The Heathen Housewife

um, yeah right. I had a funny moment this afternoon when I thought to myself “I’m just like June Cleaver.” It’s funny because this moment was preceded by many scatter-brained slovenly mom moments and followed up by more of the same all day long. Let’s start at the beginning, or somewhere near there.

We all know it’s been a busy week around here. The house started out fairly clean on Monday – or about as clean as we normally get. On a good day, right after my husband and I have cleaned up with all the enthusiasm we can muster just in case his brother and his brother’s girlfriend who we’ve never met before but understand is very important to him may stay with us during their visit – on a good day like that, our house is pretty clean – not perfect, but not so gross that most visitors would be disgusted by our slovenliness. But the busy week has happened, I’ve been feeling frayed, and have not done as much maintenance as I try to do in a normal week.

This morning Julie had school first thing, and I had to run an errand while she was at school, so the breakfast dishes were still scattered around and filthy, the dishwasher still full of clean dishes, the tray from Sophie’s high chair still covered in sticky clumps of drying pear and Oatios when we came home, and shortly after that a friend who had never before been to our house was scheduled to arrive. I had to help Julie use the potty*, then change and nurse Sophie, and before we were even fully done Julie announced “They’re here!” and the doorbell rang.

In came the lovely R and her two boys, close in age to Julie and Sophie. She was ever-so-graceful about it and pretended the mess was all okay, but I very nearly melted down when I noticed that I was standing in something sticky on the floor of my kitchen. If there’s one thing about a nasty house that really makes my stomach turn when I see it, it’s a filthy kitchen floor and suddenly there was mine not only covered in dried muck tracked in on snow-covered shoes all this week, but also all the crumbs and detritus from breakfast. Oh, and about a million bags and parcels and bibs and various bits of crappe covered my counter tops, which I do strive to keep somewhat clear. What a way to make a first impression. Indeed, I almost fell in a whimpering heap on the floor, but instead I kind of laughed hysterically and made us all some thrown-together lunch. R was very polite about the whole thing.

We had a nice play date, the kids played fairly well, but everyone was a bit tired from having been to pre-school all morning, and I was really relieved when it wasn’t my kid that melted down first this time. Little O was clearly ready for a nap, and I managed to sneak a few bits of chocolate and a trashy magazine into R’s bag on her way out the door as good luck charms for a fall-asleep-in-the-car naptime break for her.

After they left, Sophie fell right to sleep, and here comes that June Cleaver moment. Instead of going to town really cleaning up the kitchen mess, I cleared it up just enough so that Julie and I could make banana muffins with chocolate chips for snack. I had to do something to quell the chocolate-chip cookie jones I’ve been experiencing for the last few days, and I was about to just make some damned cookies when I realized there were about a million overripe bananas in my freezer waiting to be muffins, so I had a compromise. I’m loving this flour mix that we use instead of wheat flour – you really can’t tell that these muffins are gluten-free.

But back to the story – just as I was putting the batter in the muffin pan, right before Sophie started to cry in her crib – that’s when I had that “I’m a great mom” moment. It only lasted a moment, I swear, and then it turned into a “I’m still a pretty darn good mom” moment when I realized that no, I don’t wear high heels and panty hose every day, my hair is not pouffed, and nobody would want to eat off my floors even on their cleanest days – except maybe Sophie when she finds a rice puff left from the last meal (yick!). But I love my kids and I’m here with them, and I put them as close to first as I can while remaining sane.

I don’t know where I was going with this. It’s a ramble. Here’s the muffins:

They’re not even all that impressive looking, but boy are they tasty – this is a mini-muffin pan that I bought 75% off after Christmas, and I love mini muffins especially.

Here’s a random picture of Julie today, wearing the pink sparkly tutu because the purple one is in the wash because there was an accident yesterday involving a child too intent on whatever she was playing to go to the bathroom and tinkle.**

Now I have to go pay some bills. Oh, the joy.

*Oh, and I have to brag – finally, FINALLY, finally the lightbulb has switched on in Julie’s head and she has figured out that it is more pleasant to poop in the potty than in her pants. Halle-freakin’-lujah! It’s only taken six months.

**Two steps forward, one step back.

It’s been a while since I showed off a couple of the projects that are on the needles, and in the interest of openness, I thought I’d post a couple of pictures. First, on clearing out the memory card of the camera, I found a few kiddie pictures I wanted to share. Julie made herself and her stuffies a little nest the other day. Of course she was wearing the purple play dress.

Julie and Uncle Dave on a balloon ride at the Maul of America yesterday. Julie loves Uncle Dave so much, and he is terrific with her. I only wish we got to see him more often – maybe now that he’s living on the other side of the country instead of the other side of the planet.

