So things are going along swimmingly on the newest of the Seven Songs. I actually think the knitting will be complete before Friday, so *everything*  will be ready for the October 1st release, including snazzy pictures with my new camera. But I’m behind on blogging about it. So here are a couple in progress pictures.

As you can see I am still having a bit of trouble with my depth of field on close up pictures. But I’m loving this yarn, and the pattern is working up quite nicely.

Speaking of the yarn, this is from Ever After Yarns.  The blue colors in this yarn just sing. I’m hoping when I do the outside final pictures you can see just how gorgeous it is!

So I’ve been a little light on the blog content – yes I know. I’ve just been so very busy and sometimes the words just don’t seem to come. So I’ve decided to steal words! Not in a bad, stealing content sort of way. More in a Brenda did it, so I’m going to do it too!

So without further ado, here are my top five knitterly things:

1. My favorite things to knit - It’s a tie. I love designing and knitting shawlettes. But I’ve become more and more drawn to sweaters lately for no apparently reason.

2. My least favorite thing about knitting - Intarsia. Intarsia is evil and must be destroyed. If I never do intarsia again it will be too soon.

3. My first finished object – A baby blanket and hat. Made out of Red Heart yarn. Yep.

4. If I could take only one brand of yarn to my desert island, it would be – Sanguine Gryphon. This is an easy choice. Her bases are scrumptious and her colors are to die for. I have a skein of Skinny Bugga in Dragonfly Tattoo that is screaming my name. All I want to do is design the perfect something with it, and I have too many other deadlines.

5. My current knitting obsession is – rapidly switching from shawlettes to sweaters. I want to design and  knit perfect sweaters. The sweaters that you love to knit and that you always grab first. I just need to get the ideas out of my head and onto the needles.

So… what are your top five knitterly obsessions?

I find it hard to believe that I am already working on the fourth song. Are we really four months in? Are my boys really already back in school? Aren’t I too young to have a boy who will be a bonafide teenager on Friday? And while we are asking questions, is this pink yarn not gorgeous?

This is the yarn for the fourth of the Seven Songs. It is the Nebula base from the very talented Jellyfish Knits. I think I know exactly what this yarn wants to be and I’m a-swatching away to make sure I’m not wrong. But no matter what happens, I know it will be gorgeous. I mean look at this color!

And you want to know the best part? The best part is the name for the colorway. Wait for it. It’s called “Pigs In Space”. Yep. Is that not awesome? More updates coming soon on this song!

It’s time for a winner! Clea is the winner of the beautiful skein of Absinthe Bluetopia. Clea, I will be e-mailing you to get shipping information. Thanks everyone for playing!

I had an awesome birthday yesterday – thanks everyone for the nice birthday wishes. I felt well loved. I had lunch with a dear friend and I ended the day with dinner and euchre with my husband and some of our best friends, and I got to pick up some pottery I painted a few weeks ago.

I painted the measuring cups to match the FiestaWare that I currently. I have six place settings in different colors. I think it turned out pretty nice.

I have no time for long-winded heartfelt goodbyes. I’m going on vacation. I will be gone for a long time. Well no longer than some of my unplanned absences. I’ll be back on the 20th. I think. Maybe. We venture into the wild north. See ya soon!

The universe apparently did not notice that I pressed the reset button on this week, this month, this year. Today was not fun. And to top it all off the TV died.

Tomorrow I intend to be way more specific with my intentions. I shall be hatching up a plan for this while I trot to an embarrassingly early Friday night bedtime. Good night all. Tomorrow will be better.

I’m that mom. I try real hard not to curse around my kids. I’m very picky about what they watch and what video games they play. I still hold their hands in parking lots, because I don’t trust people. So obviously, not all of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is quite appropriate yet. But some of it is. So we watch it in bits and pieces on youtube. Because no one appreciates a good fart joke like my boys. And they laugh even harder when they realize that a lot of the things we say come from that movie. Like asking 3 questions before they are allowed to leave the dinner table.

Today was a grumpy day again. So I did laundry, baked lemon bars, and dyed.

The results will be up in the next day or so. I tried to do four things:

1. Overdye the louet kit yarn that had white spots
2. Dye a bulky wool in jaguar colors for a hat for a boy
3. Dye a dk superwash in Velma colors
4. Dye a merino fingering in medium pink & bright yellow

Numbers one and three went well I think. We’ll see when I reskein them. Number two just came out a very dark semi-variegated teal. Number four – well the pink and the yellow got *real* friendly with each other. Real, real friendly. No yellow remains, but there are many lovely shades of pinky orange. Not sure what I’m gonna do with that one.

