Well, we officially reside in Portland, Maine again. I still can't believe it. Part of me still feels like at the end of the day I will have to get in the car and drive the 45 minutes to Gardiner. Our living arrangement could be compared to camping right now. We have running water, lights and heat. Yet, there is still this, shall we say, rustic feel to our home right now. Everything, and I mean everything, has a layer of dust on it as we continue to do construction. Running power tools in the middle of our living room equals dirty city. Also, the second we moved in the temperature outside dropped to about 0. So we are trapped inside our little shelter. It's amazing to think in a few weeks time we went from this:
to this:
The second we moved in my body said, okay, we're done here, and I got a wicked bad cold. After that I had a hard time getting motivated to work on the house, despite the disaster that surrounds me. Good thing I have friends like Dayna. She came over and we got all these cabinets and doors finished so I actually had somewhere to put stuff.
Yesterday I spent the entire day and night trying to get back in the swing with designing. Judy recommended Sweater Design in Plain English by Maggie Righetti. I have to say, it has come at an excellent time. While I am in general a very independent person, it can be strange working by yourself on a project sometimes for large stretches of time. At a certain point, I start questioning a lot of my decisions. I need to consult. Maggie Righetti writes in such a way that I feel like she is sitting here explaining things to me. She makes something like calculating the cap on a set in sleeve sound so interesting, and in a way, simple...which we all know it's not. But anyway, thanks Judy. I am so into Maggie right now. She's my new buddy. Ah, okay, maybe I should leave the house a little more.
I sent a box of projects to be knit up down to Lynn. I finished designing the sisters skirt, and although I really wanted to knit it myself, I had to give into practicality and send it to an expectant guild knitter. It is a fun project. Also I sent the men's Felted Tweed vest, and a hat to match the sisters scarf. I am interested in seeing how this turns out. It is knit in the round in part, then 3 inches are bound off. The hat is worked back and forth for a few inches, then those 3 inches are cast on again, and you go back to working in the round, leaving a square gap in the hat. THEN, you go back and pickup sts along each vertical side and knit 10 rows toward each other, then graft together in the middle. So its like a knit in patch. And it's cool the patch will have stripes vertically against the horizontal stripes of the rest of the hat. Oh, there were a few more things in that box.
Later, alligators!
I just finished graphing out the tree for the Family Tree Throw. You can just work from this picture of the graph, right Lynn? (ha!) I hope it looks nice knit up. My original plan had been to just have the tree in colorwork, and then knit tons of tiny leaves and applique them on. Then I woke up to reality. Someday maybe for myself, but when I thought about writing the pattern for that I said, I guess I'll rethink this.
