A Little Yarn On The Side

Last night I went to bed excited in the knowledge that I was 200+ stitches in to the final row before the armhole on the marathon sweater.  This morning, with a whole lot LESS excitement I am undoing those 200+ stitches because the instructions include the horrible phrase: Do not knit the final row of the gusset, which I am sure I read at some point but since I started this monster in September of 2012, I am obviously a bit fuzzy on the details--like why I thought this was a brilliant idea in the first place.  At least it didn't say "at the same time."  I have lost a lot of my knitterly goodwill to that phrase over the years--especially because the place one is most likely to find those words on any written knitting pattern is after a great deal of text explaining the previous step and most often on the next page to catch unwary knitters who have not learned to read ahead, which I believe is about 99% of us at one point or another.  It's moments like this that ...

Wow!  A 4.9 earthquake hit Challis, Idaho this morning, and I actually felt it in my sewing room.  It was my first earthquake ever, and as I was upstairs it was a pretty big jolt, but it didn't even occur to me that it was an earthquake.  Challis had a smaller one two weeks ago, but the last big quake was in 1983 and measured 6.9.  My hometown did feel the tremors of that one, but we were in a car on the way to school and missed it--it wasn't until we pulled up to the school and found the entire school in buses parked on the football field that we knew anything had happened.  An earthquake!!!!!!!!! It shouldn't be all that surprising in geological terms--Idaho is very close to Yellowstone which is a monster volcano, and we have natural hot springs everywhere, and we even have Craters of the Moon and even further north where I grew up, there is so much lava rock that there's one large chunk of land on the ranch dubbed "the Rock Pasture."  And the presence...

The new year is off to a strong crafting start!  20 new kimono ornaments are done, which uses up 1 yard of fabric from my stash and which I'm counting as 5 projects because 2 cuts of 45-inch wide fabric makes 4 ornaments.  To be fair, I've been working on them for several days now.  They're cute, but they aren't that quick.  We usually give most of our family and friends a new homemade ornament every year, but even with Andy making all the wooden ornaments and what looked like a pretty big stack of kimono ornaments, we still ran out and I ended up giving away more ornaments from last year.  (Note to self:  Math would be a good idea).  Obviously, having made 365+ ornaments, I did have some to spare, but it might have been easier to keep track of who got what 2014 could have been kimono ornament year or wooden ornament year.  I've kept 9 of these guys for us and put the rest in the gift bin.  Not a bad start for Christmas 2015....... And ...

Whew!  Here it is, the last day of the year, and I haven't committed to any completely idiotic crafting goals yet.  Eke! Ideally, I'd say "use up 100 yards of fabric," but in case it has escaped your notice, the only year I have managed to do that was when it wasn't a goal.  So, it ISN'T a goal this year.  Nope, not at all.  Totally Not A Goal.  But if I do manage to use up that much fabric as a pure, unrelated coincidence , that would be really, really great.  Aside from finishing 100 projects and the usual "read or listen to 100 books," I didn't do very well on my goals this year.  I did 3 threads on the never-ending cross stitch project instead of 12, none at all on the needlework project, finished 1 sewing WIP instead of 3, finished 1 knitting WIP instead of 3, and unless I manage the sewing day of all sewing days today, am going to have used up about 56 yards of fabric for the year. I'll have also knit about 55 balls of yarn, so I...

Wow!  THAT was a busy holiday season!  We had friends over for dinner Christmas Eve, an open house Christmas night, and would have had our holiday party Sunday night had I not picked up a very nasty little bug that forced us to cancel it.  BUT, I didn't miss anything because of my back, which is very exciting.  Hope you all had a great holiday season as well!

Happy Holidays from Château Sutton-Goar! 2014 was a big year here at the Château as Andy turned 50 in July and celebrated by running a marathon in June.  While this disqualifies him as a professional party-planner, it was his longest run ever and involved several months of training.  And blisters. Because there should also be fun associated with a birthday, we had friends over for a big birthday bash in July, and in August went to Victoria, British Columbia for a week.  We had originally planned to take a train trip across Canada, but decided that once the novelty of the train wore off, it was really going to be a week of mostly sitting.  Victoria, on the other hand, is a city built for walking and with some newly acquired mobility(Toni, not Andy), we did just that.  This was our first trip together that involved staying in one place for the entire week, so we found a nice family-owned hotel with a kitchenette facing the beach, which I thought ...

At least I'll still get some crafting done when my fingers need to rest.....