Summer is Over

Hello Everyone,

Well it is official summer est fini, there is a briskness in the air and the nights are cooling down, the trees are starting to color and troops of kids are walking to school.

I personally love this time of year, for some reason I feel renewed energy and anticipation for the end of the year. I love the colors associated with fall and although I don't decorate much for Halloween I love putting out fall colors.

This weekend we closed up our cabin. It was a lot of hauling, cleaning, and packing this is a bittersweet feeling because we are trying to sell our lake place and though the money would be nice, we feel saddened to let it go.

Our DVD player was on the fritz so we watched an old VHS movie, Slap Shot, I forgot how funny this movie was and by the way it has knitting in it! One of the bored wives of the Chiefs was knitting a swatch of wool on big needles...I knitted many things during my kids hockey games. We had four of them all playing at the same time so we lived at the rink, of course their games never coordinated time wise and since the rink was far from home we really did live there.

These memories are not my fondest, I really did not like watching kids playing such a violent sport and the parents would get caught up in it as well. My tension affected my knitting, so everything I made was very tightly knit.

Sometimes things work well together like peanut butter and chocolate, or Paul Newman in leather pants, others not so well like hockey and knitting!

So Much Yarn

Last week our son moved home and the result is moving my craft room into one of the extra rooms upstairs. Most of what I moved was yarn, tons of it. Today I spent hours sorting through all of it and made a lot of discoveries, some good some bad.

The bad are that I tried on a Hanna Falkenburg sweater that I have been working on over the last three years and I hate the fit! It is too boxy and looks awful on me. But, the good is that it will look terrific on my sister Carol and instead of sleeves I am going to do applied I-cord around the armholes. If I need to add length I may do the same along the bottom.

Another bad is that I discovered a scarf (the Anniversary Flower one from Vogue) that is missing a huge chunk due to Rocky, I have written about Rocky before. The good is that now I only have the remaining two scarves to finish and they are labor intensive hand sewn projects.

One more bad is a turtle neck that I am knitting out of Mission Falls wool, which is a great product but this is my third attempt at using up this yarn. It was a Christmas gift from my husband three or four years ago. I should just let this yarn go but I can't seem to do it. The good is that it is the perfect weight for an afghan for my grand daughter Laura, so this will be its final destination!

The final bad is that I have a ton of novelty yarn...in every color imaginable. For those of you that don't know what novelty yarn is it is the fun stuff that is ribbon, shiny, textured, etc. It is what adds zip and bling to scarves and felted purses. The good of this discovery is that as I color coded these yarns they looked so pretty and inviting. I think what I am going to do is have some fun knitting up some wrap type garments and use these colors. Who knows maybe there are some Etsy customers that would really go for this type of thing.

Well, the next thing I am tackling is organizing my books, patterns and magazines...more fun to come!