First of all, I received a lovely email from a lady in Lawrence, KS that they are organizing a knitting group and inviting all levels of knitters to come and knit! HOW cool is that? Here's the link: Knit Lawrence. They're meeting on Sat. afternoons at Milton's Coffee on Mass. street. Check their site for the exact date & times. I am SO excited! I know I almost never make it to the local group here in town, so who knows how often I can get there, but it excites me nonetheless...kind of a "for the love of knitting" kind of feeling. Lawrence is SUCH an artsy-fartsy town, I LOVE that city! Also a great excuse to head to the Yarn Barn!
Picture time, picture time! My battery was dying on the camera, so I had to combine 2 shots in one and put off the pic of a shirt I found at Target last year and never wore that I found in the back of my closet while battling the scary tote bags and piles of shoe boxes that is threatening my survival each time I pull open the closet doors...The SAME baby poop green as my new shoes...coincidence, I think not. I DO need some yarn in this same color to complete the ensemble. The more "appropriate" among us may call it "lime green" but I have never seen a lime this color and I have seen more than my share of baby poop. The current craze is for baby poop green. end of story.
I am so very proud of myself! These balls are the yarn that has given its life as an ugly mans sweater to be almost never worn...and will become a lovely sweater, yes, my FIRST sweater...those tank tops just don't count as there were no sleeves or a collar. I haven't decided what it will be yet, but the drape was beautiful and it yielded a serious buttload of yarn. I need to make one of those measuring stick things that show 3 yards so I can tell just how much yarn is in a buttload. Notice the TINY pile of little pieces. That is ALL that I couldn't save. I was a freaking frogging QUEEN baby. I was tempted to start hacking it to pieces, but this silk & wool combo was begging me to be patient. And look what I did! I may or may not have the patience to live through the measuring, washing and winding into skeins and all that, but we'll see. I did the "happy dance" tonight. The last time I was happy dancing was when the craps table was sending serious CASH my way. Momma likes being happy. All this yarn for $3.98 and it's SILK & WOOL...I'm just too too excited.
The ugly colorful thing in the right of the pic is my start on the mutated buttonhole bag. I'm not exactly sure how dense the fabric will turn out, if it will hold shape, but I'm kind of starting to like the color pools. It could turn out very cool, it could turn out to be a turd with handles. It's the magic of felting.
One non-knitting comment (you know I HAD to, didn't you?) I realized this last weekend that beauty schools on the wrong side of the tracks (in our case LITERALLY on the wrong side of the train tracks) are the day spas for the trailer park community. I have nothing against the trailer park communities, heck I lived in one in New Mexico for two years with no phone service (too far into the country so we had no phones for 6 months), a black widow infestation in the storage shed, and rattlesnakes everywhere slithering over to sun themselves at "tireman's trailer". Tireman was saving tires so he could build an adobe home using them as the base. He never got any further with the idea than digging a big hole for the foundation and accumulating over 2000 tires stacked up to the sky, kind of like disneyworld for snakes. Where was I? Ah yes. My assistant at work suggested I take my daughter to the local beauty college for her haircut ($6 shampoo & cut) and since my little girl has long straight hair that just needed a trim, I thought, cool. good idea. She did get a good cut, but that place was CRAZYTOWN. I am not even exaggerating here when I say it was like the cast of Deliverance came to get pedicures and shampoos & sets. I saw an old bag griping at the poor little girl trying to saw off the nasty growths on her feet because the counter girl wouldn't let her use a 25% off coupon that expired last month. Those poor things were massaging the feet of nasty old women AND MEN that you couldn't have paid me ANY amount of money (and I'm easily bought) to touch. What those poor girls and men must do to earn their certificates. OH LORD I'm thankful for my job in the basement with just the few of us.
Tried to start teaching my daughter to knit. It was a start, neither of us ended up in tears, but that was because I was trying SO FREAKING hard to have patience. My mother walked by and sagely said, "Patience is a virtue, dear." I told her "Purity is a virtue as well, but that boat sailed long ago and took all my patience with it." :) I do like making the old broad smile. HAH. She's the true source of a majority of my sarcasm, so I think we're good for each other. We didn't get along too well from the time I was 15 until oh about my mid-20's or so. We never yelled at each other, or anything like that, we'd just be polite and quiet and bug the holy crap out of each other, quietly...that uncomfortable quiet that no one wants to be around kind of thing. I think we were just so damn similar and that woman backs down to NO ONE, so it was a quiet few years. I love that we can hang out now and enjoy each other. I am really blessed. While on my knitting break earlier, I heard an old country song from a passing car...that one that goes...."You can bet that I'm ok.....except for Monday, which was never good anyway, Tuesday something something, Wednesday I feel better just for spite, Thursday and Friday take too long, before you know it, Saturday's gone, but it's Sunday now and you can bet that I'm all right..." It brought back the best little memory. Mom & I were for some reason doing the 6 hour car-ride out to Grandma's house together, can't remember why, and we weren't pissy or anything, just quiet almost the whole way and this song came on when we were about an hour from home. Both of us were quietly humming along and then we ended up singing together the whole song, laughing and it just kind of broke all the tension. Ever since then we've been all right. Isn't it funny how knitting frees up the mind and lets these forgotton things come out?
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