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L1020506.JPG, originally uploaded by knitwitmama.

See this shawl? I started this in the summer using some yarn I had spun last summer and a pattern from my knitting calendar for a travel cozy. I quickly ran out of my handspun yarn and I bought some merino and some mohair in similar colors to continue knitting. I am not liking how the whole thing is looking though. The pattern starts at the neck and establishes increases as it goes over the shoulders, and it looked a lot more lacy in the photo. I put it away for a couple of months, actually it sat in a basket near my spinning wheel looking at me. Asking me to work on it, but I have just not been inspired. I love the colors, and the feel of the yarn, but I just can’t get into how it is shaping up. So this weekend for some reason I grabbed it when I went to spend the weekend with a friend who is recovering from surgery. We sat and talked and watched movies, and I knit mindlessly on the shawl. By Sunday morning I looked at it in the bright light of day and it struck me that I am crazy to just keep knitting! Why do I think it is going to improve with more length? It is not. I need to rip it out and make something completely different with the handspun yarn. If I could just bring myself to do it and give the yarn a new chance. here I go………

A family of 5 can go through a lot of glasses in a day. You know how it goes, you get a glass of water and you don’t finish drinking it but when you go looking for it suddenly there are three partially empty glasses and you can’t figure out which one has your germs on it and which one is covered with sister kooties. So you get another clean glass out and start again. Take this times 5 and we have a full dishwasher before we get to dinner! It is extra work for the person on dish duty but it also uses more water and soap. So here is my creative solution. Individual glass cozy’s. I made a bunch of them in different colored yarns, I used Peaches and Cream Cotton so that I could wash them in hot water with our cloth napkins. Everybody that takes a glass needs to put a cozy on it and use it for the entire day.

Most of us have our favorites that we use all the time, I like the yellow and my daughter likes the pink-orange-yellow, I made the black one for the 15 year old teenager who is in his black phase. Hubby wanted me to make him a dirt colored one because his hands are always dirty from gardening when he comes in for a drink and he didn’t want to keep getting his cozy muddy. I haven’t found that color yarn yet.

I wish I could tell you that we only wash 5 glasses a day now; we don’t. But we are using significantly fewer glasses a day, and I think it has raised awareness in the house about how easy it is to be careless with resources.
I then knit a cover for the ubiquitous can of Barkeepers Friend that sits by our sink. Hubby laughed and wondered if I was going to cover everything in the house with knitted tubes! Tell me would you rather look at this:

or this?

If they aren’t going to put things away, my theory is to make stuff that is out as attractive as possible. That is why I have always used wicker laundry baskets. I knew that there would always be laundry out on any given day in some stage of being sorted or folded or transported. I like looking at wicker baskets way better than those plastic baskets! And surprisingly my wicker baskets have lasted almost 20 years!
If you can’t control the clutter at least make it tolerable.

