Step Into My Thimble

Noticeable progress has been made on Rodney’s anchor sweater!

WARNING: Giant popup! I promise to resize it when I get to a computer with better photo editing software.

Despite the annoying over-twist of the Peace Fleece yarn, I am having fun with it. I do dread the sleeves and back, though, boring walls of stockinette, so I started a diversion project, the Shedir hat from the special PDF issue of Knitty. It’s lots of challenging cabley goodness and I think it will be a good alternative…

I managed to finally get a ball winder and swift for Christmas this year, and my mom also gave me this neat antique craft container-thing. It’s hard to explain, it is a box on a stand that you can put next to your chair, and it has a little tray inside for notions etc. plus lots of room for yarn.

We went to see Santa! Look here and here.

Happy holidays, more later…

I’m starting now on Rodney’s birthday sweater. He’ll be 30 at the end of February. He has repeatedly asked for a pullover sweater with an anchor intarsia-ed on the front, so that he shall get.

Don’t worry, I talked to him at length about bad intarsia sweaters that people invested hundreds of hours in only to have them never worn. He swears he will wear it all the time when it’s done. We’ll see!

Here is what he gave me for Christmas, a complete surprise, but a very happy one. As soon as the battery charges up I am going to have lots of fun with it!

You can get a name engraved on it when you buy one. Mine says “Bernadette Tandoori” which is an old alter-ego of mine from the college days. I think she will be good friends with Iris Maggot who is my Canon digital camera. I guess I better name my cell phone too.

I might not be blogging for the next week or so, as we’re off to Michigan. Happy holidays everyone!

The reversible cabled scarf for my mother-in-law is done! It’s the warmest thing ever. Now I want one too. The best part is: all holiday knitting is now done!!

I made it out of Cascade 220 Tweed in a gold with black bits, color U626. Jo Ann wanted it to be fall colors, and I think the black bits will make it go nicely with one of her winter coats.

UPDATE: Duh, sometimes the obvious details escape me. I used three skeins of the Cascade 220 Tweed, and the scarf ended up maybe a bit shy of five feet long. I’ll add this to the description in my FO Gallery.

A strange thing happened at our house yesterday. We have Christmas lights in windows in two rooms on opposite sides of the apartment. In both rooms, exactly one half of each strand of lights stopped working! It’s really weird. They are not connected to each other, and are in fact different types of lights too. I couldn’t fix them by removing or replacing the bulbs. So if you see a third-floor apartment in Oak Park with only half the windows lit up, that would be us.

Stanley has another visit to the vet this afternoon for follow-up bloodwork. It was supposed to be two weeks after the last one, but with my grandma’s funeral, and then Thanksgiving, this was the soonest we could get in. Wish us luck! Stan seems his usual self, so we’ll see what the doctor says. His gums still look pale to me…but maybe they’ve just always been that way.

Here’s a picture of the socks I got in the mail. I tried them on and they fit perfectly. Thanks again Amy for accommodating my very long feet!

This is the first pair of hand-knitted socks I have ever owned. They’re so comfortable. In knitting socks for this swap, I kept thinking how much it kind of sucked, the small gauge, the DPNs, and the relative difficulty of the heel and toe. But now that I have a pair of my own to wear, I might rethink that!

Phew! Yesterday, a day which involved staying in pajamas and never experiencing the out-of-doors, I said about 50 times “I have to finish something today. I have to finish just one thing today.” But did I?

Well kind of. I made progress on several of the things that are in the works. I’m not just talking about knitting either. Here’s what’s on the list:

-Make more yogurt (OK, that one is done! and it turned out good)
-Make bierocks (DONE! and they turned out good too)*
-Finish all the holiday greeting cards (DONE! But only because I ran out of cards, and I still have about 10 more people to write to. You all get New Year’s cards, okay?)
-Of course, finish knitting the scarf for my mother-in-law (at least 80% done at the moment, yay!)
-Choose music for and burn CDs for Rodney’s brother for a gift (one of 3 CDs is burned, and most of the music for the other two is chosen, just needs to be organized)
-Clean off the hard drive of our aging computer (All the 2003 and 2004 photos are zipped but I need to delete a bunch of stuff still)
-Bake a coffee cake and banana bars
-Make more wrapping paper, so the rest of the gifts can be wrapped
-Finish transcribing all of my recipes that are on scraps of paper, or cut out from newspapers, or whatever, onto 3×5 cards. Now that I have a neat vintage card-catalog drawer to store them in, I must fight the clutter!!

And I got some socks in the mail from Amy. I have to write and say thanks, and take a picture for this site! You can see them on hers, 12/14 post. Very lovely and wonderful, I can’t wait to try them on. Thanks Amy!!!

*The way we do bierocks is pretty easy. We just buy pre-made frozen bread dough and thaw it out. Each loaf makes about five bierocks. The filling is browned ground turkey, mixed with sauteed onions and cabbage, salt, pepper and worcestershire sauce. Roll out the dough pieces, fill them with this mix, close up the “pods” and put on a greased baking sheet to rise for about 15 minutes. Bake for about 20 minutes until the bread is golden. For an extra element of goodness brush the tops with melted butter and serve while still warm.

This is a bit different from the last time we made them and blogged it and I think actually a bit better. More authentic, anyway, compared to the ones we ate when living in Kansas.