Birthday!

This week was my birthday, and while I’m scarily close to being 30, I enjoyed my day very much. Beth surprised me with an ice cream cake, we cracked upon the bag of American Doritos (yes, there IS a difference), and enjoyed watching Frozen together. I’m so thankful for these lovely ladies who made me feel so loved and appreciated.

This Monday I finished the sixth chart on my scarf—I’m working on the barrels right now. The Lonely Mountain is in sight! Here are charts 5 and 6; I’ve not downloaded my pictures for awhile.

I’m really debating right now whether or not to add the crochet boarder around the scarf. There is one part of me that quails at the thought of that after all this knitting, and there is another part of me that wonders how hard it will be to make that look nice. I think the scarf is about as wide as I want it right now, so I might just leave it off. The main advantage as far as I can tell is that it would cover those places at the beginning where I didn’t always wrap my yarn very well. Oh well, there are a few more charts worth of knitting for me to ponder through…

I’m hankering to start a new knitting project right now, but I’m not sure what. I have a sock that is just about ready to be cast off, and I finished my red spiral scarf made with the Mountain Color mill ends I bought in Montana last summer.

I’m still planning out my gift knitting for Christmas and a few birthdays, and I came across another scarf pattern that I want to try out. If only teaching didn’t interfere with all my knitting! The trick is to find something that a) I want to knit and b) calls for yarn I have in the stash. Yes, I have a rather, er, good sized stash, but sometimes there just isn’t anything that will work for what I have in mind. I think I’m going to do a left-overs sort of project to clear out some space in my sock yarn shoe organizer…

Parting shot: I have some pretty crazy animals; here is Java in a bag,

and Hazel napping in a culvert!

I might be a little addicted to astronomy right now...

I tried out a new recipe for baked eggs with spinach and mushrooms last weekend, only I didn’t have spinach so I substituted Chinese cabbage. Gooood stuff let me tell you! I LOVE it when I find recipes that I can make out here without too much scrambling and substituting, and just to round out the win of this dish, it’s gluten free AND good for you!

Not much has happened on the knitting front, but I will say that I’m trying out a new type of crochet project that has been a pleasant challenge for me. Also, it’s a sock yarn stash buster—very important in my life! Pictures will hopefully follow next week depending on how much I get accomplished.

Wednesday was a full moon, and I wanted to take my kids out to look at it through the telescope, but what with one thing and another it just didn’t work out. I continued my efforts to take even half-way decent pictures of the moon, and ended up with something that utterly does NOT capture the golden magnificence of the rising moon.

Well, last night I arranged with the dorm parents to let the kids come out for a look after music night, so I took the telescope out to practice a bit while I waited for the moon to rise. I decided to give Jupiter another look as the moon was not on that side of the sky, and I found to my delight that I could see four of its moons, and when I got still enough the bands of color across its surface. Now, the planet itself was the size of a small pill, but I was thrilled that I could see even that much. Now I know how Galileo must have felt when he first saw those very same moons all those years ago. I tried to take a picture of it through the eye piece; you can just see the brightest moon. I’ll have to explore the photography options with this telescope; my camera isn’t compatible with the system that is built in.

A little later, I tried taking pictures of the moon through the eye piece, and while the results are not as nice as what the eye can see, I was still amazed at how much was visible!

As I’m learning, it takes a lot of patience to make a hobby of amateur astronomy, but I am having a blast with it right now! I’m glad I had the seniors come out to look last night; the rather chaotic experience will help me plan a better star gazing tour a little later in the term when the moon has waned sufficiently for the constellations to show up again. I just hope these kids catch a little of my enjoyment, and have some good memories of this unit.

Not much to report...

Not a whole lot to talk about this week, other than the facts that a) I am very tired, b) I am very excited that it’s my weekend off, and c) dry season is coming! I planted a garden and am now waiting for things to sprout, and this weekend I’m going to plant some sunflower seeds. Here is the finished chart 4 from my epic scarf of hobbity awesome-

I recently received some pictures of a dear friend who will be getting married soon modeling the shawlette I knit her with her wedding dress. This is my favorite one-

Finally, because I really did pretty much nothing else but school stuff this week, here is a picture of the early morning sun gilding the long grass around my garden.

The There and Back Again Scarf Project of Insanity

I’ve been so busy getting ready for class that I haven’t had a time to talk about my current insane knitting project. I had a vague hope of getting it done by the end of third term, and at the rate I’m going it looks like this will be a real possibility. So, here is the story on the There and Back Again

While cruising Ravelry awhile back, I found a double knitting scarf that had the names of the Doctor (Doctor Who) in Galafrayan script. I thought it was cool, but as it wasn’t free and I’ve never done double knitting I queued it for future reference and moved on. Then, the nerdy knitting podcast I listen to talked about the There and Back Again Story Scarf. I realized that it was by the same person, and I became very intrigued. Well, one thing lead to another, and in a fit of crazy one Saturday morning this term break I looked up double knitting tutorials on-line, took a deep breath, and plunged off the deep end.

What is double knitting you might ask? It’s a technique where you create a double layer of fabric with each row you knit. In fact, you’re simultaneously knitting a row on the front and purling a row on the back with every row you work. This means that you have two different working yarns which you have to keep flipping back and forth, and leads itself quite nicely to this sort of detailed colorwork pattern. The two sides are mirrored colors; my favorite is the side with the gray background.

I have to admit that my first row was a special kind of crazy—it took me awhile to figure out how I was going to manage the two colors and which hand would carry which yarn, but eventually I feel into the rhythm of the thing and I was HOOKED. I finished the first two charts in one week! That’s 160 rows of double knitting if you’re counting…which I’m not!

In the week before school started I finished the third chart,

And this week I’m well into the fourth. How many charts are there you ask? Ten and a bit!

The thing I love about double knitting is that each row is a reward in itself because of the pattern you can see emerging, and that this makes very complex patterns possible in a way that fair isle and intarsia just don’t. I have some other charts that I have some ideas bubbling over in my head for—tree of Gondor hotpads anyone? That being said, this is NOT staff meeting knitting, and so I’m still plugging away on some more mundane socks. Gotta have some excitement in my world...