When one thing breaks, it all goes. Over labor day our washing machine stopped running. We thought we would just get it fixed, after all it was only 7 years old. Seems young for a washer to go kaput. Of course the warranty was out, so we called Sears and arranged for them to come to repair it and got our 4 hour window of time for them to show up. Then they told us we could buy another service contract; $200 would get us 1 year of service or $500 toward a new washer, sounded good to us. Well, the service guy missed his 4 hour window and I had to go to school, we set up another 4 hour window two days later. They didn’t show, and when I called they didn’t have our appointment. Boy was I ready to blow, mind you at this point the washer had not been working for a week and 5 people create mountains of stinky laundry. You know. I cancelled the Sears contract, got my money back and started calling independent repair guys. Ah!! little did I know that we did better than most with the washer we had, they all told me that most people only got a few years out of theirs, apparently this washer has the worst repair record in washer history. Ugh, they said don’t spend the money fixing it and start over. So we went shopping for a new washer, got some fancy front loader that is super efficient, but we had to wait another 5 days for it to come. So the kids and I traipsed to the laundromat and filled 10 washers, hauled 10 wet loads home and hung them on the line and dried some in the dryer. Great, then the clothesline fell over twice with the weight of all those wet clothes and Brian had to bend the metal back into shape and make a new stand for it with hurkier pipe fittings. At the same time my bug stopped starting. I had it towed to the repair shop, but they couldn’t figure it out right away, it turns out a computer thing in the car recognizes the keys, and that was what stopped working. The engine was fine, the cars brain just had alzheimers. Unfortunately only the dealer has the secret code to straighten this out and they would not give it to the repair shop. They called and I called several dealers, no luck, so we had to pay for it to be towed to the dealer to get fixed. All that took 2 weeks! Finally everything was back and running fine and Brian and I were relaxing on the front porch the other evening and a thought came into my head that we have had our water heater since we moved in 18 years ago and it is still working. I didn’t say it out loud, I thought I was safe! But noooo, Friday night the hot water heater went out, so we are without hot water until Monday, when Ernie’s, our trusted plumber can come install a new one. Why does this stuff always happen on the weekend? The picture above is the hot water being made for my bath today. I was feeling rather grungy, I tried but just couldn’t bring myself to step into a cold shower. My hero, husband carried three giant pots of boiling water to make a nice hot bath for me. Warm water never felt so good.

And just in case it seems like I don’t get to knit anymore, it is true. Well, not totally true, I get to knit some. Here are the socks I started the other day. Blue Moon Socks that Rock yarn in Lunasea. Tidal wave pattern. I love this pattern, it is easy to memorize and I think I like cuff down better that toe up socks. I tried a new cast on that is stretchier.
I don’t dare even think about what else might break, clear your head of all thoughts of broken things. But don’t hold your breath, life goes on.

Yippee! I finally got my invitation to Ravelry, now I can join the fun. So I’m knitwitmama, if you are in Ravelry come be my friend. Now I need to get busy with Flickr and all my projects and stash. Yet another thing to keep me from knitting, but at least it is related to knitting.
I did start a new pair of socks last night. Tidal Wave pattern, using Blue Moon sock yarn lightweight, colorway Lunasea, on #1 needles. I can’t finish Brians socks till I manage to find more Blue Moon lightweight sock yarn in Typhoon Tina. I had bought it at Black Sheep Gathering, but it seems to be a colorway that is not available online.

Well would you look at that, my scarf is finished. It took me all summer and I am so proud of it! I made just a few errors that I didn’t catch and reweave while it was still on the loom. I actually made many errors that I went back and fixed while it was still on the loom, but I missed a few. Now it is washed and the yarn softened up quite a bit, Lou (my teacher) says if I didn’t beat it so tight it would be softer yet. I am sad that with my school schedule I will not be able to continue the class , maybe in a couple of years after nursing school is done. I did begin to wind on a warp for some cotton dish towels. I got the 370 ends wound onto the back beam, but I still need to thread the heddles and sley the reed (don’t you just love the vocabulary). Weaving at home I will miss the camaraderie of my fellow weavers. There is something to be said for sitting in a room full of looms to transport you back in time to another era when groups of women actually did this. The sound of many treadles, beaters and shuttles clacking made me imagine that I was living in another time when the pace of life was a bit more sane. I imagine I am in an ancient Celtic village weaving tartans and catching up on the village gossip. All around us the children are playing with scraps of thread and the young girls are learning to spin and weave too, we can hear the sheep in the pasture and smell the bread baking in the village oven. Nevermind that we don’t have flush toilets and we have to carry our water, let me live in that fantasy world for just a few hours a week.

