Super Sitting Saturday

Seven hours in the car and we are in Massachusetts. Actually, the trip didn't seem too bad. We stopped at a scenic overlook along the Hudson...pretty but cold! And when, a few miles later, I picked up the scarf I was knitting, I could only find one needle! Oh no! Poor little needle, abandoned at the scenic overlook! In the cold. All alone. (Have I mentioned before that I tend to over-anthropomorphize things?)

But hurrah! When we got up here to the hotel, I opened the car door and looked down beside my seat and there was the needle! Yay!

We stopped by school and scooped up Rachel and headed to Webs. I picked up some yarn for Maureen and some yarn and a book for Rachel and, yes, a little yarn for me. Got some pretty Noro Silk Garden Lite in shades of purple and green on sale. And some yarn to try to make a hat with leaves... What fun.

Home tomorrow...seven more hours in the car. Yikes.

My Hat Is Finished!

La, la, I finished my hat! Okay, I know…I hadn’t even posted that I had started a hat or was working on a hat. But that was only because I was busy working on my hat!

I needed a hat to go with my new winter coat. It’s red. So a month or so ago I was up at The Black Sheep and bought a skein of yarn with lots of reds and white. (I may have posted about it.) I hadn’t gotten around to knitting it up yet however. Then, a couple of weeks ago I was up at The Black Sheep and they had a hat and scarf knit from that yarn. And they felt….light….thin….not terribly, terribly warm. So I began the search for different yarn. (Don’t worry…the already-bought-yarn won’t go to waste. I may make myself a little light hat for not-so-cold days. Or a long scarf for the Red Scarf project next year. Something.)

Last Saturday I was up at The Black Sheep and Tracy and company suggested that I make a grey hat. And my coat does have a grey lining. And they had some scrumptious soft yarn in grey…and red. So I decided…Miss Oh-Yeah-I’ve-Done-Stranded-Knitting-Twice…that I would design myself a beanie sort of hat in grey with red hearts around it. Piece of pie! Easy as cake!

And it really was, of course. I had fun charting out a heart design. The yarn (Skacel's Schulana Pacolana) was a delight to knit with. The stranding went pretty well without too much corrugating. I didn’t run out of yarn. And the hat fits! (Well, I sort of wish I could have put in another three or four rows before I started my decreases, but I was worried about running out of yarn. (As it turned out, I probably could have done so.) But it pulls down over my ears enough...but a couple more rows would have been perfect.)


[Imagine the mandatory picture of stranded inside here....I'll try to get one soon]


Think that pompon's big enough?

And now I keep imagining other hats....cream with green leaves...green with cream and black sheepies...cream with gray trees....this could get addictive.

Guess What It Did At Our House Today!

It snewed!

Not a lot...maybe 4 inches in our neighborhood. But my, it's pretty.

Went up to the Black Sheep today and had a nice sit-and-knit with Tracy and Karen and Renee. It was not as busy as last week, though ten minutes before closing a bunch of people came in. Weird. Got a good chunk down on Rachel's sweater and am now up to the dividing for the neck.

Tomorrow....housework. Ugh.

How About A Reading Update?

So I'm going to add 15 new books to my reading list over there...some better than others. In fact, I just looked at my list and the first book I'm going to add, Man Walks Into A Room, I can remember absolutely nothing about. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. And I read it only a bit over a month ago. Geez. Either the book really wasn't memorable or my mind is going.

The only book I starred in my reading journal....my sign for a good book...was The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness' sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. These are good books. Looking forward to the next one. Jane Gardam's The Man in the Wooden Hat almost got a star...but I have to say to me it seemed sort of as though it was material that just didn't fit into Old Filth.

The new Deborah Crombie isn't bad...not marvelous (I probably won't remember much about it in a month), but not bad. Discovered a new-to-me mystery writer, Louise Penny. Read A Fatal Grace, her second book, and just bought another one, A Rule Against Murder.

Zipped through Under the Dome, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

Karen Maitland's The Owl Killers wasn't, in my opinion, as good as Company of Liars.

And I'm in the middle of three or four books right now. A Joan Aiken kid's book - Go Saddle the Sea - I do love her books. An Ian Rankin mystery. A science-fiction book that my brother gave me for my birthday that I think might be a little too smart for my little brain. And a fantasy...

But once I get one or two of those done and out of the way, I have Sue Grafton's new one, U Is for Undertow. Yay!

Amazing....

I've never tried embedding a video...let's see if this works.

Have you seen this? It's amazing.