Slowing down

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"   This quote from Walden is echoing in my head today.  It is difficult sometimes just to keep up with the pace of life.  Isn't it?
My boys seem to change over night.  Their faces look just a little different in the morning.

Before I went to sleep last night, I finished the book Mitten Strings for God: reflections for Mothers in a Hurry, and it is such a wonderful book.  I just left it on my nightstand, because I'm sure to continue to pick it up in the evenings.  

Today my thoughts are centered around the pace in our home, the rhythm of our daily life together, and on creating a special place here where we can just breathe and be who we are.  The world is such a noisy place sometimes.   I really hope for our home to be a refuge from all of that noise.

In Mitten Strings, Katrina says "We live in an age in which personal experience threatens to become interchangeable, with one day blurring into the next as we eat out at chain restaurants, shop at chain stores, drive back and forth to work, abandon our souls to television, technology, and manufactured entertainment."
I feel the truth in this statement.  I know there have been almost entire days where I was completely moving in auto-drive and didn't stop to notice anything.  I must always remind myself to slow down and notice how beautiful the smallest moments are in my day-to-day.   Everything is so fleeting.  And so spectacular.  What I wrote about here yesterday is already a precious memory and we're moving on!

Today I will work at creating more peace here, more wide-open space, and more uncluttered breathing room.  I will try to notice and take mental pictures of the best small moments of each day.

Squam Art Workshop

Yay, hooray!  I will be attending the Squam Art Workshop this summer!  I couldn't possibly BE more excited than I am to go to this retreat.  I will be taking 15 hours worth of classes in knitting/crochet/screen printing/and sewing with great teachers!  
And it's on Squam lake, which admittedly is not a very far hike from my house, but still beautiful.

My very first class of the workshop will teach me how to pull thread directly from a stretched silk cocoon and knit it into something.  With her!!!  - the yarn harlot herself is teaching the class. GLAG  <giggles like a geek>   I made that acronym up.  Further evidence of my geekdom, like you needed any.

The next day of the workshop I will be honing/fine tuning my crochet skills, which are lagging way behind my knitting skills.  This will be good.

And on the subject of crochet :

- I snapped a photo of these before we took our Christmas tree down, because I wanted to remember them before I take them back out of storage next year.   I don't know from whom or whence these particular beauties came, I wish that I did.  They are absolutely my favorite ornaments on the tree each year... and I would really like to learn how to make some more.  From what I can tell online, they are made with this:

                                                          (That's size 10 bamboo crochet thread.)

I have found a bunch of free patterns online, so when I get some other projects off of their needles, I will feel ready to begin some of these.  And I will keep you posted, incase you want to join me and make some too.

Lastly, the boys and I have been reading about snow and snowflakes, and have been busy making the paper kind with scissors and tissue paper.  We have plastered our windows with the fake kind, in the hopes that they would bring about the real kind.  And it worked!!  Hooray for real snow!

Bisous!

 

Spaghetti, Pajamas, Dragons, Knights, Swedish Chefs and UFO's

On spaghetti: We had some friends over for dinner the other night, and had a great time! 

The boys love to have visitors, especially to eat dinner with new people.  I think they get bored just sitting across the table from mom and dad every night.  Every time we invite someone to dinner, I am reminded how wonderful it is, and I promise myself that we must extend invitations more frequently than we currently do.  There is nothing better than eating with friends, right?  And these particular friends have a little girl the same age as my boys, and a set of just-turned-1-year-old twins (today actually!! Happy Birthday twins!)

so it was especially nice to have them over, as they are pretty busy people and we don't get to just relax and talk to them very often.

On pajamas:  I made these last night for the twins' birthdays. 

Which as I said is today.  How cool to turn 1 years old on 1/1/11.  Right? 

On dragons and knights: 

There have been a couple hanging around our house lately.  

Sometimes an epic battle is brewing, and sometimes peace is at hand.   Dragons and shiny armor are the new casual attire in our home.  It makes me feel a bit under-dressed in my t's and jeans.  I am on the hunt for one of those pointy princess hats...

On the Swedish Chef:  When not entertaining guests this weekend, the bulk of the remaining free time was spent laughing at these videos on YouTube with my children who had never before seen the Muppet Show.  Ah - Muppet Show.  Why can't you still be on television on Sunday nights?    I didn't realize how much I'd missed you Muppet Show until my children reminded me.

and on UFO's (un-finished objects).  I found my February Lady Sweater in a bag in my closet this week. 

(This pattern is available as a free download from Pamela Wynne's site).  

Mine was missing sleeves, but that was about it.  I finished one sleeve this weekend, and am already busy working my way down the other.  I hope to show you a finished product by the end of the week.  I love this sweater already.  I think I'll be wearing this one alot.  The open lace work on the body makes it lighter than you'd expect from a 100% wool cardigan.  For the sleeves, I stopped at 3/4 length , and I am very pleased with that length.   It will definitely be in my regular rotation - so I'm knitting quickly now as I can see the end in sight.  Took me long enough though.  I'm pretty sure I cast on for this sweater last March.  Ah well. 

Until later friends!

Abandoned

Remember I told you I'm a bit flighty with my projects?  This is what I found in one of my bins the other day as I was organizing rifling through my yarn stash...

