Progress continues on the cream sweater. In fact, I am so lazy I didn't want to set it all up for a photo shoot and instead, just sort of snapped it in it's natural habitat.
What you see there is a back, both fronts AND a sleeve. That sort of makes me feel like I am NEARLY done. But it also forgets finishing the other sleeve, sewing it all together, and adding a buttonband AND hood. Good thing it snowed yesterday! (Didn't stick but STILL).
Still so much sleeve to knit....
I have been taking this every where I go, and that usually is a bad thing when you have a sleeve (increase every X rows Y times!), so this time, I made a chart of which row numbers to increase on. And when I took it to the ball park for our first (really cold) game of the year I improvised.
I did end up with 3 too many stitches at the end, but in the interests of finishing, well I just bound off instead of trying to "fix" it.
The other project that is progressing is our caterpillar project. You do remember the caterpillars right? Well the cocoons have been in a tank in the garage over the winter. And last week I moved it outside in case sun was the deciding factor. No action yet, but I understand May is their month.
I felt like maybe I should title this post "what I did over my summer vacation" because I think that would make me feel more accomplished than a list of things I put off that I need to accomplish in September or even this week.
The kids went back to school and OH the list of things I put off while they were home is long.
Last year I did this whole write an entry every day as I slogged through my canning of both peaches and tomatoes. This year, I finished tomatoes so early. They were abundant this year instead of moldy. And then, peaches started coming in.
So here are the peach statistics so I don't forget. I made two batches of jam, one regular and one peach vanilla. I didn't really have enough fruit for the regular and so it is a little grainy, but the vanilla is OH MY. Then I managed to buy a half bushel of peaches from my regular orchard, even though they technically weren't selling them, And then a few days later I bought another (and they were selling them). So it worked out well and I ended up canning 24 pints of peaches. I didn't do any honey spice because it turns out that I'm the only one who likes them. I actually have enough peaches left on my counter to do another pint, but I think I'm going to smoothie them up instead. Maybe freeze them too.
I have been slowly slowly working on socks. at least the plain socks. until I ran into this
And so now I am busy untangling yarn so I can knit. It should have pushed me to work on the complicated socks, but I am having complicated feelings about them. I'm sure that once the newness of school wears down, and my kids get healthy again (yes, school started yesterday and my kids have head colds), I will not feel like such a zombie all the time and will actually (gasp) maybe even have time to knit during the day every once in a while!
And yes, Halloween is on the horizon. I think I have a plan. One girl picked something I can easily scrounge around at second hand shops and find (she wants to be "Sadness" from Inside Out), and while the other one was more complicated (she wanted to be a three headed... something), she has decided instead upon being a pink sparkly princess. The pattern I bought is a generic Glenda, but we are going to "un-Glenda" it by maybe choosing some fushia and gold or silver. Stay tuned on that one.
And in case you were curious--all the caterpillars are now cocoons! It was a fun process, and now one of my many September jobs is to get them set for the winter, safe so animals don't eat them, and exposed to weather. Then we wait.
Summer is in full swing here. I've talked to the peach guy about the bushel and got a definite "maybe" so am still waiting on those. We finished out Tomatoes from last year the same night our CSA came with tomato palooza. So I ended up with nearly a bushel of tomatoes, which I have been steadily canning ever since. I did the last of them today (and tonight is more CSA pickup!) and ended up with 4 pints of sauce and 14 pints of crushed tomatoes.
There are signs of fall--the weather turned cooler, and the girls picked up their schedules for 7th grade. Michigan starts after labor day, so we are trying to squeeze the last juicy bits out of late August. To that end, we went to a baseball game where I knit a heel on the "travel" sock, then made a mistake and ripped out part of it, reknit that at the dentist and then dropped a stitch that made it so I had to unravel a bunch of the heel---it was a yarn over stitch that unravelled quickly all the way to origin and POP disappeared.
Am almost where I was at the end of the ball game.
I also started Neldoreth and am about done with the ribbing. Once I got the hang of it, it wasn't hard but I KNOW I can't do it at a ball game or in the dentist's waiting room.
I guess the big news around here has been in the caterpillar front. If you came for the yarn, stop here. Well maybe not. The caterpillars are working on cocoons, so far half of them have spun one. Because Cercopia are related to silkmoths, their silk is similar. It is stronger than it looks and is really kind of fun to play with. As the friend who gave the caterpillars asked me: Are you wanting to knit with it? Maybe not, but I find it really fun to watch them spin. ,br>
Of course some of them are still just hanging out, doing their "thing"