I flipped through a few channels of election coverage and it is amazing the differences. The differences in numbers, attitudes, slants. I’m thinking my grump factor is due to the time change. I’m hoping a good night’s sleep will cure it, but I want to stay up and watch things. I keep having to remind myself that I did what I was supposed to do, and things will happen whether I’m watching the TV or getting some much needed rest. So sleep is what I’m aiming for. Hopefully tomorrow will be bright and interesting.

My boys and I have really interesting discussions. And they truly do say the darndest things. Today they were fighting with foam swords….

Big Dude: “Prepare for a beating so severe your great great grandchildren will be sore!”

Little Dude: “As will your slap happy grandpappy!”

Honestly. Where do they come up with this stuff? This morning on the way to school we were discussing the election. Again. A couple of years ago little dude got quite upset when he realized he couldn’t vote until he was 18. “I am an American citizen!” This morning we decided that a Scooby-Shaggy presidential ticket would be the bomb.

Stay with me here. Scooby and Shaggy don’t like scary things. So they would ban scary things. Like war, the boys suggested. Ok, I’m all for that. Scooby and Shaggy *really* like to eat. So no one would ever be hungry. I’m totally for that. Now maybe Shaggy might have some other liberal ideas I’m not so sure about, but overall, the boys made a very sound argument for the Scooby & Shaggy ticket in 08.

My spinning is coming along. Seen on the back of the Scooby Mobile are my first four hanks of handspun. Along with some project bag prototypes I’ve been working on. It always takes me a while to get back into the sewing groove.

Just for comparison, let’s look at my first attempt vs. my fourth attempt.

First

Fourth

My fourth attempt has some very thin overspun places, but there are also good long stretches of very even stuff that actually looks like yarn. Next I’m onto the good stuff.

I almost forgot to tell you my very exciting news! Sugarbee Studios is running a sock club! A fabulous sock club with her own wonderful take on color and her crazy sense of humor. Anyhow, the exciting part (for me) is that I will be writing the patterns for her club. I have all sorts of ideas and I’m very excited. How many times can one girl say excited in one little paragraph? Anyhow, check ‘er out. You won’t be disappointed!

Rufus needs a bath. Badly. According to my 10 year old he smells like corn chips. I think that’s a rather polite description. He stinks. He gets a bath once a week, but with this hot and humid weather he gets stinky so fast! So in a few minutes I will be throwing all his blankets and his bed in the wash to get ready for dog wash day.

Other things have been bathing around here as well. I finally finished the five ounces of corriedale that I bought to learn to spin on my drop spindle. It’s been super fun. My singles are getting smaller quite quickly though. I still need to play around with the plying. Some of my yarn is very twisty. I gave it a good whack on the tile after squeezing the water out, and now it’s all out on the porch drying.

And woo-hoo! Liesl is finished! Right now she is spread out on a towel after taking her soak. I’m hoping she gains a good bit of length. I basically worked the yoke, then the sleeves, and then the body until I ran out of yarn. This is how she looked pre-blocking.

I’m off to moosh around and do some housecleaning. I’ve decided that all of the nastiness of August is over and that September will be a month full of fabulous, wonderful things. Only good stuff.

I’ve been doing some blog tinkering. I have this amazing new logo, and I need to figure out some banners and avatars for here and for my etsy store. But for some reason, it’s not coming so easily to me. Which is frustrating the bejeebers out of me! I honestly want to stomp my feet and holler a bit about it all.

Speaking of hollering, the Liesl sweater is pretty much done except for the final bind-off. The holler-about-it part is that I ran out of yarn. I did well at using every last yard of yarn. So well that I ran out before I could bind off. So now I need to tink a row or two and then bind off again. It is cute though.

So the other day, I looked in the mirror, with my hair in its standard messy updo and this is what I saw.

Talk about hollering. To be fair my friends and I had a discussion about a week ago that we needed to have a hair dyeing party. But not one of them said, “Hey, Corrina, even if we don’t do this together, you NEED to dye your hair. Immediately. Like yesterday even.” Nope, no one told me. Not even my husband. The man who will tell me that my favorite Oscar the Grouch t-shirt is now for wearing around the house ONLY.

So I have concluded that no one loves me. Fortunately, the mirror is honest and I remedied this situation Friday night while the lemon bars were cooling.

Much better, yes? Now if I could just fix my danged blog, all would be good.