A pair of opera-length wool gloves that I had abandoned for who knows what with only THREE fingers left to finish!!!  How ridiculous!  To put that much effort into something and then just toss it into a bin, with only a handful of minutes left of work to be done.  Even I'm appalled at my shocking disregard for this lovely pair of gloves.  I must have seen something shiny and got distracted.

Anyway - last night I made amends with them. I apologized profusely (they had been holding a grudge and had allowed themselves to become tossed about in that bin in such a way as to produce a terrible knot that took me at least an hour to unravel) and now these gloves and I are OK again and they are finished.  (Except for weaving in ends.  Hopefully that won't take another two years.)

I based the pattern off of one in this book, and I have no idea what this yarn is anymore.

It's sad that I didn't keep the label.   From this point forward I must try to be more responsible with my yarn and my projects.
Next week, I'll show you the beautiful lace scarf that I dumped half way through because I forgot to knit in a life line and then got hopelessly lost.    <sigh>

A Picture Postcard

Good morning everyone!   Today, I am simply sharing some photos with you from the weekend.  I have become quite a shutterbug since I received my Bestest Present Under the Tree: my new Canon Rebel EOS Digital SLR.  Hooray.  I am taking it ev..ery..where!!

It was a beautiful weekend, so we decided to try out the little ice skates someone gave us for the boys (they were hand-me-downs from a very kind customer of Mike's).  And this year they fit!  It was very exciting.  Well, they fit Johann.

George will grow into his.  But he did very well on those skates, even so!  A natural, I think.

Not all of the pond has been cleared for skating by our friendly neighbors, but if the snow continues to melt, we may have an entirely clear pond pretty soon.  Which is what it looked like most of last year. 

By the end, Johann was gaining confidence and doing just fine with only one hand (clutched tightly!)

Back home for hot chocolate!   

Go boldly forward and make hats

or...  Avery's "Mistake" Mistake Rib Hat.

I am not always right.  In fact, I am frequently wrong.  Often, I believe myself to be right, when it is very clear to others that I am certainly not.   In life, this can be trickersome.  In knitting... it sometimes leads to surprisingly pleasing results.     An example...

I set myself the task of knitting my sister's fiance a hat for Christmas.   I am completely ignoring the truth that today is the 5th of January, and that the finished hat, which should most definitely already be living at Avery's house, if it were actually to have been his Christmas present, is in fact still sitting here beside me.  Ahem.  

I had suggested to my sister a few weeks earlier that she embark on a mistake rib scarf that I had seen on another knitting blog years ago.  This one.

And before I go on any further, I should stop and fill you in:
(on the off chance that you are still reading along and that you care at all what Mistake Rib is...)

First, a "rib" is a pattern of stitches that follows like this:

Row 1: K K P P K K P P --->
Row 2: K K P P K K P P <---
Row 3: K K P P K K P P --->
Row 4: K K P P K K P P <---

and it looks like this

http://nownormaknits2.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c50b853ef01053617c181970c-800wi

Isn't that nice?  I like that hat.

Mistake Ribbing goes like this:

Row 1: K K P P K K P P K --->
Row 2: K P P K K P P K K <---
Row 3: K K P P K K P P K --->
Row 4: K P P K K P P K K <---

See how the K's and the P's line up nice in the regular rib (because of the even number of stitches), but they do not line up in the "mistake" rib (because of the odd number of stitches)...
hence - the "mistake".

This "mistake" actually produces a very cool looking stitch pattern, and I thought it would look great in a hat.  I looked in vain for a mistake rib hat pattern and then gave up.

I don't need a pattern, I'll do it myself!!!  (I might have added "dammit" at the time... I get really testy when I waste time on the internet looking for patterns that do not exist.  Go ahead and look.  I dare you.)

Anyway, because I had read a mistake rib scarf pattern exactly once in my life, I naturally believed myself to be an expert - so I just set off with confidence.  I grabbed some worsted weight yarn from my basket and cast on an odd number of stitches: 63.  Because that felt about right.   I joined for knitting in the round.  I figured, because I have an odd number of stitches here, and I'm knitting in a circle... all I have to do to produce a nice mistake rib pattern is knit 2 purl 2 around and around and around, and wa-la!! I'll have a mistake rib hat.

This -

- was a mistake.

What I have is most certainly NOT mistake rib.  It is, instead, a new stitch pattern that looks like this:

row 1:  K K P P K K P P K --->
row 2:  K P P K K P P K K --->
row 3:  P P K K P P K K P --->
row 4:  P K K P P K K P P --->

I realized I had made a mistake on my mistake rib in about my 20th row.  I probably said "dammit" again and went to bed.

But who remembers?

At any rate, I have decided to embrace this new stitch pattern I have created, and furthermore, I have convinced myself that I created it intentionally.

And so - what I have now to offer you is a nice little hat pattern so that you can whip up a hat for yourself this winter if you like:

  Avery's Mistake Mistake Rib Hat

*** and the knitting moral of this story is: there truly are no mistakes in knitting if you can just firmly believe that whatever you made is what you intended to make all along.  ***

So go forth boldly and knit!!!

Stay tuned...

Tomorrow I have a free hat pattern for you... and it's wicked awesome!  No - it's just a hat.

But it is pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

Which I did.