Am I bad?

I desperately want to have a friend saunter into Darn Knit Anyway and scope out if anyone bought any of my yarn yet.  smile.  And I'm too chicken to call and inquire.  I of course am waiting to get the call saying the yarn flew off the shelves and they would like me to bring more!  grin...someday.

In anticipation of such a call I've been spinning this week.  I have two bobbins filled and ready to ply tonight.  I promise I'll take pictures.  And I ordered and received 3 more rovings to add to the que of unspun fiber.  Again, I'll take pictures.  I've been really bad about not taking pictures lately.

I'm leaving work early today to take Emily to her first orthodontist appointment to start the widening of her jaw to prepare her for bone grafting surgery the first of the year.  Today should just be a quick look and decision to actually start the process.  So no hurtful procedures today.

And yesterday, I had to really force myself to acknowledge Anna is growing up.  For the first time, I let her bike alone to a friend who lives reasonable close, but still farther than I've ever let her go alone before.  I think she was thrilled.  I was a wreck!  I think this growing up is harder on the parent than the kid.  But she is trustworthy and has earned this stretching of the boundaries.  But I'm still a wreck.

When I went out to check the pumpkin mass I actually found the first sign that amongst all the leaves and flowers and vines, there is at least one pumpkin trying to grow.  Hang on, there will be more farm reports later.  Along with pictures.  Are you noticing a theme here?

And just in case you don't read the Yarn Harlot her description of her adventures in throwing out the first pitch to the Toronto baseball game during its Stitch N Pitch festivities is one of the best things I've read in a long time.  And she even has pictures!

New Adventure!

Last night I brought this lovely basket of my handspun yarns to a local yarn shop darn. knit. (anyway) to sell!  I'm very excited!  I worked most of Sunday getting all the wrappers on the skeins and naming the yarn.  Now that was interesting.  I always said I wanted to be the person naming the paint colors, but I realized as I was labeling my yarn that it wasn't as easy as it looked.  But I ended up with everything labeled and ready to go.  Aimee looked it over and seemed very excited to have my yarn in her shop.  So if any of you readers are near Stillwater, MN, and are looking for some handspun yarn please head over to Aimee's shop and ask to look at my yarn, I labeled it Knitting My Way Home too. 

I made yarn with wool, alpaca, wool/silk, and wool/mohair blends. The yardage ranges from 50 - 350 yards in a skein.  I also made 2 Fair Isle sampler sets out of 3 different skein colors in small yardages that would make a nice stranded baby hat etc.  Or just some swatches to practice your stranded knitting. 

My handspun cubby is now half empty.  Yee Haw!  This means I can spin more!  Can't beat that.

Ice Cream in Texas and swimming with the Dinasaurs

One of the things that you forget when you move from Texas to Minnesota, is that no matter how fast you try and eat a Dairy Queen ice cream cone in the heat of a Texan summer, you will get dripped on.  You can't lick fast enough without some drips cascading down your hands.  smile

We had such a good time in Texas.  The temps were moderate (at least for Texas), only in the mid 90's.  Several days it rained which rearranged some of our plans but we still saw fireworks on a mosquito infested night.  Anna found a unique way of trying to fend off the blood thirsty critters, she put her legs into the arms of her sweater, pulled the hood up and tucked her arms in and lasted oh mere moments before gasping for air.  But it made us laugh while we waited for the festivities to begin.

The drive to and from went well, 16 hours can be a chore, but the girls are great for the most part and it is freeway driving for me so easy enough.  I loathe to take 2 days as I don't want to lose any time that I could otherwise be spending with our friends. 

We drove to Glen Rose and crept through the animal preserve, Anna was brave and had the giraffes feeding off her hands, Emily decided to wait until next year to try that.  Emily however, fed the ostrich and that is not an easy feat to do without getting pecked.  After trolling through the animal presevere, we went to Dinasaur Valley and the kids played in the river and saw dinasaur tracks.  It was fun for all of us.

I promised to knit and while I did, I don't have a picture yet of what I worked on.  I worked on the tiger from the Cyd designed balloon animals.  I need to knit the ears to sew on and then embroider on the eyes before I will show him on the blog.  But it is an amazing feat of engineering I think how you twist and fold the critters together.  So watch for that in the next installments.

