Vacation, Day #1

I haven't finished unpacking yet, but I thought I'd start on my vacation recap.

I'm going to try to do one day per post so today's post is about the first day, tomorrow will be day #2, etc.

Day #1 - traveling from Tulsa to Salt Lake City, then on to Heber City, Utah.

Ryan had a good time playing with his woobie when he wasn't napping.

Here's a view outside of the neat clouds. I loved how puffy they were. These are somewhere between Tulsa and Dallas.

This is the start of my Swallowtail Shawl. I cast on the night before the trip, which would've been Thursday, May 10. Note the handy pattern holder that the airline supplied. :-)

In the Salt Lake Airport, playing with the luggage cart. There was a large open space between the baggage carousels, and no one was standing anywhere near. They weren't going as fast as it looks like in this picture--I didn't have the flash on.

And of course Ryan had to try pushing Gillian. LOL!

Once we got to Heber City and checked into our hotel (and had dinner), the kids really really really wanted to go swimming, so we did.

Here's Gillian in the pool with her new floaty,

And Ryan thinking about getting in (but not getting in unless I was holding him). He didn't get into the hot tub, but it looked like something more his speed until we turned on the jets. Then he wasn't interested.

Tomorrow, the Heber Creeper!

Where to start??

It's been a while since I've blogged, but I've got a good excuse!

We've been on vacation for the last eleven days, and I've got the pictures (and sunburn) to prove it. I won't torture you with all of them now (since I haven't uploaded them yet--I'll save the torture for a day or two) but I took more than 500 pictures! Some of them are really cool, if I do say so.

My computer time was very limited while we were gone, and I even went a few days without touching a computer!! That was waaaay out of my normal routine and kind of nice for a break, but I missed it.

I think what I'll do is blog about a day or two of my vacation over the next few days so I don't have one really really huge post.

Let me just say now that the Snake River Fiber Fair was an absolute blast, and I highly recommend that you go if you're in the area. The vendors were very cool, and my classes seemed to be very well received.

More once I get my pictures uploaded....

Quick post--I'm still here!

I've been rather frantic for the last few days, trying to get ready to go on vacation and prepare for my classes at the Snake River Fiber Fair.

I can't believe how long it's taken me to get my handouts ready for my charting class! Thank goodness I had a bunch done from my lecture to the K.N.I.T. Guild (Knitting Needles In Tulsa) last month. I've also put together some samples and exercises, as I'll have people actually doing some charting in my class. It should be fun but it's taken me a lot longer to get everything ready than I'd anticipated. (Doesn't it always?) Hopefully people's eyes won't glaze over too much. LOL!

Our vacation is going to be a lot of fun! I just have to finish getting ready and then I can relax.

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Thanks so much to everyone who commented about my blogging. I go through phases where I think "why bother?" and then you wonderful people let me know why I do. :-)

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I'm getting close to finishing up the Shetland Tea Shawl. Well, I still have a lot to go but I'm almost to the edging. Six plain rounds and then I have to figure out what I'm going to do for the edging! Here's a pic of what I thought I'd do but I'm just not loving it:

The ruler is showing that the top edge (above the faggoting) is 8" so this is BIG. I love how big it is but I'm just not sure I'm going to love it on this shawl. I was hoping for something that was a bit more, well, regular--those big eyelets look somewhat random to me.

I'm thinking that a traditional Shetland pattern made into a border might be better. Back to the swatching, which is probably going to have to wait until we come back.

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Hopefully I'll be able to do a post or two while we're gone, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to being back in the west, and the gorgeous scenery.

Diamond Madiera lace, 6th birthday party

A while back I had to drop down a section of lace and build it back up, and I decided to photograph the steps. This was back in March, and I kept putting off posting it (not really for any good reason except maybe laziness, which isn't really a good reason after all) until now.

So here we go, in a series, dropping down a section of lace in the Diamond Madeira section of my Shetland Tea Shawl.

This is Step One, isolating the stitches that I'll drop down. All the pins on the sides stop the stitches from running farther than I want them to. In this case I'd done something wrong about four rounds down and I couldn't fix it by just working a stitch or two back up or down--this pattern is worked every row (instead of every other row) and I figured it would be easier to just re-do the section.


Step Two, dropping all those stitches down. At this point I always think "Oh my goodness, WHAT have I DONE??" but then I take a couple of deep breaths. ;-)


Step Three, working row-by-row (or round-by-round in this case), following the chart for one repeat. The trick here is isolating (on the chart) which stitches I'm dealing with and ignoring the rest of it. Remember to breathe.


Continuing to work row-by-row:

And more...
And I didn't get a picture of the finished fix, amazingly enough!! I'm not sure where my brain was that I didn't get a pic, but I think it was pretty late (like close to midnight as usual) when I did this--it's the only time the house is quiet enough, with no interruptions, for me to do things like this. My kids like to "help" by putting my pins away for me, which normally is a great thing--except when those pins are holding lace where I need it to be. :-)

I'm making pretty good progress on my Shetland Tea Shawl and hope to have it finished in the next month or so. I've got about four more rounds to do on the Diamond Madeira, then some plain rounds, then the edging! I've decided to do something different than the pattern in the book, but I haven't done any of the math or swatching to figure out exactly which one.

