.) It feels like going through a tunnel.



Daughter has been making tunnels and snow caves. This is her just outside the living room window. She's close to 5 feet tall, and you can see the snow is up to the top of her chest.



I think this will be one of the more memorable Groundhog Days that I'll ever have.

During

It started snowing at 2:00 yesterday afternoon. We got at least an inch every hour, aand because of the 40-50 mph winds, there are drifts everywhere.



That's Husband trying to get the sidewalk shoveled out so we can get to the garage and the snowblower.



Murray (that's the snowblower) is my new hero. He's a little guy, but he's been out there taking the 8 inches out of our driveway like a trooper.



Our street hasn't been plowed since 7:00 last night. Our neighbor across the street works for our Park District, and he's been on plow duty. He got up very early this morning and had to walk out to the main street because there's no way anything short of a snowcat is getting up or down our street.



The fence in the backyard is four feet tall.

Snow's supposed to keep coming down for 5 or 6 more hours, so we'll see how this all ends up.

The Before

As you are probably aware, I live in the Chicagoland area. They have been telling us for the last week or so that a big storm is headed our way. As time has gone by the meteorologists have been predicting worse and worse weather for us. As of this morning we are expecting the worst storm the area has seen since 1967, with the blizzard watches having been upgraded to blizzard warnings.

I thought it might be interesting to have some before and after pictures to record this event, so here is what our neighborhood looks like today.












Stay tuned for updates as the snowpocalypse hits us this afternoon and evening.

False Start

Happy New Year everyone. Yes, it's true that the new year has been around for nearly two weeks already, but I find that it's best to give it a little time to feel the new year out before assuming that it will be happy. As Sherlock Holmes says, it is a capital error to theorize without data.

And based on the data that I have accumulated thus far, it is going to be a year full of challenges and partial triumphs. I started the year by casting on for a new pair of socks. It's one of the October Rocking Sock club offerings called Buggin Out. (Ravelry Link)



It's made with a nice deep green that I like very much. The pattern at the bottom of the photo is supposed to look like a spider. I was a bit concerned while making them that they seemed a little on the narrow side, but they called for the same number of stitches to begin with that I usually use with this yarn and needles, so I figured that they would just stretch to fit.



So I continued on, creating spiders and turning the heel and knitting up about half of the foot. This is the point where I start trying the socks on to see when I need to start the decreasing for the toes. Unfortunately I was unable to determine if the foot was long enough because I could not get my own foot into the leg portion of the sock. While it is true that the ribbed portions of the sock stretch nicely, those cute little spiders do not. Not at all. Not even a little bit. After finishing almost 3/4 of a sock before determining that it won't fit on anyone other than Olive Oyl, I ripped the whole thing out and wound it back into a ball. I'll have to come back and revisit these when I am not so mad at them.

In the meantime, I started another pair of plain socks using some wool I got several years ago from Interlacements. These will certainly not be socks to wear to a somber gathering.

A Christmas Miracle

This year for Thanksgiving Daughter, Husband and I went to visit Brother and his family in the Detroit suburbs. We had a very enjoyable time which included eating a lot of food, as well as a little of a new hobby that Daughter and I have taken up called geocaching. Before we left for Detroit I looked up a few caches that would be close to Brother's house and got the details.

Here we are after finding the first cache. It was a little chilly out, and there was a very brisk breeze blowing that day, so we only found two of the three that I had looked up.

While we were digesting our turkey feast, brother mentioned that his hunting hat was getting too stretched out for his taste, and would it be possible to make him a new one? He wanted a Liberty Cap in hunter's orange, if possible. It seemed like an easy enough request, so I said yes.

The first step in the process was acquiring the yarn. In case you haven't checked your local yarn purveyor recently, you may not know that hunter's orange is not a well stocked item. Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to find it just after hunting season, but the yarn proved tricky to find. I eventually turned to the internet and found a company selling hunter's orange wool. I ordered a cone of their HunterSafetyOrange just to be sure I didn't run out. It came soon after and I made up a gauge swatch to see how it would work up.



Next I had to locate a pattern for a Liberty Cap. The internet came to the rescue in this department as well, although the first pattern that looked promising turned out to be sized for an 18 inch doll rather than a real human being. I finally located a pattern here that I was able to use with a few modifications.

The next step, of course, is to actually knit the thing. For reasons unknown to me, at least on a conscious level, I didn't start doing the real knitting until Christmas Eve. To make it an even better challenge for myself, I needed to have it done and ready to go by 9:00 in the morning on the 26th, which was when Brother and his family were leaving Parents' house to go back down south.

I got ready to start and discovered that I had everything that I needed except a crochet hook. The pattern calls for a provisional cast on, and the only way I know how to do one is using a crochet hook. I asked Mom if she had one, and after searching in several locations she told me that she did not. I was momentarily concerned that the hat might not happen, but then brother asked me for the specification of a crochet hook. I told him that it was just a long piece of thick wire with a hook on the end. He then borrowed a piece of old coat hanger from Mom, went down to the workshop, and came back minutes later with this:



It's not particularly pretty, but it got the job done. I spent most of Christmas day knitting. I took a couple of breaks to play Scribblish and watch a family movie classic (Boxman, for those of you in the know.) Most of the day, however, looked like this:



(Thank you again, Honey, for the cool new Blackhawks jammie pants.) At the end of the day, the very end of the day, I finally finished it off, built a tassel using no instructions whatsoever, and washed and conditioned the hat. I set it out in the living room hoping it would be at least mostly dry by morning.

It did not dry completely, but that didn't stop Brother from putting it on and modeling it just before getting into the car and speeding away.



Looks pretty good for a hat knit in a day.

Socks, Check

I finished the socks. The pattern is called "My Heart Beets 4U." If you look at the heel in just the right way, it is supposed to look like a beet, with the pattern on the leg forming the beet greens.





I don't know that I really see it, but they are good looking socks, even if I can't see the cuteness of them.

I'm glad that they're done because the beginning of the end starts tomorrow when we leave for 4 days at Kohler Andrae state park in Wisconsin.

Socks that Rock

As I've mentioned, I'm a member of the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Rockin' Sock Club this year. I received the May club kit which contained this skein of yarn:


I know, it looks like they sent me an undeyed skein of yarn, but if you look REALLY closely, you'll see that the right side of that skein is very slightly more green than the left end. It is actually dyed, it's just deyed in a very subtle way. The patterns that were included in that package were both ankle length socks, neither of which really spoke to me, so I haven't made either of them yet.

A week or two ago I received the July shipment which contained this yarn:


This color is called Firecracker, and the patterns this time were a little more to my liking. I ruled out one of them because it features cables, which I don't like to deal with in a sock related situation. The second pattern only calls for 3 cables on each sock, so that's the way I went. This is what they looked like last night:




They look very narrow, but that's because they have a lot of ribbing. They stretch out nicely and fit just fine. I'll need to get a move on and finish them soon, because Thursday we leave for a 4 day camping trip, then we go to Colorado the day after we get back and stay there for 8 days. We'll be back home the day before Daughter starts school. It's frightening how fast summer goes by.