What I did Yesterday...

I regularly get the LBY Studio blog from the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. This wee project caught my eye on Tuesday and appealed to me in many ways. It's about memories and I have a lot of them relating to knitting. My mother taught me to knit when I was six years old. She also owned a fiber retail business called By Hand in Philadelphia, PA when I was in my teens. I spent many an hour either knitting samples from our new yarns or helping our knitting customers to be more successful with their projects. The memories of being taught to knit and the various projects I worked on over the years is a very long thread of my life. When I was in England two years ago, I was working on a pair of kilt hose for my Da whilst riding the train down from London. A wee lassie watched me for awhile and then asked me what I was doing and how long I had been doing it. I thought about her questions and realized that I had been knitting at that point, for fifty years!

I also am enjoying passing those memories on to the next generation as I have taught both my daughter, Erin and my niece, Mimi to knit. I think both of them will far surpass my skills in the end. After all, Erin has become an extraordinary independent yarn dyer with her own business called The Asylum for Wayward Yarn and Mimi has just finished up a lace shawl project called Evenstar that also included 3000 beads.

So, onto this project. I grabbed some of Erin's hand dyed yarn that was leftover from a hat I knitted for my dear old friend, Rocky. I just cast on 15 stitches and did 4 rows of seed stitch and then 4 inches of stocking stitch and 4 more rows of seed stitch. After casting off, I folded the fabric in half and crocheted the seams and then the loop. Wallah!

There will be a meet and greet for this project at the studio in NYC in May, which sadly, I will not be able to attend. After that, the wee bags and their stories will go to the Wales National Wool Museum for an exhibit during the summer. I, of course will not be able to visit the museum while the exhibit is there, but the thought of my bag being part of it makes me smile. Hopefully I can convince Erin and Guy to make a run to Wales and see it for themselves.

#84 of 365 - Really Happy Feet

I have been missing ONE of this pair of fraternal socks nearly all winter. I was sad about that and worrit that it had fallen behind the stacked washer and dryer when I used the top of the stack to lay out the drying sock collection back in December. The laundry set is in an alcove and therefore it's inaccessible by little ole me, as there is NO way I can move them out by me own self and Erin's is often too broken to ask for her help. Normally, I lay the collection out on a towel on the floor and let them dry there. However, when this one went missing, Erin's young man, Guy was here from the UK and my Da was also in town to meet him. It was the only place I could think of that was absolutely out of the way of anything. We have a teeny tiny townhouse and between Erin and I, we have TOO much stuff...

So, imagine if you would, both my dismay and delight when the washer and the dryer failed yesterday and I needed to dump out my laundry basket so Erin could cart a very wet load of laundry to the laundromat to get it dried. In the upending of my deep laundry basket, the missing sock miraculously appeared. Since we are having snow, yet again, my feet are glad of the wash and wear warmth of my Encore Scrap Socks. Also in the picture, my oldest pair of clogs, which I will be very unhappy to see go when they finally shuffle off this mortal coil, as it were. I am thinking that they are going on their 25th year of service. So, I certainly have gotten my money's worth, don't ya think? I just spent $20.00 on repairing them, so who knows, maybe I'll another 25 years out of them, if I live that long?

On the Rocks Redux - #5 of 365

Here is the photo that I was wanting to get when I asked Rebecca to meet Erin, Guy, Da and myself at Garden of the Gods. We had so many cameras going, I wasn't sure who had it. Erin's guy, Guy posted it yesterday on Facebook. So here tis.



Off to the library, jeans buying and Sherlock Holmes. More shall be revealed. Still knitting away on Shawl #1 of 10 Shawls in 2010.