purples!

This last week was spring break for my girls, and we did a bunch of crafty type things, but I neglected to photograph any of it. Mostly we worked on Brownie projects, we made two of the snacks required for the snack badge one daughter is working on, and made spool dolls for a local display on the history of girl scouts. For the record, the snacks were homemade trail mix (both girls made a recipe where they use the measurement of "hand-fulls") and cookies where you took a chocolate chip cookie recipe and added something that was not chocolate chips. I think my baking soda is old or something because they came out all flat. Each girl added two things (I divided the dough in fourths) one added craisins and pop rocks candy. The other added butterscotch chips and york pieces. We added all of these to the growing column called: things that are nasty that I taste for my children while smiling and saying Aren't you clever. Actually 3 out of the four weren't THAT bad, but the flatness added a layer of yuck. Plus the girls did all the measuring themselves, so something else could have been off.

But you didn't come here for the brownie crafts, you came here for the knitting! the disasters! When I last wrote I was working on a lace scarf for me just like the ones I made for the teachers for the holidays this year. I finished that but have not yet blocked it. I was also struggling with a cardigan I wanted to knit for one of my daughters. Actually I'm knitting one for each, I'll get to that later.

To refresh your memory on the cardigan thing, I was driving myself crazy because I was afraid to just make up a pattern and/or wing it. I had in mind I wanted to do top down raglan style and found a pattern similar to what I wanted. Try as I might though I just could not get gauge. When I looked at going with what I had and doing a smaller size, I realized that for my size 10 child, I'd be making a 4! That is probably what made me say--Look this yarn is cheap (Brava by knit picks) and you want this sweater to get done, just fire up your raglan calculator and cast on already. So that's what I did.

I have pictures, but I also have to talk about those. See both projects (along with a lot of other stuff I knit) are purple. Purple is really hard for me to photograph true to color. I don't have a fancy camera, a simple point and shoot is what I use. So I struggled, googled and finally decided that my makeshift light box needed direct sunlight. Fortunately we had that yesterday.


This is actually really close to the true purple. Might be just a tad on the blue side, but pretty accurate.


The unblocked scarf. Hopefully there will be more sun when I have it blocked. Because the colors are pretty true on that as a well.