I have finished an UFO though.  Thank heavens. Here is the Inga hat, I like how it turned out, although Anna didn't like that it had a "poufy" top.  I think it is fine.  I still need to give it a good soak and block it but I'm happy with the end result.  I used left overs of yarn used to make Kyle's Anna's mittens last year. Anna's mittens were very cute and since I bought the yarn at the Yarn Harbor in Duluth I wanted to make sure I had enough yarn, so I overbought the amount I'd need.  But as you see it did not go to waste!

I also completed a new cowl and have 1 1/2 fingerless mitts done that match it.  It is a very simple ruched pattern for the cowl and the mitts are the Fetching pattern in Ravelry.

And finally, we can not have a garden at our house.  We live in a twin home with a home association.  They are very strict on rules on the outside of the homes.  And one of those rules is no gardens (except for the people who have the pond in their backyard, somehow they are exempted and can have gardens?  don't get me started).  So we have containers of flowers every summer on our patio, but no garden.  For Emily's birthday, my sister gave her a round fiber type basket that is made for vegetables to grow on patios.  Who knew?  So we planted carrots in the middle and ringed it with pumpkin seeds.  I was hoping we would get tasty carrots as that is Emily's favorite vegetable and at least 2 pumpkins for fall for the girls.  Well look at this. 

I fear that we will have slightly more than two pumpkins! In the center of the basket I counted 24 blossoms. TWENTY FOUR. and that does not count the at least equal amount of blossoms coming out on all the various tendrils hanging off the edge of the basket. I see the girls hauling their wagon full of pumpkins up and down the neighborhood streets selling them for a dollar! But it has been fun, say if anyone has any good pumpkin recipes, let me know!

I interrupt our regularly scheduled program

I broke.  The mountain of wool that is Yggdrasil sitting in my lap addled my brain.  It was hot people.  Too hot to have a ginormous pile of wool in your lap.  No amount of fans blowing on me could change the simple fact that it was too hot and sticky to be working on a large wool blanket.  So I broke.  I randomly pulled some handspun yarn off my shelf (at least I shopped in my stash) and I cast on for a hat.  A few hours later, I had this little simple charmer sitting in my lap.  The only problem is no matter how many pictures I took, the color is all wrong.  Umm what?  How with all the blazing sun beaming in on me could I not take a picture that had any resemblence to the true colors of deep dark chocolate (not the namby pamby orange brown showing) mixed with deep blues and even purples of the yarn?  Isn't natural light the thing we look forward to in the summer months?  Well, you see, I took the pictures late last night, when it was dark outside, and I used indoor lighting.  Yup, that is my story.   

And one hat was not enough.  I had more of the same handspun left over, so I simply cast on again and this time ended up with a smaller baby hat....with ear flaps...that needs something added to it....maybe some embroidery?  A tassel on the top?  Definitely braids need to be added to the ear flaps, but I'm not sure that will give it some needed umph.  And this picture is rotten as well.  Maybe instead of a knitting class I should take a camera class!

But the biggest excitement is that I'm heading to Texas EARLY tomorrow morning, like we better be in the van on the road heading south on 35 by 4:30 a.m.  And that means that by 8:30 p.m. my van will be pulling up in front of my friends house and I can crawl my way out of the driver's seat and collapse in joy knowing for 9 more days I can eat Tex Mex, drink my share of wicked good margaritas, and laugh and talk until I'm filled to the brim.  So while I've been silent on the blog before, this time I will have a good excuse.  I'll be in Texas.  I promise to take pictures.  And I promise to knit and spin for HOURS...well maybe not after the margaritas...

Heading home soon

Soon, the girls and I will pile into the van and head south to Texas for a vacation.  The three of us surrounded by friends we love and in the place I love.  It will be the girls first Texan summer.  Feeling the asphalt squish under your feet as it radiates heat.  Feeling like you have to push your way through the thick hot air.  Feeling the hot steering wheel sear your hands because you don't have a windshield sun screen anymore.  Anna was too little when we moved back to MN to remember what July in Texas feels like.  Emily has never been there in the summer.  We usually go there during the girls' spring break in March.  I anticipate some stunned looks on their faces when they first step out of a cool air conditioned house into the brick oven like heat of Texas in July.  Not even in the night does it cool off.  But I can't wait to go. 

