Like The Queen
Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.

1 Comments:

Love the socks, especially the fair isle pair! You are quite the industrious knitter! You had a wonderful mini vacation and just the thing I would do (minus the cleaning, lol) if I had a few days to spend as I wished to. Hope you have a good week at work and more of the same at home!

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:41 AM  

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Sunday, July 05, 2009  

Full summer begins


Thank you all for the kind comments about my socks. Much progress was done over the weekend and now I have another pair completed, allowing me to cross off 3 of the 14 on my list. There are photos of the Finished Objects at the end of this post. What follows next is a little catch-up of what has been going on at TheCastle.

Prepare to be sprung from your prison. Expect, soon, to be given the key to your cell. But be ready too, for a reluctance to leave the familiar comfort of your old environment. You have been unhappy with a situation for a long time. You are in the habit of complaining and of getting nowhere. Shock may be your first reaction when the door that you have been pounding on opens up. You may suspect a trap. But, slowly, you'll come to like the inspiration and the opportunity that presents itself to you this week. It's going to be an amazing month...

Thank you MrHoroscope. You have been promising me a pleasant change for a long time. I've been waiting for this since oh... January? Yeah – about that long. I am completely ready to be “released” and looking forward to an amazing month.

I am also pretty doggone relaxed after 3 and a half days of doing exactly what I wanted..... which wasn't much, barring a marathon cleaning burst on Saturday. I'd cut out early on Thursday, a day of perfect summertime weather: sunny, breezy, clear and dry. Somehow, I just couldn't make myself stay at work till 5 and with a bank of vacation days saved up and plenty of staff on hand ... well there. What would you do?

Well, what I did was go buy enough groceries to make it through the weekend, pick up the first 2 Harry Potter movies from the rental place and zip on home about 2:30. The air was so sweet and tempting I convinced BD to join me on a walk out to Robert's Landing and, for me, at least, a swim. Oh how the water felt – so silky and sweet as it flowed past me on its way to the sea. Tide was going out and little leaves and floating bits slipped past me as I dug my toes into the sandy bottom. BD is not much of a swimmer but he never minds sitting on the bank and talking while I'm playing in the water. Virgos may be earth signs, but I must have many planets lurking in the water signs. Water is my medicine of choice for whatever ails me .... drinking it, swimming in it, bathing in it ... I adore water.

Friday I rented the Rug Doctor from a store in town and cleaned the rugs and upholstered furniture. It's exhausting work because the heavy rugs have to be vacuumed, flipped, vacuumed on the back, flipped and vacuumed once again, all the while the year's worth of dirt tracked in off the farm by man and dog must continually be sucked up off the floor too. That is a heckuva lot of flipping and vacuuming. Then you start using the wet vac. The products that go with it are remarkably effective, though, especially the pet odor remover which you can use as a spot treatment or dump in with the soap and hot water. In particular, that is needed on the blue couch in the den where three dogs think they are welcome to lounge no matter what swamp they've been sloshing through.

I went to bed Friday with aching limbs and stiff fingers but the rest of the weekend it was fun to wander from room to room, sitting on clean furniture, lying on clean floors and saying “No No Out” to begging dogs at screen door. I will relent after Wednesday, when we have guests coming, for dinner but for now, no dogs in the house.

But after all that effort I just didn't have it in me to do another thing all weekend. At least, not another thing that required getting dressed. I've been in my pj's for 2 whole days and it has been delicious. I didn't even take a walk! I just knit and read and watched the first 2 Harry Potter movies and the second disc of TLC's What Not To Wear. What a fantasy that is. $5,000 to spend on a new wardrobe with fashion experts to tell you how you really look in what you're picking out. Yum! Also, I really like the guy who does the hair for the victim's makeovers.

BD wanted to be close all weekend and the best way for us to do that is to let him read to me while I knit. I had recently picked up Mort d'Arthur on tape, read by Derek Jacoby. Oh what a grand job he is doing too – with his perfect classically trained voice. Ahh I wish there were more Brother Cadfael DVD's out there. I, alas, have seen them all at least twice. A discussion with BD about Mallory lead to talk of Spencer and his Faerie Queen and the next thing you know I'm listening to this complex and sexually latent tale as I knit socks. What fun it's been, especially since I know I'd never read it myself. I have enough dyslexia issues with normal spelling as it is. I could never plow my way through the secret code of Spencer's Spelling. BD, with all his years of 17th century research and also his perfectly visual way of reading, can breeze through the strange pronunciations and keep the elegant pace of the poetry.

Much knitting was done as these photos will attest:

I finished these plain jane stockinette socks for me. This is a beautiful Spirit Trail sock yarn knit on #3 needles.



This is a Trekking sock yarn I bought at Stony Mt. Fibers ages ago ... it's what I call a "guy" color and these socks are intended for BD. I'm not sure what happened since I bought this stuff at least 4 years ago, but I don't think there was a full skein here. Fortunately, this color, #66, is still available. Neither BD nor I care if the dye lot matches all that well. These are, after all, men's socks. They will be felt, not seen.

Again, plain stockinette sock knitting.




Of course, I like to have an upstairs sock and a downstairs sock going and though there are still at least 4 more half knit pairs in the queue, I couldn't resist starting something different. This is another Spirit Trail sock yarn combo - an almost solid green with a beautifully coordinating handpaint. I've been waiting for just the right inspiration to knit these two yarns together. The yarn is still from the downstairs stash I inventoried a month ago so it's legal to knit it up this summer.



I'm using the first reticulated pattern from Sensational Knitted Socks. It's the blue and yellow pattern - but look at the color match between the book cover and the sock yarn! Pure coincidence, but isn't it ... coincidental?



I chose the other pattern because this particular yarn isn't truly self striping and I wanted to be sure enough bits of the handpainted colors showed up.

And now it is Monday and it's back to work. A busy week with a guest author, dinner guests at my house as well, and prep for the coming library board meeting. Yes. It's July again.

Happy Monday to you all.

posted by Bess | 3:58 PM
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