Hildene bound

It's been the week from H-E-double toothpicks, but I'm getting ready to leave the office and will arrive in Manchester sometime in the middle of the night. I have no sock yarn on me for civil war knitting, but I'm hoping that I can remember to grab some cotton for washcloths before I hit the road. Oh well...

Cannon article in yesterday's Burlington Free Press. Someone from Reutors e-mailed Jim about doing a story on the gun situation. Looks like we've got another round with the press coming.

Please send dry weather thoughts up to Manchester, will ya? Hope y'all have a great weekend!

ETA at 11:07 p.m.

There was also an article (pretty much the same thing) in the Brattleboro Reformer today, as well as the same article in the Rutland Herald.

OK, now it's time to hit the road.

Please--pay no attention to the fact that I have a five-hour drive ahead of me tonight. Really. Look away.

Look at the pretty sock!

Little purls...

I didn't realize how long it had been since I last posted until Punkin pointed it out to me. Yikes! So much for my mid-year's resolution.

Of course, work has been hectic--as usual. The end of last month one of my editors, Blogless Elsie, left the company (good opportunity for her, very sad for me), so I had a couple of weeks of finishing up her projects. An now we're smack dab in the middle of the-book-that-shall-remain-nameless. (The authors want us to process 3,000 pages by the end of the week. Yeah, right...) So instead of a long drawn out entry, here's just a few bullet points for you.

• Been working on just two knitting projects: the baby sweater and my handpainted sock. Here's the sock just after the heel turn.

I'm working on the gusset decreases now. I'll have new pictures soon.

• There's been some sock yarn purchases. I don't have pictures right now, but there will be.


• Jim finished the wall on the other side of the front lawn. Didn't tell me he was working on it. Sneaky guy. That wall is still the talk of the Mount Snow Valley. Who'd a thunk it?

• I think I'm going to be able to attend my friend (and Vermont neighbor and handyman) George's mountain dulcimer festival next month. It's been a long time since I've been able to do that. (Oh, yeah, I can play the mountain dulcimer a little bit.) I'm keeping my finger's crossed!
• This weekend I’m hoping to be up at Hildene for my unit’s Civil War event. We still don’t have possession of the cannon.* However, the event will go on and if I don’t get trapped in NYC by the-book-that-shall-remain-nameless, I’ll be there. I’ll post my plans right here by Friday afternoon. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!

*By the way, Historic Preservation is in absolutely no hurry to arrange for the inspection required by legislation. In the meantime, Jim managed to arrange (at great expense) for an independent inspection by a leading artillery expert earlier this month. We're still waiting for his final report, but basically he said that "the tube is in as good a condition today as it was in 1863 when it was first inspected."

Saturday Sky

Late afternoon over Patchogue, Long Island.

Sockie sockie

Just some socks, hanging out, shooting the breeze...

That's me modeling Punkin's STR (Rose Quartz) in Crosshatch Lace with my own handpainted Scolls sock resting comfortably, while Punkin's DD was doing her own thing...

Kids...

Down by the sea

So glad it's Friday. It's been a rough week in these parts. Work has been the same kinda crazy, but this week has been bookended by sad events. Last week one of the members of the 2nd Vermont passed away. Jim and I went to the funeral in Chatham last Saturday. His health had not been good as long as we knew him, so while his death didn't come as a huge surprise, it was still terribly sad. As he wished, Art was buried in his Civil War uniform, and had pallbearers in uniform as well.

Then this week was the real shocker. Alan, a friend of mine from back in high school unexpectedly passed away. He had a horrible accident last week, was sent home from the hospital earlier this week, and then had to be readmitted and his heart stopped. They couldn't bring him back. He was only 47. The bunch of us from high school who used to hang out together have a Yahoo! Group that we use to communicate and this has hit everyone really hard. Lots of e-mails--grief, memories, reaching out to each other. I'm pretty sure that Alan's the first one of our group to pass. So horribly sad...

