Monday, July 28, 2008

projects up my knitted sleeves


I am working on the second of the Pitts twins' knitted merino baby blankets. This will be the fifth one in two years, and I am really looking forward to its completion. Luckily, I love the colors I chose on this one and I am enjoying it much more as a result. I forgot to take a photo of Curt's blanket before it was gifted - when I drop off Wynn's, I will get photos of both babies with their cutie blankets to post.


This is Koigu Kersti, which is a beautiful hand-painted merino. Kersti is always handpainted, and this particular color scheme (knitters call it 'colorway') looks like ice cream with sprinkles. It knits up very evenly and makes me look like a better knitter than I am. I love it.


Next I plan to start finishing my mom's houndstooth Chanel knitted jacket. It is a knitted version of a Chanel pattern. I will get that together for photos. I hope to have it completed before early fall and then keep it for her as a Christmas gift.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

a sneaky photo


Well, I stopped by to see the Pitts family after work, and snapped a quick mobile photo of the wreath on their front door. This is a terrible photo, I was slightly in motion trying to take the picture with my blackberry before the door opened!

Sort of looks like a quinceanera and an old folks home got together.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Not a lot going on.

Made a baby wreath yesterday to celebrate the homecoming of Steven's cousin's twins, and forgot to take a photo. I am convinced that I would take more pictures if I had a fabulous digital camera of my own that worked.

more of the one hundred:

2. Nutella is in the category of top ten best foods ever created.

3. I really believe that I want to be a nurse, but I am also afraid to pursue it and be told that it can't happen.

4. I bite my lip instead of biting my nails.

5. I love to iron, but not for others. It is a selfish ironing thing.

6. I love the smell of a freshly lit cigarette - where you smell all of the bad stuff but also the initial burning of the paper.

7. I have never been a smoker.

8. I think that I could live anywhere for six months and wish that I had that opportunity a little bit.

9. I believe that our guest bathroom looks like a pimp designed it.

10. I am in favor of botox, restalyne, and anything that makes one feel better about herself, as long as you do not appear unnatural. Uh, and if you, do, then by all means, I will judge you.

11. I like dogs more than cats, but I do not dislike cats.

12. This is not a compliment to myself, but I don't want to elaborate: I am a 'grass is greener' person.

13. I love gardening desperately and wish that I had a place in our yard to grow things in the ground.

14. Libertyville High School's Homecoming Queen, 1994.

15. I have only been arrested once, and it had nothing to do with alcohol.

16. I am a very weepy person. I know I am sensitive, but mostly I think it is genetics. I cry at EVERYTHING.

17. I heard once that the dye used in maraschino cherries is the same dye used for cadaver veins, so therefore, I do not eat maraschino cherries.

18. I am really afraid of the dark.

19. I am afraid of being in the woods alone.

20. I am terrified of being alone, in the woods, in the dark.

21. I love the smell of rain.

22. I love medical mystery television shows.

23. I cannot stand clams, oysters, or mussels. I wish I did. I feel like I have given them all a valiant effort. I just can't do it. Give me seven years and I will try again.

24. My favorite sandwich as a child was [Peter Pan] peanut butter and ham.

25. I do not like James Taylor.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

One Hundred things.

Last night, over at Emily Price's home, there was a discussion of a 'list' of one hundred things about oneself. (Like that chain email that went around.) I am working on this, too, but one hundred is a lot. I will add the numbers into future posts, I guess, but here is number one:

1. "Git 'ur done." kill me. This is the worst phrase of the century. It is one of those things that makes you hate high school boys even more than you already thought you could, and makes me cringe every time I hear it.

And the girl wears the hat.


Ellie will be growing into her hat - which is expected - it should continue to fit her into the fall and be great for early winter, I think. It is a crap shoot when you just go for it without thinking too hard about head circumference.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Things I have done

The hat just went for a ride to Elizabeth Jean. Hope she likes it.

Allison Dickson gave me a gift certificate to Bookpeople for my birthday. There were two books I wanted to buy, but Bookpeople only had one of them in stock, and now that they say I can come get it, I realize that I really just want the other one. It is "The Opinionated Knitter" by Elizabeth Zimmermann. . but I just posted on her fan blog to see if I should be purchasing a different book of hers, first.

and I just dropped eyeshadow into my keyboard.

From the reviews I have read, it sounds like I should be purchasing "The Knitting Workshop" first. .. . pardon me while I call Bookpeople. . . and it is not available. I will be ordering it on Amazon, which I hate to do. . If you don't know, Elizabeth Zimmermann is super-famous in the knitting world and has some really amazing ideas. I understand that I will grow as a knitter by reading her books, so get ready for my growth.

I want to post some photos of items I have knitted on here, but I also want to just discuss things I have done in the past few years that I am proud of. .

