Wool windings

Dear Mom,
Last week I met with Barb, Creative Knitting Magazine's editor, so that I could give her a to-be-published knitted item and the instructions for it. She and I bonded several years ago when we met at a local yarn shop and realized that we could speak fluent knitting to each other and be understood. OH! My heart leaped in joy!

Barb had a beautiful pair of socks in progress and showed me the new (to me, at least) sock yarn she was using. You can kind of see the sock in the background. I was enchanted with the actual ball of yarn and not thinking clearly when I snapped the photo. In fact, I commented on how pretty the yarn was wound ( I know- knitter knerd) and wondered out loud if that is how the yarn is sold.
Well, it was a good thing I did, because not only is Barb a wonderful editor, expert knitter, patient teacher and generous friend, she is a human wool winder! All these many years I have been using this to wind skeins of wool into center-pull balls of yarn:

Barb taught me a new trick and now I can create lovely center pull balls of yarn by hand, too! OK, I know. Knitter knerd. But a happy contented one.

Yesterday I gave the first batch of raw wool a bath.

  I put a small bundle into a mesh laundry bag and let it soak in hot water with Orvus WA Paste (my favorite sweater wash, by the way). The initial bath water was caramel colored. I gave it several soaking rinses until the water was mostly clear, then the wool took a ride in the washing machine's spin cycle. It is now upstairs air drying, out of reach of Bumper Joseph, who seems to think I brought the sheepy smelling stuff home for him to tear into.

When I figure out what my next step is, I'll let you know, but in the meantime I am liking this wooly fluff and all the promising possibilities.

Love,

Kim

Happy Birthday Mom!

Dear Mom,
I wish you the happiest of days! I couldn't ask for a better Mom.
Love,
Kim

1942

1945

1946

1949

1953

the caption on the back of this one:

"Her first teen-age picture!"

1958

1958

2008

A Wedding, More Knitting and an Unexpected Gift

Dear Mom,
The long drive to and from the weekend wedding destination offered plenty of knitting time. We had terrible driving conditions on the way up on Friday evening- it rained the entire drive- and I tended to my knitting to avoid getting nervous and making My Hero even more tense than he already was. When it got too dark to see my knitting, it was time to help navigate unfamiliar roads.

The wedding reception was well underway when we arrived. Now, there are times when it is glaringly obvious that my children favor one side of the family or the other, and when The Young Man immediately disappeared to join the crowd on the dance floor, I didn't have to stop to wonder where that came from. It wasn't from me.  The Young Lady joined me with the quieter out-laws.

When family pictures were taken, the patient photographer needed to take several of the boisterous group. When it came time for a "just the outlaws" picture, she only needed to snap one because we took our positions, smiled for the camera and held still.

I was able to knit some more over the weekend and then a little more on the drive back home. (When I wasn't dozing.) I think the fact that My Hero left his voice in Detroit at the Red Wings game making it difficult for him to yell at instruct the other drivers on the road, along with listening to football on the radio, made the ride home a tad more peaceful than normal and I kept nodding off.

I did finish these mittens and the hat to go with them, though.

I am tweaking my hat design. I started another, in a fingering weight yarn. We'll see how that goes and then I may offer the pattern.
I purchased the buttons for the mittens at Skeins on Main, a yarn shop my soul sister-in law, Cheryl, took me to on Saturday morning.

On Saturday, another outlaw, as if he didn't have enough to do what with just having hosted a wedding and all, asked me if I would like some raw wool from his sheep! I was struck speechless. He misinterpreted my condition, thinking that I was trying to find a polite way to say No Thank You when in fact so many happy thoughts were scrambling in my head and fighting to be the first spoken that they were jammed up and nothing would come out! I did find the words, and brought home this:

Processing, or having it processed will be a learning experience. I will document the progress of the bag o'wool here on the blog. If I am successful, there is more wool for me if I want it!

I must be off- today the weather calls for homemade soup and bread for dinner, and I need to make a quick trip to the grocery for ingredients.

Love,

Kim

Mission Accomplished

Dear Mom,

It took some panicky marathon knitting (I knit through the entire school day on Thursday with the first Harry Potter and Chocolat- the movie not the food- to keep me going) and my right arm may never completely straighten out again, but I managed to get the black lace duster off my needles in time to have it blocked and dry (thanks to a box fan blowing on it all night) so I could wear it to a niece's wedding on Friday night. 
It is soft, flowing and comfortable. It deserves a better name than "black lace duster". I used Classic Elite's Wool Bam Boo yarn. The buttons were purchased at Inish Knits.

I have ideas for modifying this design a little to make an everyday casual sweater, but it is nice for this knitter to have a dressy handknit of her own design.