There is this octagonal pool in the garden by the spa that is fed by the natural hot springs and surrounded by benches with foot baths in front of them. Here I sit enjoying the soothing water on my feet and the shade of the giant oak tree behind me. I am feeling quite blessed to have had two relaxing weekends away this month. I'm tring to store up this experience as we go into the fall. Fall always feels like a runaway train through Christmas. And I fear that this fall will be intense,with my heavy school load, Pat's college search and Brian's job on top of the usual shedule. I will just need to take good c
are of myself so that I can take good care of the rest of the family too. I think now about all the people who cannot get a break like this and my gratitude swells.

I can hardly knit, I am so relaxed from my trail ride this morning through the woods and the afternoon in the spa. This is the good life. Here is sock in the grand lobby waiting for ribbing. I am waiting for the other Clyne women to come back from the Jefferson hot springs. Maybe I'll just rest my eyes for a moment…zzzzz..

Here is second sock, we just touched down in Roanoake, VA. We're here to surprise my sister-in-law for her birthday. A significant one but I won't tell you which one. My brother, Peter arranged it all at a resort in the mountains. I have been flying all night and this morning, so I got the foot and the heel done. I am not sure I like this pattern, the heel always ends up with some holes at the ends of the short rows even though I think I am twisting the stitches the way the pattern says to. Anybody have any pointers?

Two days from now I will be in school again, a week before Rose starts and 2 weeks before the boys start. How can that be fair? I should be in physiology, microbiology, nutrition and interpersonal communication. Some of you know that I decided to go back to school to get a nursing degree, (read looming college tuition) and it has been more than an education so far. I am trying to take care of my prerequisites at the local community colleges(DVC, Los Medanos, and Contra Costa College), however the classes I need fill before I am allowed to register for them. You see, I fall into that group of people that is disadvantaged because we aren’t discriminated against. I have a BS degree already so I only need a few (in high demand) classes, thus I do not have many hours under my belt at the community college, I have enough money to pay for school (it only costs $20/ credit hour) so I am not economically disadvantaged, I can read and write without any disability so I am not learning disadvantaged, and I have a working husband so I am not a displaced homemaker. All those people get to register for classes before I do. Physiology and Microbiology were full when it was my turn to register at all three community colleges in my area. For the next several weeks I put the registrars office on my cell phone speed dial and every time I picked up the phone I called them first to see if someone had dropped and I could get in. WooHoo ! by the end of June I got on the waiting list for both classes. Now 2 days before classes start I am 6th on the waiting list for physiology and 3rd on the waiting list for microbiology. I emailed the professors to see what my chances are for getting in, should I purchase the books yet? They said no, last semester only the first 1 or 2 people on the waiting list got in. AAAAHHH!! I drive over to the Samuel Merritt College website and see that they have posted their Physiology class for the fall, it starts in 2 weeks, and meets on Wednesdays and online (it is a hybrid class). It would fit with my nutrition and communications class. I print the application, send it in with my $35 app fee, and email the professor to see about space. The BIG problem with this class is the cost, $1300 plus books compared to $80 at DVC. But a good thing about the Samuel Merritt class is that it doesn’t start until 1:30 in the afternoon and is only 1 day (albeit a loooong one) a week instead of 4 days a week starting at 8 am at DVC. I would be able to still sing with the kids at St. Catherine’s everyday, and Rose would only have to go to after school care 1 day a week instead of 4. (I don’t really need the micro class if I apply to the 1yr nursing program at Samuel Merritt, I already have a BS in micro, I just wanted to refresh; after all I graduated in 1980!) This should be a no brainer, I should just spend the money for an easier schedule. I am constantly fighting my Scottish genes that balk at spending the money for convenience if there is something cheaper. So I wait. T-minus 2 days. I still don’t know what my schedule will be or which school or schools I will be attending.
I am off to my last weaving class, I am glad I was able to squeeze weaving in this summer, it has been a blast. I hope to get my loom warped today for weaving some kitchen towels at home. Tonight I study, study, study, for my last quiz and my final in Life Span Development. I’m glad this online class is almost over. If I take the final tomorrow I get an extra 20 points for doing it early, to me it is worth it.
There is still the house to paint………..