As I was riding the train home today I decided I needed to do something to try and clear my head. It was such a beautiful day, and it looked like it would be a gorgeous sunset, so after I got off the train, I headed out to the beach.





This was just what I needed tonight.
May Art and Alan rest in peace...

Tink-a-little, Knit-a-lot

Hey--I'm actually making some progress here!


I love the way that the color is interacting with the stitch pattern! Since the colors remind me of a mountain stream, I wanted something that would compliment the look of water.

I think this really does look like moving water!

By the way, the little bits of pinky red that you see--those are my lifelines. I'm putting them in where the pattern changes from k2tog to ssk. Those first rows after the change seem to be the hardest to keep straight. Overall, though, I'm finding it easier to keep track of.

In other knitting news, look what was waiting for me at home tonight...

Maybe look a little closer...

Woo-hoo! A Sock Club Shipment!! Really unexpected this time around--the way it's supposed to be!!! After the ordeal of the last two shipments, I was really beginning to wonder if these would ever be a surprise, or just a continuous nightmare of shipping delays and tiptoeing through the blogsphere to avoid sock spoilage. I saw a couple of postings on the Rockin' Sock Blog, but nothing that would raise my expectations.

And about this month's shipment? I really love it, and that's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone else. You can look here and here if you want to see, but I'm not posting anything in a blog post until all the shipments are out there.

But Punkin will see it this weekend. She'll probably try to covet it, I bet. Ain't happening.

Of course, she could just place another order with BMFA...

What a difference a little daylight makes

I'm only about 8 rows into the pattern, but I love how it looks. I also still can't get over the diagonal striping of the colors in the cuff!




And the best part about the yarn--I've got the formula for the dyes that I used, so I can replicate this! (And to answer Carole's question (from many weeks ago) as to how I applied the yarn--we used stencil brushes and pressed the dye into the yarn.)

...must knit more rows...

Knit-a-little, Tink-a-lot

I've been working on a new pair of socks using my handpainted yarn from Charlene Schurch's class at Webs last month. Punkin helped me pick out the pattern from More Sensational Knitted Socks. (Only fitting, since Charlene taught me how to handpaint, don't you think?)

Not much to see, huh? Well, if it hadn't been for all of the tinking (like, a quarter of it) there'd be more here. (My fault. It's lace. I'm new to lace. I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have...) I actually wound up tinking it back to the cuff after I took this picture, but this time I put a lifeline in and I think I'm going to put them in periodically throughout the leg until I get the hang of this lace thing.

Anyway, this is Scrolls (8-stitch pattern, balanced). I'll get a better picture of it in daylight and post soon. I promise.

Saturday Sky

It's been a while since I've posted any of these. These were taken this afternoon while driving from Chatham, New York, to Jacksonville, Vermont.

It's good to be back home in Vermont!

Blogline overload

You know what the flip side of blogger's block is? It's Bloglines block. Look at this list of blog postings that I need to get caught up on:

Claudia's Blog (25)
CrazyAuntPurl (30)
Dave Daniels Cabin Cove (32)
january one (34)
knit and tonic (22)
Lolly Knitting Around (27)
Mason-Dixon Knitting (34)
Now Norma Knits (10)
purlingswine (33)
Sandy's Knitting (29)
Too Much Wool (22)
The Tsarina Tsays... (21)
Yarn Harlot (28)

Yikes! That's a whole lot of postings to go through, especially when you realize that some of these posts tend to be on the long side. I feel bad, because these are blogs that I enjoy reading. But it's amazing how things tend to pile up when you don't attend to them regularly.


Anyway, my next step--to whittle away at the list. Catch up with these people that I love to visit online and have missed from my daily life.


No knitting pictures today. I've picked a pattern for my hand painted yarn and have started the cuff. I'm sure I have something in a few days.


For now, I'll leave you with a couple of garden pictures from the yard on Long Island.