A Little Yarn On The Side

So after being gone for 4 days, the garden is.....well, let's be nice and say "ready for some attention" ("stupid mangy pain-in-the-arse monstrosity" was my first choice) Sigh....what I would really like to do this week is to lock myself in the sewing room and craft my little heart out now that Jeeves finally works.  What I am going to do is to garden/can like a maniac today and tomorrow, then maybe I can take Friday and Saturday as a crafting mini-vacation.  For the first time since I don't know when, we do not have anyone coming over for any reason all weekend.  Not to be anti-social, but WHOO HOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Traveling with two men, there's no way we were going to be browsing knitting or sewing stores, but our weekend did turn into quite a "tour of historic crafting." First, while on the Pendleton Underground Tour (highly recommended--I'll be adding more info to my main blog), we saw this: It's a trade blanket made by the Pendleton Wool Mill.  Those black stripes are how many pelts it represents--this one being 4 pelts.  Wool as a form of currency!!!!  It turns out I don't have a stash after all--I have a nest egg .  This may have been my favorite part of the entire weekend! If you have any interest at all in historic clothing (though not going back beyond mid-1800s--this is the Oregon Territory of the Old West after all), do yourself a favor and visit the Union County Museum .  It's got a very lousy website, unfortunately, and it's only open from Mother's Day to mid-October, but we spent two hours there and could have easily stayed longer.  They ...

No sewing, not too much knitting, but lots of fun.  Pictures to come!  I have to go do some of that pesky laundry, as Andy and I had a discussion and decided naked is not really a way of life.....

Remember when I said I had probably put way more yarn in my stash-dash basket than I could reasonably  expect to knit?  So far I've finished two scarves and used up 4 1/2 balls from my basket.  The newest scarf:  and the next one already on the needles: and the first ball of the gift vest. the entire thing is not part of my basket (thank heavens--cable needle, size 5 needles)--just this one ball. Shall we just stop pretending that I'm not trying to finish the entire basket by September 1, no matter how idiotic this might be?

After cherry-picking yesterday, I finally had a chance to give Jeeves a test run, and decided it would be fitting to try to finish the summer towels that I had started a year ago  when I found out that Holland's Sew Shoppe had sent Jeeves home with more problems than he went in with.  I stabilized, hooped, and everything was going along swimmingly until I apologize for the blurry pictures, but until I actually take the time to A) find my camera manual and B) figure out how to focus said camera, I take a lot of blurry zoomed pictures.  It's a much smaller jump, but it's still a jump.  Now, I have a LOT of faith in Larry at the Twin Falls Sewing Center, and Jeeves had certainly improved, so I took several pictures, explained the problem, and emailed them to Larry so he could look at it when he came in today.  I turned Jeeves off and set everything aside, because I wanted to confirm with Larry what he might need to see if I had to take Jeeves back to Twin Falls. ...

 .....is the guilt-free knitting time.  The blue Foreign Correspondent scarf is done, and I'm already a little over halfway on a scarf for another niece: which means I've already used up FOUR balls of yarn in my Dead Heat stash-dash basket, which has me giddily thinking that I just might get through all of this: before the end of August.  Boy, good thing I decided to be more realistic about my goals, isn't it?????

Jeeves is home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  But, after 4 hours of driving it's actually too late to set him up for a test run, and tomorrow morning EARLY we're going to pick cherries with a friend, so stand by for test-embroidering Sunday night!