Click on pic to enlarge. The foreground clutter is a spare rollabout holding baking stuff. No, Jane is not finished. But we have countertops, and our new sink.
Click on pic to enlarge. The foreground clutter is a spare rollabout holding baking stuff. No, Jane is not finished. But we have countertops, and our new sink.
happy new year to all the salads!
Happy and Felicitous New Year! — I’m happy to see 2017 behind us all and hopeful somehow for the new year, despite all evidence to the contrary. Hah.
Slightly raucous around here for about an hour, less so before, now it may have settled down. One hopes all celebrants, lifeforms, and property are unharmed. Ah, as far as one knows, one’s neighbors are not unduly unruly soused. 😉 There were the requisite kid-units out celebrating too, which is, with fireworks, both propitious and unsettling by turns.
The two feline-units are taking things better than expected. Possibly by now, they figure it’s just one more inexplicable human bout of insanity 😉 and noise-making.
My sleep schedule’s weirdly off again, and may take a bit to get back to its usual uneven keel. :-/ But hey, that’s livable. I spent the day puttering around, doing little stuff and working on fiction ideas. Also, I’ve attempted to cook down the remnants of a rotisserie chicken for stock. No idea yet how that will do; I’ll find out tomorrow when I finish it, now that it’s cooled down and in the fridge. I fixed black-eyed peas with bacon, (Mmm!) for lunch / dinner on New Year’s Day (oh, today!) along with ham, cole slaw, likely the other packet of stuffing, possibly another vegetable, and leftover mine pie. Ah, and of course, tea (Constant Comment from Bigelow). Mmm. 🙂
Haha, no idea if everyone (neighbors) will be in bed by 2:00am, but I doubt by 1:00am.
…Man, will I be glad when the kitchen ceiling light is back in! That lone bulb is dim!
Happy New Year! C.J. congrats on your new kitchen. It’s beautiful.
That looks like the perfect kitchen for the space. More than enough room for two people to be working in there. I’m a fan of that kind of sink too. The glass on the door/window (?) on the right is interesting. Is that new as well?
Wow, that is a stunning change. I’ve copied it into our ongoing “what do we do with that kitchen of ours” file as inspiration, especially since we saw both versions.
We hope everyone had a happy new year with sufficient libations and warmth!!
All the decks are cleared and my Kindle is set up to receive overnight tonight. Now if this flu would leave me alone long enough to finish your book, I’ll be mighty happy. I had my flu shot in October but readyGuy managed to share a version for which the vaccine was ineffective. Christmas eve day while sitting in the theater with readySon and readyDaughter in town for festivities I started feeling “dull.” I remember nothing at all about Christmas Day other than coughing and being achey. This illness has stuck around all week but is finally starting to break. I’m using it as an excuse to stay snuggled up in bed with Bren!
I’m STILL not 100%, but there’s one good thing about having lived through it–I can go about my business without worrying about getting it!
(The worst bit: a couple days-in the mild bronchial spasms connected with all my thoracic muscles from the diahragm on up, causing everything to spasm, and it especially wanted to do so when I’d just exhaled and had no air to cough with! I had to suck in fast between spasms so’s I COULD cough and satisfy the coughing reflex.)
Best wishes for the new year for everybody here.
I celebrated by buying the new book, Emergence, from Kobo: no troubles with availability over here, hurrah.
Now I have to be patient and finish my work before I can start reading.
You know what? The dedication made me happy. The idea that nice people can be happy with each other, that is a good feeling.
Warmest wishes for a new year for all the world—may there be more of love, more of cheer, more of can-do, and more generosity to people in general.
Yay, the new book arrived in my Kindle book-hoard, er, I mean, library. 😉 A few crafts supplies arrived also, for which I’m glad.
I _may_ be pursuing learning to knit after all, and ordered 3 skeins of yarn in one of the colors Chondrite recommended. Hmm, think I’d better get another 3 skeins, as I think the consensus was, about 7 to 8 skeins per one adult sized sweater. (I wear a Large.) Once I’ve got a pattern, I’ll buy more if needed. Still to get is a kit of knitting supplies. Hah, if Rosey Grier could do this back in the day, I s’pose I can too.
I’ve spent the day so far doing font design work on the latest draft of an idea that finally seems to be going the way I wanted it. It’s not quite what I’d originally intended, which means I may be pursuing that one in addition. This one’s going in an interesting direction, so I’m running with it.
BCS! My original comments on what and when to order yarn still very much hold: figure out/find your pattern first, find out what “weight” (meaning thickness) of yarn it uses and also how much length of yarn (how long each skein is) and then figure out how many skeins of that length/amount of specific yarn you need to complete the pattern.
Preferably, order all the yarn you need at once so that you are pretty certain you are getting the yarn from the same dye lot or else your sweater will subtly/annoyingly shift shades at an odd point. If you don’t order it all at once, yes, do order as close together as possible because yarn, like books, often goes out of productions and no more of it (because there are no yarn libraries or Project Gutenberg’s of yarn) exists.
