I frogged the first pair of glow-in-the-dark mittens I started for a couple reasons: 1, my needles and yarn didn’t match up and it was so tight I was getting frustrated and 2, the pattern was too hard for my small brain. Then, fortuitously, I found my old mitten pattern that I used to use back in the day, which I am reproducing here. Please don’t follow it, it won’t make any sense to anyone else in the world, so just pretend this entry ends here.
Worsted weight yarn and dpns. Don’t ask what size, I don’t remember.
1. CO 30 sts.
2. K1, P1=12 rows
3. K1+1, P1, 1 row=45 sts
4. K 5 rows=45 sts
5. K5+1 around=51 sts (this means K5, yo, K5, yo, K5 for each needle, adding 6 stitches)
6. K 11 rows, thumbhole=7sts
7. K 20 rows
8. K4, K2tog around, 15 sts (?)
9. K 1 row
10. K3, K2tog around=12 sts
11. K 1 row
12. K1, K2tog around=8sts
13. K 4 row, cast off.
Thumb=16 stsx16rows.
The second I finish the first one I will post. I think that 7 stitches sounds narrow for a thumb, so that might change. And I might use other yarn and weave it in properly so it looks neater, but i might just cast off and cast on, we’ll see!
Hello, all you ladies out there, I have a serious warning for you: Walmart takes bathing suits back! YES! I was behind a woman in line at customer service today and she returned 2 bikini bottoms with NO QUESTIONS ASKED! I almost barfed. When I got to the head of the line I asked the man if he seriously had just returned them and he said that they hadn’t been worn, they still had the protective sticker inside.
Yeah? Still gross. From now on, when purchasing intimate type items, I will be asking the store about their return policy.
Ugh.
These are sort of mutant cookies. I had half a box of lemon cake mix that had been sitting around for a while-I don’t even remember what became of the first half-that I decided to make cookies, based on that awesomely easy recipe I made almost a year ago. I used mini chocolate chips and they came out really well, thanks!
I’m calling them lemon crinkles. Next in line for baking are cupcakes, but that might not happen until we return from our trip to CR.
This glow in the dark yarn’s been around for a long time now and up until yesterday, I’d avoided it. Although I’d looked at it many times because I have a deep, abiding love for all things glowy. It’s on sale at Zeller’s (and everywhere, I think) for half the original price so I went for it, 2 balls of the yellow “light bright” yarn. I’m knitting (!) it into mittens for myself-how cool will that be?
Yikes, it’s not listed on the Bernat website so I might race out today and buy more. The other yarn is only marginally classier, it’s actually wool from Romni. Here’s how I buy yarn: what appeals to me visually and then I rub it on my neck to see if it’s too itchy. Then I look at the price and either smile or curse my expensive taste. That yarn’s probably going to be another scarf.
I hadn’t ordered a good food box from the Anne Johnston Health Centre in months but something in my head tweaked a couple weeks ago and I put my name down. Am I ever glad, look what I got:
1 Romaine Lettuce
2lb carrots
3lb potatoes
3lb pears
3lb apples
2 lb onions
2 red peppers
1 head cauliflower
1.5 litre box coronation blue grapes
1 bunch organic kale
1 organic eggplant
2 field tomatoes
Not a bad haul, and all that for $17. This cheered me greatly after watching a rather depressing documentary about the woman who ’starred’ in the infamous ‘Animal Farm’ videos everyone’s seen. Now to figure out what to do with a vegetable only I like (eggplant).
No pictures, sorry, he’s shy. But I rescued the World’s Smartest Turtle from certain death earlier today. Or yesterday, I guess, same thing. When I woke up and walked past the pond there was no water squizzling out of the squirter and I was all, DANG IT! because I’d just cleaned the filter and it had been pumping really well just the day before. So I yoinked the intake tube out of the water, and lo and behold, there’s Turdy suctioned to it by his shell.
AGH!
Poor little bugger, who knows how long he’d been stuck under water. So I shook him off and he floated up to the surface of the water and was so still I thought he was dead. But he wasn’t-he was gasping. Seriously, I had tears in my eyes, it was scary and sad and he was so pathetic, floating and huffing for about 3 minutes. Then he sunk down and sat on a ledge for another minute, contemplating, I’m sure, what had just happened to him. Then he went back to being his usual super genius self and scrambled for safety under a rock.
And I haven’t seen him since. And now I’ve decided that while we call him Turdy day to day, that’s just his nickname. Following the Bev Hills naming scheme (the fish are Brenda Walsh, Kelly Taylor and Donna Martin), I’m renaming him Steve Saunders. Hahaaa!
This is all I had the time to hot glue together on Saturday.
Then I glued her to the wall under her friends Gluey and Glovey. Now she won’t be lonely.
Anyway, other than that, it’s business as usual. I’m completely, utterly, addicted to knitting and it’s making me crazy. I sure wish I hadn’t given away my set of needles (that included dpn’s and circulars and a cute holder for the whole shebang) but what can you do? At the time I thought I’d quit that habit. Ah well. I’ve already finished one scarf and have the first 2 on the go still. And a yarn date tomorrow, see ya at noon, Jana!
Or maybe the other way around? I have been trying recently to expand my horizons by cooking food outside my comfort zone. This means baking-mostly-non out of the box deserts. I’ve already made 2 of these apple cakes (which really are the best apple cake I’ve ever had and it gets totally eaten here-unusual) in the past weeks, but cake is easy, it’s something I am familiar with. So today I decided to do bars. BARS! Oh, not just bars, these are lime coconut bars and trust me, they are delicious. Oh, so incredibly delicious.
I love sweet and tangy at the same time, so good. I’ll make lemon bars next time!
Inspired by Jana (who is the best knitter I know), I bought some gorgeous yarn at Romni, dug around on Ravelry and found a pattern I thought was do-able and got to work. It was hard at first: I couldn’t even remember how to cast on and I stared at the needles willing my hands to just do what they know how to do, and it worked. I’d bought 2 balls of yarn, so I thought, hey, I could do this pattern in crochet too, let’s have a race.
Nope, I didn’t fiddle with colour at all in that picture, that’s actually what the yarns look like. On the left is Misti Alpaca hand paint yarn, #18. On the right is Wisdom Yarns Poems Sock, colour 958. Crochet is winning the speed race, I’ve always loved crochet for that reason, but knitting (it’s on #3 needles, fiddly twiddly stuff) is winning for pure gorgeousness. The Misti Alpaca yarn is SO nice, it’s soft and smooth and there are no weird variations in the yarn at all. The Poems is very, very nice, the colour is incredible, but the yarn goes thin, thick, thin, thin, thick and kind of drives me crazy. Both are a little itchy and both will need to be blocked when finished, but I do believe they will soften up once washed. I am hoping Jana can advise me on how to know when I am in the middle and need to start decreasing. Or I need a small scale.
When they’re both done, I will update.
