summer update

I have a short 15 minutes before I need to get lunch together for the children. That's how summer has been. One long meal prep followed by cleanup and then meal prep again.

Ok it isn't quite that bad, mostly, we do a lot of stuff in the mornings, including prep stuff for supper, and then head out to the pool for the afternoons. But it does feel like I am spending a lot of time on food. And these next few weeks it will go into hyper overload with corn to be frozen and peaches to be dealt with in addition to the very regular meals. I've already tackled strawberries (5 batches of freezer jam and a half batch of strawberry lemonade), and cherries (one batch of jam, and I lost count how many quarts frozen for crisp)

In the evenings after the kitchen is tidied (doesn't that sound domestic), I've been chilling with my knitting. I finished the lace panel for the Dahlia sweater:

And as expected from someone who didn't "take time to check her gauge" it is a bit bigger than the pattern suggests. I have a 16X17 inch "square" instead of the 13 inch they recommend. I did check gauge (by knitting up the next two pieces) and turns out that I really need to do some reworking. If I continue and make what the pattern says, I'll end up with a sweater that is 29 inches long on the back. So, I need to make the pieces shorter. At least I think I do. I need to read a little more ahead and see if I can figure out the construction.

I'm hoping that I can get it worked out because I really want this sweater.

In the meantime, I leave you with the turkey mama and her two getting bigger babies that wandered through the backyard today. They live somewhere in the neighborhood, as this is about the 3rd visit we've had.

summer sweater

Most people knit socks in the summer. And I like knitting socks, don't get me wrong, but this summer, I thought I'd try something a little different: a sweater.

*So I cast on for the dahlia cardigan. And then I made a mistake and had to rip that out. repeat from * 8 times.

It starts as a provisional cast on--no problem. With 4 stitches: no problem. Increase to 8: no problem, Join in the round and start the lace pattern: problem. I actually think the fact that it was 8 stitches and trying to manage 3 dpns and yarn over was some sort of issue.

After like 10 tries I got to the point in the lace where I thought I finally had it, but then was off 2 stitches. I think that was row 5 or something.

Finally I made it to row 7, was again off a stitch but was able to tink back to the error. And so now I have the beginnings of the center medallion:

I am hoping to get past all the tricky stuff before we have another long car trip. And I'm hoping to finish this in time for cooler weather. We'll see. Right now I haven't even decided which size I'm going to make, I thought I'd see how big my medallion turned out. How's that for disaster waiting to happen?