Because yarn is pricy and few first time knitters finish their first project if it is a sweater (well, unless you are my mother in law, who taught herself to knit on an Irish, Aran cabled sweater), I recommend a much smaller project to begin with, like a washcloth (my first), a hat (my second) or a very short scarf. Start something that you will finish and feel a sense of accomplishment (and use) with, not a sweater that will haunt and taunt you with its incomplete state of being and immense amount of work still needed!
No matter how simple the instructions are, an afghan is a lot of knitting. Don’t start with one.
I know I have commented on this post. Why are my comments not here? They were here, but now they’re not. ???
Grandma taught me to knit when I was in high school, on a sleeveless spencer with a simple pattern of rectangles (like a brick wall, but standing on end): the “bricks” were knit, the “mortar” purl – it was a very simple and straightforward pattern but looked really nice. Because the spencer had no sleeves, it was a lot easier and faster than a complete sweater, while still giving the body warmth.
On the other hand, trying to pick up my knitting again by myself, after nearly four decades, I find I have no patience nor skill enough for nice sweaters yet. Especially since what bothers me most are cold feet. While sweaters (or more likely, cardigans) can be bought if necessary, bought socks are still not that warm when the wind is whistling round my ankles. So at the moment I’m knitting leg warmers: much simpler than socks, just a somewhat tapering rectangle as long as my leg from my shoe-top to just below the knee, sewn shut.
If you’ve got a round knitting needle you could knit them in the round and eliminate the sewing.
Worn over socks but under the trouser leg, they keep my feet and ankles nicely warm, without most people noticing them. So it doesn’t matter if the knitting is a bit irregular, and the seam less than neat.
If you’ve got cold ankles/feet now and then, I can certainly recommend trying for legwarmers for your first project. They are useful, and almost impossible to find if you want to buy them. There are lots of free patterns available online, if you want to try out different stitches. And they don’t take much yarn.
Everybody thinks of those Jane Fonda 1970s big and colorful things worn over leggings when they think about leg-warmers, but that’s not what I mean – these are more like kneesocks without feet, in subdued colours fitting in with my clothes, worn under your trouser leg. If you sit with knees crossed in front of somebody, they might think your socks are a bit lumpy, but you wouldn’t look like you were going for a retro 70s costume.
Knitting is a sociable thing to do. If you knit somewhere in public, like sitting outside in your appartment’s courtyard/garden/ppool area when the weather is nice, there’s a good chance someone will come up to you and talk about what you’re making. Lots of knitters like helping a beginner get the hang of things, so it could also help get some acquaintances going, as well as make something useful to keep you warm.
I just posted something about starting with knitting legwarmers (kneesocks without feet, not the Jane Fonda 70s things); that doesn’t appear on the blog either.
I posted one yesterday about afghans not being a good first project for knitting.
WP strikes again!
The posts are on two pages. Try clicking on ‘older comments’.
@CJ, I think there’s something gone wrong somewhere here, and the system needs some tech support attention. I reported a posting that never appeared on the 31st and now more are being reported. The “Older Comments” page has nothing new. It isn’t a case of them being associated with the older comments.
So, the case of the disappearing posts, eh? I hope things do turn up. I’m catching up on blog posts after. a few days.
Ah, I do intend to start on a smaller, simpler project first, because I’m sure I’ll need the practice before I can turn out something that looks neat and even, and I want the eventual sweater, if I get that far, to look good.
I don’t recall what problems my mom had with knitting, but I do recall she’d sometimes undo a longish run of knitting because it had gotten too tight, too loose, somehow uneven, or when she’d realize she’d miscounted or put in a wrong stitch somewhere. Mom was good at crafts and handwork, and knitted occasionally in spurts, much more so when I was little than in later years. My grandmother apparently had a stronger tendency to knit tightly; she was a perfectionist. She knitted less often, as far as I know, but did once in a while. I wish an afghan knitted by her youngest sister had survived unscathed. It was, for many years, proudly on the back of my grandmother’s sofa, a 70’s piece in flamestitch, the rusty-brown-red-orange-yellow-white that was popular then. It was very nicely done.
Hmm, socks might be a good idea as an early learning project. Lately, store-bought socks tend to have weird fabric content combinations which sometimes itch, even though I’m not allergic to latex or other things, as far as I know. Also, I don’t often find men’s socks in colors except the standard “guy colors.” (Not even Burgundy or maroon, the last time I’d looked. Huh.) I do not get why designers and most guys are so scared of color. I mean, I’m pretty conservative in how I dress, but even so, I’d like more choices occasionally. At least there’s been some experimenting with men’s dress shirt colors lately.
I really wonder how long it will be before we get something besides the “suit and tie.”