Like the four gallons of grape jelly last summer. It was a bumper crop on the fence there at Lions Municipal, so I picked around 21 pounds of mustang grapes. Did you know that many people are susceptible to a fair amount of itching when exposed to mustang grape juice? I, for one, felt like I might crawl out of my skin, but the itching went away by the next morning. I still have a fair amount of jelly - - I mean, how much can one household eat when it is just two of you?


The squid hat is another favorite. I found the pattern and began knitting one for an expecting friend of mine. The pattern was terribly written. I knit the first one as written, and gave that one away. Another friend asked me to make one for her infant son and so I began, but with multiple modifications. The first one was cute, but the second one was way cuter.




Some Light Reading

I loved to read as a child. I couldn't get enough. I read almost anything I could get my hands on, and certainly enjoyed age appropriate literature. . .um, until I discovered VC Andrews. For those two years, my brain slowly imploded. . and then I came out of it. I loved then, and I love now, books containing information like helpful household hints and off label uses for everyday household items. . I imagine I was the only child on the block reading "Helpful Hints from Heloise" (find it here: http://tiny.cc/toWuM ) after discovering it in our local library. . but who doesn't want to know that you can dump a can of coke in the toilet and it will clean overnight?

I set down my knitting in the move to our new house so I am now trying to furiously pick up where I left off. I finished baby blanket A for twin A over the weekend and began baby blanket B, but that is in progress. . And another friend of mine and his wife had a perfectly tiny and pink baby girl yesterday afternoon. I got home and searched through my yarn stash and pulled out the pink and green cool wool and started a hat, hoping to be finished when I visited them around 8:30 pm yesterday, but alas, I failed to build in driving time and dinnertime, so I visited them with a Ziploc, five sticks and some string, instead. I stayed up and finished it when I got home, and it is cute - wish it had been more pink - but it was a great use of leftover yarn! So welcome to the world, little Elizabeth Jean and here is your hat. . that's all you get for your troubles.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Just an introduction

I keep starting blogs and then realizing that they are titled too narrowly, and then I just delete them after a few posts. I hope that this one will be different.

I like to think of myself as kind of a renaissance woman. I love me some domestic crafts, minus housework. I am a child of an almost baby boomer. My mother was raised in the fifties and early sixties to believe that if a woman planned to work outside the home, really her only choices were to be a nurse, teacher or secretary. (My mom majored in home economics, earned a masters of science and became a registered dietitian.) My mother was a stay at home mom, for a large part of our childhoods, really not working full time outside the home until we were in middle school, when she started her own monogramming business. (In middle school, most kids don't know the difference between monograms and mammograms. That caused some questionable conversations at the time.) Our mothers were the first to have freedom from the domestic tethering common in most US households at the time. As time has progressed, we have been taught that we [women] are smart enough and can work outside the home and can be academically and professionally high achieving. . . and when I enrolled in a few womens' studies classes during my undergraduate education, I learned quickly not to say that it would be great to be a stay at home mom. GASP.

I went on to law school because my parents both have advanced degrees and I thought I needed one, too. Law school seemed like a great idea and, "you can do anything with a law degree." It was a lot harder to find a job when I graduated than I thought it would be. So, now by folly, I am in state government, and thinking instead that I should have been a nurse. We will see.

But, enough about education and really tough stuff. . My mom taught me to do so many things - and I want to focus on the domestic crafts that lots of women my age aren't into, anymore. I love to cook, talk about food, eat, read about food, and absorb all I can about food science. Home canning is fun, but messy, and I learned a lot on that one last summer. I like to create, in general. I like painting - both decorative and housepainting. I like to get dirty. I like to work in the yard, and if I could get our mower started, I would be absolutely willing to mow the lawn. I love to knit - this is the only hobby that I can't truly get enough of - and I will never know everything I need to know about it, no matter how skilled I become. I like to learn about all of the things that women (back in 'olden days' - before our mothers' mothers) used to do because of necessity. They put up vegetables and darned socks and would take apart the sweater from three years ago to knit up a new sweater for the growing child. They could birth a child on Friday morning, cook supper that night, and spend all day Saturday baking for Sunday's lunch. I don't like to clean or do housework, but I do find ironing somewhat therapeutic. I love me some Lifetime Television for Women. I know it is bad, but I can't help myself.

Feel free to comment as you like or ask questions - Comments that are in any way construed as snarkiness will be removed and you will be banned from access, so if you have a problem with something I wrote, then tell me and we can discuss.

Uh, so all of that creative need and my multiple hobbies have fostered my success in procrastination and my failure at organization. . so I am working on those, too. Finally, I named this blog "Do-Nest-icity" because it is about domestic things which involve my neverending desire to nest. I am a nester now, and have been for a very long time.