DD's party was today and it was a lot of fun! We're all pretty tired, though. This year we had it as a place called Playhouse for Kidz, which was really fun. I could do without the religious signs but it's wasn't too overwhelming. It was SO nice to be able to go there, have a party, and leave without having to do all the cleanup. Last year we had a party here at the house and I swear I spent days getting ready and days recovering afterwards! It was fun, too, but I liked having the party away from the house.

Here's the princess' cake:

And the boy, who did play for a while (despite the sign--I know they mean not to climb on the outside, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to take this picture) as long as either Greg or I was standing nearby.

And here's the birthday girl, or actually one of the birthday girls--Gillian and a classmate shared their party so that we could pool our resources and invite the whole class. It was fun!

Yes, she really is totally pink and sweaty--it was warm in there and the kids were playing with everything they had! The drinks were really popular. :-)

I have lots more pictures of course, but since I don't have permission to post pix of other people's children I'll refrain.

Back on the knitting front, I started a project for me: a yoked sweater using the yarn from Bernat that I won. I'm really excited about it. Or I would be if I hadn't made a whole bunch of reverse progress today. I've redone the sleeves twice now because I'm just not happy with them. I think I may have finally nailed down the shaping so we'll see how far I get tomorrow. Perhaps far enough to have something to photograph, but we'll see.

Low on content today

I've been feeling very apathetic about blogging for the past week or so, for no really good reason.
At one point I was feeling like I don't think many people read my blog, which got me to thinking about why I blog. Do I blog to brag? Do I blog to share things with my friends, rather than emailing millions of pictures? Do I blog to increase my ego, because I actually think anyone cares?

Ah, the wonderful thoughts I have in the shower. (I loooooove my new shower and want to spend way more time in there than I should.)

Yes, I'd love to have a blog that has a large number of readers, if only for my ego. Am I willing to post as often as most of the high-readership knitting blogs seem to? Um, no. not right now, and for a few different reasons: 1.) I don't do much that changes quickly--most of my projects are long-term ones, and it's just not exciting for me to post pictures of an additional inch of knitting; and 2.) the time I spend at the computer recently needs/has needed to be spent on doing knitting guild newsletters and stuff for charting classes I'm teaching, not on blogging. Not to mention that when you have a lot of readers, it seems like it tends to get more negative. (Cara of January One recently blogged about this.)

I need to keep in mind my original purpose in starting this blog, which was to keep my friends and family, many of whom live 1,000+ miles away, informed about what's going on in my life. I keep getting sucked into the popularity-contest aspect of blogging, though, and wondering why I don't have lots of comments on my blog. Kinda silly, huh?

DD's sixth birthday was this week and I didn't get a chance to take any pictures--she had everything opened and played with before I could get the camera! However, tomorrow is the "big" birthday party with her classmates, so there will be lots more photo ops. Here are the cupcakes we made to take in to her class on her actual birthday:


And here are my "helpers" sampling the goods. :-)

We leave for Utah and Idaho on Friday, and I've been incredibly unmotivated to sit down at the computer and refine my notes for my classes I'll be teaching at the Snake River Fiber Fair. I'm not sure why, although I've managed to make a fair number of notes in the old-fashioned way (pen/pencil and paper). That makes me sound totally unprepared, which I'm not--I've got a fairly coherent start from the handout I made for my charting talk to our guild here in Tulsa, but I need to have a more solid idea of examples and blank charts, etc for this three-hour class. I'm really looking forward to it!

I've also been playing with some charts and making some facecloths for DD's teacher. I wanted to see if I could successfully chart a round dishcloth formed with short rows, and I think I did an all right job. Not that I've put it into Excel yet--it's still on paper, which is SO rare for me. I'm hoping that once the party is over I'll be able to concentrate on the class stuff.

Here are two of the dishcloths:

The pattern came from here, and I modified the one on the right, the solid one, to have wrapped short rows. I'm much happier with it, but I doubt DD's teacher will notice or care.

For no good reason really, other than I felt like it, here's a picture of some stuff in my house:

The doll is one I made back in 2002 (I think) at a quilting retreat in Brian Head, Utah. It was really fun! The picture on the wall is my darling children, about 2½ years ago I think. We took casts of their feet using paper clay, which was really fun. The gold and black rectangular object is a paperweight that my Aunt Louise sent to my DH for Christmas a few years ago. I just love the design. And the round thing is a very very cool dandelion head encased in plastic. My grandmother had one just like it and I used to love looking at it. My parents gave that one to me for Christmas and, more than 20 years later, I still love to look at it (although it's not the same one).
This isn't the best picture--taken indoors at night with a flash--but you can get an idea of how it looks. (Please ignore the dust--we've had the house open because the weather has been so nice.)

And here's my latest spinning adventure:

That's an 87-yard skein, not sure about weight or anything else yet--I still have more to spin up, then I'll do a wraps-per-inch measure and add more detail info about it. (See the previous post for how it looked before spinning.)

That's about enough randomness from me today. :-)