Step Into My Thimble

This is the Buttony sweater. I sewed on the brown/black buttons last night. I liked Carolyn‘s sizing up of the options, and I used that to help me decide. It just so happened that the majority liked the brown too! Here are the project details.

Pattern: Buttony Sweater
Yarn: Lamb’s Pride bulky in “Sable”, maybe about 4-5 skeins? (I have 10 in the stash, some of it frogged and re-wound from half-done things, so I’m not sure exactly how much I used.)
Needles: US10
Mods: I didn’t do the garter stitch button bands, but picked up after knitting was done. I like that look much better. I also cast on three stitches at each side of the underarm, and at each edge of the sleeve. I worked the sleeves flat because I didn’t enjoy the idea of DPNs, I don’t have any 12″ circs in that size, and anyway I don’t like those short circs. I also added waist shaping.

If I had to do it over, I’d make it even more snug, but with a less bulky yarn. I like how the one in the pattern pic has a more open neck, too. But as it is, I think it’s super wearable! Finally something out of that stash yarn, which was the second yarn I ever bought as a knitter, that I will actually use.

Since nobody gave any opinions over on Flickr yet, I thought I’d post my dilemma here: Which buttons would look best on the now-completed Buttony Sweater?

We have Option A, the slightly irregular, vintage Mother of Pearl buttons picked out of the tin from my grandma:

And Option B, the swirly brown/black vintage “Nouveaute” buttons, still sort of attached to their original card, also from my grandma:

Option C, not visible here, is as follows: a trip down to an antique store about 20 minutes south of Kalamazoo, where they have drawers and drawers of fabulous (if overpriced) vintage buttons in every imaginable style and color, and I pick out a bunch of mismatched, multicolored ones.

All these options are good, though Option C is less good due to the fact that I really don’t need to be spending more money on vintage buttons, or on any of the inevitable impulse purchases from an antique store. However, so tempting!

Help!!

The sooner you give your opinion, the sooner this can be a true FO and I can give you the Project Metadata. Because I know you care about that.

Today has been such a nice day…a leisurely lunch on the new porch swing while Maeve napped, a long walk around a nearby neighborhood, and a delicious dinner of Japanese-style salt-grilled trout, not to mention a trip to the playground where they have baby swings.

We have many bulbs popping up like crazy throughout the yard, deep purple tulips, yellow daffodils, and funky peach-colored hyacinth, plus crocus of course. With help from my dad, we managed to get rid of a bunch of dead branches and tree roots, and cut stumps out of the chunk of yard I’m hoping to turn into a vegetable patch. I have been thinking about which kinds of hostas to buy to fill in around the back of the house where our ugly gigantic air conditioner unit now lives; I’ll probably go with some of these. I’m not a super hosta fan or anything, but they are easy to grow and they fill a lot of space. Obscuring the a/c beast is a priority.

This morning, a neighbor whose yard backs up against ours came by to tell us we had a dead possum by our fence. Her dog had been trying to get at it. It must have died (or been killed) overnight, because it wasn’t there last evening when I was raking under the shrubs. Stinky!

I just found out that a LYS that was kind of on the other side of town has moved to the shopping plaza that is within walking distance from our house! I wish I had known that when I went to buy yarn for Rusted Root at the other LYS, which I don’t particularly care for. Nobody ever seems to have a great selection of Lamb’s Pride Cotton Fleece on the shelves, and although I wanted to make RR in that dark purple, I ended up getting Sedona Red because it was the only non-baby-pastel available at the crappy LYS. But hey, when a yarn store relocates, a lady is entitled to go check out the new and expanded digs, and if that happens to involve a purchase of a few more tiny skeins, that’s okay, right?

Finally…a new modem. We are back.

Here is my Seda vest.

I had to redo the armholes because of uncontrollable curling, which you can also see happening at the back of the neck and a bit around the bottom edge. I may redo the neck too, eventually. Right now I’m just sick of monkeying with this project and I want to move on to other* things**.

Our first batch of home-brewed beer is bottled. We made an amber ale, and it really does taste like anything you might buy in the store. The only problem…we may have jumped the gun on the fermentation process, because it has a very low alcohol content. The second batch, a wheat beer spiced with coriander and orange peel, is now in the secondary fermentation carboy, slowly bubbling away. It smells really good, and a taste when racking made us think that it too is comparable to any wheat beer you could buy. I hope it is a bit more boozy because we were not aiming to become the homebrewer’s version of O’Douls or anything. Anyway, it’s really fun to brew your own beer. Chalk it up to yet another DIY initiative that we’ll try to keep in the household rotation! After this we’re thinking about making a hard cider, but that may not happen until the fall when we can get fresh cider sans preservatives. I would like to try a Belgian white ale as well, eventually.

Maeve made it through her barfing virus like a champ. During her illness, she discovered her love of taking steps while we hold her hands. She’s still not really crawling in the traditional sense, though she can get around in a sort of reverse spiral until she backs into something and gets stuck. She also must have needed to make up for her lack of meals while sick, because she’s been eating like crazy ever since. I’m sure part of her tentative approach to food in the past was my own concern, but now, look out. She can eat anything! She even enjoyed corned beef over the weekend. It’s nice to just feed her off my plate instead of prepping a bunch of special little things. This is her grubby little fist mashing up a blueberry. It took a long time to clean up after that snack.

*Already half done.
**Still need to buy yarn. I am thinking Cotton Fleece in “Plum Patina.”

Our five-year-old DSL modem has croaked.

That means no home internet. And researching a new, affordable modem is kind of internet-dependent, so I have been working that out from my parents’ computer, when I have time and transportation to get to their house.

It has been one whole week. Only on true vacations have I gone this long without the internet, in probably five years. It’s pathetic how dependent on it we have become.

I can promise at least one F.O. when I’m back though! Yay.