This next is a poor self portrait using the timer, but maybe you can get an idea of how the whole thing looks:

Tomorrow I will show you what I finished over the weekend. And the exciting gift I was given.

Love,

Kim

A Magic Night

Dear Mom,
I took the kids and my favorite neighbor to one of my favorite places.  We met the authors of The Spiderwick Chronicles, Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi!!  WOW!!  We spent the evening listening to them talk.  They were funny, animated, serious . . . fabulous.  They shared where some of their ideas came from.

We watched Tony Diterlizzi draw his incredible pictures!

We got to listen to Holly read from the newest book in the Beyond Spiderwick series.

We were entranced.

Holly and Tony played a trivia game with the kids in the crowd.

And the teenager won the motherload of prizes!!  He won the original drawing from earlier in the night, he won the Spiderwick Chronicles movie and he won a book that hasn't been released yet!!  It's the entire Spiderwick Chronicles, The Completely Fantastical Edition, all of the series in one book!

Holly and Tony also sat and autographed books and talked with every person.

I can't believe how magical the night was.  In Spiderwick terminology, it was completely fantastical!
Love,
Wendy

Perfect

Dear Mom,
I am faced with a difficulty that has almost silenced me....?.!.... I Know!
I had a blissful, contented, perfect four day getaway with some knitting friends. So perfect that I am afraid I won't be able to come up with the words that will do it justice. And the four days definitely deserve the blog time.

The anticipation of our getaway had us planning projects and packing yarn for weeks in advance. We needed projects for car knitting, talking knitting, drinking wine knitting, I am in the mood for this kind of  knitting, and the delusional I can do this complicated thing anyway knitting. (That last one was me, but I did notice that GinaWhoCanParallelPark started counting stitches OUTLOUD.) Was 5 projects too many for a 4 day trip? What if I run out of knitting?

This was also a low key, we may never leave the cabin kind of weekend and CarolWho'sHouseGot StruckbyLightning confessed to planning her "sweats ensembles". I think we all did; she just admitted it first.

Yes, we wore our finest clothes and comfiest pajamas. By the second day, I had really crossed the line and combined a sweats ensemble with my pajamas. But I matched because I was wearing stripes. It was also pointed out that I had a food on my sweatshirt, just to complete the image.

On Friday, we did leave the cabin for lunch at a local restaurant. Which delivered on its promise of good food.

We then went to the most charming and probably my favorite in the whole world yarn shop, Inish Knits.

The owner, Melissa, could not be more welcoming and friendly. Her shop is thoughtful, organized, inspiring and smart. I wish I didn't have to drive 7 hours to visit.

On Saturday, we did not leave the cabin. In fact we barely moved at all, content to sit in our individual knitting nests in front of the fire, only moving to prepare and eat the next meal together. Or open a bottle of wine.

                                                                                      

                                                                                      

DebbieWhoHasthePrettyFarmHouseandthePerfectCabin planned tasty, healthy meals. Every bite was delicious. Every. Bite. And we all took alot of them to make sure. Soup and chili and lasagna, and my favorite chocolate cake that only DebbieWHtPFHatPC can make. As a hostess gift to DebbieWHtPFHatPC, the four of us created a unique pair of socks. Working in teams of two, we used Claudia's Handpainted Sock Yarn in a colorway that just looked like our hostess (colorway is Donna's Favorite) and basic sock measurements. The goal was not an identical pair of socks, but a sisterly pair she could wear and remember, and one we could all knit our  appreciation into.

Even though at some point most of us needed to abandon our ambitious and complicated projects for talking and wine-friendly ones, all that knitting time was productive with CarolWHGSbL finishing a pair of mittens to be felted and making good progress on her Parka, GinaWCPP worked on some felted slippers, DebbieWHtPFHaPC made a helmet liner for a soldier and ConnieWhoNeverHeardofBobbySherman (We are trying to forgive her for that. She is the youngest one of us. She also only watched the Mary Tyler Moore show because her babysitter watched it. Some information just makes a person feel old.) finished a baby sweater and sewed some long dormant blocks together to finish a blanket.

After knitting the same row wrong several times and having to rip back, I gave up on the black lace (can you say wine?) and switched to another project. A reasonable person would have turned to one of the 4 other projects she had packed. Althoooooough, one could argue that a reasonable person would not have believed she could continue to knit a black lace pattern while drinking wine and talking to begin with. No, Melissa's fresh handspun yarn (purchased the day before from Inish Knits) was more appealing. On Saturday night I started a hat (the pattern just sort of blossomed out of my head as I was knitting) and I finished it in the car on the way home.

Some of the best parts of the weekend have to stay there, but it was all.....well, I wouldn't change a thing.

Love,

Kim