etsy

etsy

Monday, October 6, 2008

Party at our house

Saturday was a beautiful fall day in MN. And the best part was celebrating at our house with our family including my niece Kristin who lives in Florida. She was here for the weekend to run in the Twin Cities marathon with her brother, Kyle and his fiancee Anna. (They all ran and completed the cold drizzly race on Sunday.) We only see Kristin a couple times a year so it was a happy houseful of family.

On November 2 is Anna's 11th gotcha day, the day we celebrate that is the anniversary of when she was placed in my arms in China, so we will do something extra special this year, just the two of us....I haven't decided what it is yet, but will come up with something fun.

I was pretty tired out on Sunday and for the first time in a very long spent a lazy afternoon, knitting some on a spiral hat (free pattern at Ravelry, called Odessa, designed by Gumperina). I finished it Sunday night, turned out good. Will make some both for church gifts and regular presents.

We are going to go up north in a couple weeks for a long weekend, we will stay in Duluth for 2 nights, I'm going to look for a yarn shop there and possibly see what I can find maybe in Superior. Then one night in Grand Marais, where I hope to go back to the Little Red House, a neat yarn shop I found on our last visit. Hopefully between time in the water park with the girls and driving through the pretty scenery, there will be time for knitting....

The weather has turned so I can start wearing my hand knit socks I worked on during the summer. I'm ready to repair any as needed as I found a wooden darning egg and some directions on line for repairing heels etc...I am going to reinforce several of the heels prior to wearing them, as that is where I have worn through my first pair I made last year. I wore them a lot last year, hoping to help out the wearability both by having more pairs to rotate through as well as better choices in sock yarn.

In these times of financial uncertainties, I think it is interesting I'm going back to things that were regular everyday chores back in the 30's during another financial crisis, knitting socks, darning socks instead of throwing things away and buying more. Instead I'm trying to be more frugal, reusing what I can, not being as quick to toss things aside. I think a really good habit to get into....although I don't think I'm going to go as far as washing out plastic bread bags or washing aluminum foil and reusing it several times. I remember my grandma doing both of those things. I also remember her never using a dryer, but would hang the laundry out almost all year round, sometimes when it was so cold that the jeans and overalls of my grandpa would be stiff as a board when they came in from the winter cold. Then they all needed to be ironed before wearing. I do like most of my things to go through the dryer. I may get one of the wooden drying racks though, and see what I can do to reduce our items that we put through the dryer. Easily will work for my hand knit socks and I'm sure once I start with it I can find other good uses for it.

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