I know I'm nearly there when I'm climbing up the hills on the border between Oklahoma and Texas and see the Red River below.  I know it sounds odd, but I can feel the joy hidden deep down inside that I'm back.  As we drop back down into Texas I can't stop the grin.  On the flip side, when we leave Texas and this time I'm dropping over the hills into Oklahoma I can't stop the tears.  But for now?  I'll wait in anticipation of the indescribable joy I feel, even after driving for 12+ hours that I'm finally back in Texas.  At least for a while.

Spinning and knitting

The Yggdrasil is moving along slowly.  I finished the first side of the final border and rounded the corner!  Ya me!  I've basically got the pattern memorized and can fly along.  In fact the row that I thought was the hardest the first go around has become the easiest for me.  I'm trying to do a side a week, but with all the evening festivities it is more of a challenge than I'd like.  I also took a picture of how all the borders look together.  I'm hoping when I block it will open up the cable and vine border just a bit.  I think that will add to the look of the border.

Yes, I'm standing on my bed taking this shot. With my ceiling fan whizzing mere inches above my head. Who said there isn't danger in knitting!

To take the edge of knitting only on the Yggsdrasil, I'm spinning again.  One reason is I'm planning on spinning enough yarn to reknit Girasole as a baby blanket.  I bought 20 ounces of roving from JulieSpins on Etsy (also saw she is now selling her stuff through The Loopy Ewe ) but in order to get the 1500 yards of yarn I will need, I need to spin it quite thin.  Thinner than I've ever consistently done before.  So I need to practice before I break out the beautiful roving I plan to use for the blanket (and what is it with me and knitting blankets all the sudden?)  So over the weekend I pulled out some roving Emily gave me for Mother's Day.  And after a couple days of spinning I had this

It is pretty, but it isn't nearly as fine as I need.  I haven't spun for several months so I clearly need to practice.  I love the yarn though, it will be a lovely hat or cowl, very soft and squishy.  So I dug through my stash and found some Ashford roving I totally forgot I had.  (bad bad when you don't even remember all the roving you have!)

And this most beautiful deep teal roving slowly turned into the thinnest single I've ever spun yet.  So I'm cautiously optimistic this will help me get the perfect yarn for the baby blanket.  The Ashford roving is the softest smoothest spin I've done in months.  The roving slides through my fingers into the neatest tight single but it doesn't break.  Hopefully it will hold when I start plying.  But one thing with spinning this fine, it takes longer to do.  Both a good and a bad thing.  Smile...but hopefully spinning an hour a night will help me churn through the final borders of Yggdrasil.

Status of Yggdrasil and news on Emily

I'm in the final stages of the might Yggdrasil.  I'm closing in on the first corner of the final cable border.  It is truly a huge blanket and even in summer, I love knitting on it.  But I live in MN, we have had a very cool and rainy June, so it has been quite pleasant to sit with that massive pile of wool in my lap.  So I keep slogging on, target completion date is early July.  Then look out...I feel a huge staritis coming on, be it spinning or knitting...watch for new projects to start soon.  But the last few days I've been grateful to have Yggdrasil to focus on.

My Emily was scheduled to have a surgery done due to her cleft issues yesterday.  Problem is the insurance company is balking at approving part of the procedure as they feel it falls into the "cosmetic" arena.  It infuriates me that it is even a question.  Two years ago after her first lip revision it took me 10 months of appeals and letters and phone calls to get two denials overturned and payment in full made by the same insurance company for her lip revision for the same reason.  Even though she had limited cartilage in the structure of her nose, the work the doctor did to try and build her an internal structure with the small amount of cartilage she had was deemed initially as cosmetic so no coverage.  Really?  On a six year old?  With a cleft history?  But they finally paid for that surgery and I thought we had established her cleft issues clearly.  Last year's revision and further surgery ended with no problem at all.  Then smack here we go again.  I can fight this fight.  But it angers me that my child has to wait because of insurance issues instead of getting all the medical help that is available.  When the doctor tells you they haven't had to get pre-approval for this particular procedure in over a year and a half from any other insurance company nor have they had any denials perviously it makes you just so disapointed in the state of how these things are decided.  I said it before.  I fought for years to adopt Emily.  I thought once I got her home, my fighting days were behind me.  I was wrong.  Well hold on people.  I can endure what you throw at me and I will prevail and my child will have the very best treatment out there.  Because she is entitled to it.  Period.