I felt like Lucille Ball the other day.

A friend gave me her breadmaker a couple of days ago. I decided to try it out right away. I had everything to make Yogurt Whole Wheat bread. Yum. I was adding the ingredients, being very careful while measuring them out. I picked up the flour bag with one hand to pour some flour into a measuring cup when the bag started to slip out of my hand. My reaction was to clap two hands together on the sides of the flour bag to catch it before it fell. A great cloud of flour shot up out of the bag all over my head and shirt. One nice thing is that it didn't hurt to get flour in my eyes, but it did make it a little hard to see.

The bread was quite yummy.

I finished my first sock!

And I have already cast on the second.

The kitchener stitch looks like crap and I don't know why. I don't have anyone to ask right now, so it will have to stand as is.



As soon as Fiona put the sock on she said, "Mama, you have to make me another sock, my other foot is cold!" I think she was a little disappointed when I explained that I couldn't just make one right now it would take a little while. At least she likes it.

I don't think I'm Anne, but then again,

I don't think I could possibly live up to any of Jane Austen's heroines. I read the book and watched the movie. I love to read, but I can read a book and have it go completely out of my head, even if I like it. As I was reading Persuasion, I would suddenly have an inkling of what was going to happen. I love the tension in Jane's, or should I say Miss Austen's, books. We all know that it will work out in the end, but the possibility of two people who really should be together, not getting together is almost too much to bear. I have to admit when watching Wentworth lean down to kiss Anne at the end of the movie, I got that tingly in my stomach feeling as if he was going to kiss me. I guess I got pretty wrapped up in it after all. The movie was a little disappointing, in that Anne's sister was a gross caricature of how I perceived her in the book. Anne also seemed to be rather mopey in the film, and I just didn't read her that way.

I read this article on green cleaning in the Guardian via The Worsted Witch. It was interesting, but mostly things I had read before. The one exception was the part where the person was cleaning her hob. I've never heard of a hob before. After a little googling, I found out that it is what I might call a stove top or cook top or a range.

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
--George Bernard Shaw

Nameless post

There is a story that Fiona has that has a witch in it called Louhi and at one point she shakes the nameless finger at someone and it is the most powerful finger. I don't know which finger it is though, the picture isn't very clear.

This is a post for the sake of posting, with no particular intent involved. (What a strange choice of words. I can be kind of weird at times. The word weird, always looks misspelled to me.) I had some free time today and I went to my LYS. I wandered for over an hour. I walked out with only five ounces of merino roving. That's not too bad, especially since I was able to use a gift certificate for it.

On reading Elsewhere this evening, I decided to take the Jane Austen Heroine Quiz.

Take the Quiz here!

It has been a while since I have read Persuasion, so I honestly can't say if this is good or bad.

I'm finding it much harder now that I am home to keep up with all of the blogs I used to look in on everyday.

The scarf that I am working on is, after a fashion, a prayer scarf. The funny thing is that whenever I try to knit it while chatting, or watching a movie, I always make a mistake. My subconscious is probably trying to tell me to pay attention to what my initial intention was with this scarf, to focus on it and pour love and hope into it.

Oh yes, ostensibly this IS a crafty blog

Pictures are nice, too. I apologize to anyone on dial-up.

First are the socks, and by socks, I mean sock that I have been "working" on for Fiona for a while now.



They are based on this pattern. The yarn is the Fig and Plum colorway from Yarntini. I absolutely love the yarn, love, love, love it! Anyway, I turned the heel, it went so well. I knit the foot. I thought at one point, I wonder if this is long enough and it was precisely the right length. There were no ladders. No holes in the heel. I was so happy. I thought, I'll just figure out how many stitches there are. I checked gauge. I had apparently gone from knitting 8 stitches to the inch to 10 stitches to the inch by the time I got to the foot. I did some math, I had knit 5715 stitches. Then I thought, Fiona should try this on before I graft the toe. The foot is snug. Not tight, but snug and I think it would be uncomfortable. The foot will have to be reknit. I'm hoping that if I go from US size 0 (2mm) needles to US size 2 (2.75mm) that it will be ok. So knowing all of this, the sock has just been sitting. I don't have the heart right now to rip back all of those stitches and start the foot over. Picking up such small stitches is a nightmare to me.

Here is a little magic, the color changed just as I was doing the short rows for the heel.



Here is a photo of the scarf I am working on for my sick co-worker. It is going slowly and I feel terrible about it.



The yarn is Louisa Harding Kashmir Aran. The pattern sort of evolved through swatching. It is reversible. I will write it up one of these days.

I've been interested in spinning lately. You may remember that a coworker invited me over to her house to try out her spinning wheel. Since then I have wanted to try out my spindle again. We didn't really do well together the first time. So I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago and spun, and it/I worked. I think spinning with the wheel helped me understand. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to wind off what I had spun so I could practice plying sometime. Since I don't have a nøstepinde I looked around the house and used this instead.



The sad thing is the relatively well spun fiber is at the center of that little wad of yarn-to-be, so you will have to use your imagination.

For Christmas, I made a patchwork doll blanket for Fiona to go with a doll bed she received.



This is only the second time I've touched a sewing machine. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It is based on the tutorial at Happythings. It is backed with off-white chenille.

While reading Feministe I came across a post about this Face Transformer. It was really interesting seeing myself as an Afro-Carribean or West Asian. They also had a couple of artistic options.

Here I am as Botticelli might have painted me:



And here is a Modigliani me:



And the last picture is of little bird foot prints on my doorstep from when we had snow eons ago.



I love watching birds and have several feeders including one just to the side of my front door. This morning at breakfast we saw a Varied Thrush digging and pecking in the duff beneath the large firs we have in our backyard.