Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Take Me Out to the Ball Game



Also watch out for pointy sticks and yarn.

Hubster and I finally made it to a Yankee game the other night.

Agile players,



happy fans,



a monument for George Steinbrenner unveiled and a terrific game made it a good late-summer night.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

From the Heart

A year ago today, the hubster's heart was stopped, repaired and then returned to us. One year. 37,869,120 heartbeats. Each heartbeat stronger than the last. My heart that ached for his a year ago, now sings!

Friday, September 10, 2010

Fall Cleaning

These cooler temperatures have put me in the mood to clean out some clutter. And a good place to begin is the pile of knitting magazines.

I started this project a couple of years ago. At that time, I thought I would fall into the good habit of immediately ripping and filing the patterns I liked as soon as I finished the magazine. But. . . we know how that goes.

Tonight, as I looked at the patterns, I kept my computer open to the "patterns" tab in Ravelry. How the finished product looked on real people and the knitters' comments helped me to decide if a pattern was a keeper or not.

I went from nearly three inches of magazines to one inch of patterns.



But look how much more I still have to go through!

Friday, September 3, 2010

The Brilliance of Knitters

During vacation, I worked on the Jackie sweater. When we got home, I noticed this--



a wayward stitch! A rogue stitch that somehow slipped off the needle when I did a K2tog. I put a pin in it, the sweater went back into the project bag and I hoped that, by ignoring it, the problem would go away. It didn't.

Now what to do about it?

Ladder down to fix it? It seemed awfully far to drop and I didn't trust myself to successfully do this. Rip it back? UGH! I hate ripping back and always try to figure out ways to avoid this. Finagle a fix? That would involve knotting and weaving and not being totally sure that the stitch wouldn't get loose.

I continued to ignore it.

Wednesday evening, I went to my knit group. I didn't bring anything to work on because I just wanted to catch up with everybody. Since the women in the knit group are amazing knitters, I asked them what to do.

Most of them agreed that, given the circumstances, (it didn't show, stitch count wasn't affected) a finagle would be fine. Then one brilliant knitter remarked that since the wayward stitch is only a stitch or two from the edge, I could leave it be for now but to pick it up when I sewed the seam.

Went home--looked at the stitch, nudged it over to where the seam would be and YES I could do that! Neither the stitch nor fabric gets pulled and the wayward stitch would be nice and snug in the seam. Many thanks to C. for figuring this out!

So I'm back on track with knitting the sweater. The days are noticeably shorter and we've had brief moments of cooler weather. Sweater-wearing days will be here before we know it.