Julie on the carousel with Dave’s girlfriend Jinnie (not sure that I’ve got the spelling right on that one) – she is a sweetie, and Julie took to her immediately as well. She’s a keeper!

Dave and Julie on the Camp Bus ride. I had so much fun watching these two together!

Here’s an update on the lace scarf – I had about an hour to work on it yesterday afternoon because the girls fell asleep in the car on the way home from the mall. I feel awful about wasting gas and polluting the air just sitting in the car with it idling to keep warm, but my girls will. not. nap. otherwise, and I need a moment’s peace! Not to mention, they are much happier kids with the extra sleep. I swear, I have tried and tried to make them nap at home and it ends in two-hour screaming fits. Not pretty. But the lace isn’t bad.

Here is my other on-the-go project. These socks are going to be for Joe. He says these are subtle enough for him, and unlike the two other pairs I’ve knit for him, he’ll actually wear them. I work on these when Joe is driving the car, or when I’m out at knitting groups and want to knit without looking and/or be able to pick it up and put it down on a whim.

This is the first in the pair of mittens I’m making for Julie to match that tiger hat. If only I would actually work on them, they’d be done in a couple of nights. Except I’m feeling too guilty about the blankie and so they sit. Hm.

I really want some chocolate chip cookies, but the trouble is I want *my* chocolate chip cookies. Store bought, or even others’ homemade will not do. But I am not making a batch of cookies this week – I would eat them all myself. I’ll just have to suffer!

Joe’s brother is in town. We have been busy between that and many other fun things. I don’t have time or energy for a real post tonight (again!).

I just spent the last hour looking at the last of the blogs recommended on my Contest post from a couple weeks ago. I have definitely crossed the threshold between possibly not enough and probably too many blogs on my Google reader – but I’m still in love with Google reader and want to marry it. I love that I can use it on my Sidekick and make my spare moments even more productive.

Speaking of the contest, I have picked out a few more things to add to the prize drawing. One of them will be a skein of Knitpicks blank sock yarn pre-measured for self-striping dyeing, along with instructions. More on that hopefully tomorrow night. It’s still not too late to enter!

Oh, and responding to Flan, who asked a couple of questions on the Contest post and I’m just getting around to reading all those comments (d’oh!) – um, Flan, if you saw me at the Yarnery and I wasn’t actually in the middle of teaching a class (which you would recognize by me sitting or standing in the front sun room at a table full of people knitting) you definitely should have said hello. I’m disappointed!

But yes, I’m a member of the Minnesota Knitter’s Guild, and I’m planning to attend Yarnover. I just sent in my registration the other day. My first choice for classes that day is Painted Skeins with Janette Ryan-Busch. I think it would be great to get some hands-on experience with dyeing like the professionals without having to invest in the pots and equipment. My second choice is the Beth Brown-Reinsel classes – I’ve heard great things about her. My third choice is the Meg Swansen classes. I love Meg and would definitely advise anyone who has not taken a class with her before to put her first on your list. She is a genius, and a great teacher to listen to. She tells awesome stories! So if you run into me at Yarnover, you better damned well come up to me and say hi and tell me how much you love my blog!

Oh, and a couple of people are asking me again about how to make the blankie. There’s a set of links to the tutorial over on the right hand side if you scroll down far enough. You can read the whole saga of the blankie and how I got all the yarn starting here.

Hopefully I’ll have more energy to be a good blogger tomorrow night. See ya!

I sure hope nobody was waiting with bated breath last night for Blankie Friday to happen, and if so I apologize for making you wait. I was too tired, too busy watching a movie with my husband (A Scanner Darkly – good movie, but it had a complicated plot and required my full attention to follow it); and too busy trying to knit up a few more squares to attribute to this week. Unfortunately, I only made it to 17 this week, which means I’m four squares short. I can live with that since I was more than that ahead last week. Still, must get back on track.

The other thing I was doing instead of blogging last night was blocking the sweater back. I am so glad I decided to do this before moving forward on the knitting. Here it is all pinned out nicely on my blocking surface – the guest bedroom bed covered in a vinyl tablecloth. I soaked it in lukewarm water and rolled it in a towel first. The brown yarn you see at the top is waste yarn holding live stitches for dealing with during finishing.

It looks innocent enough in this picture. Except maybe for that one very-thin blue stripe right in the middle of the thing. Normally, I like to match up the stripes when I’m doing self-striping anything, but as far as I can tell, the color repeat is much longer than a single ball of the yarn, and it would be too difficult to get them to match properly – still, that single-row line of blue is bothersome.

Here we have a closeup of the stitches – mostly because I want you to see that ribbing that I worked so hard to make while hunched over the damned machine. It is nice ribbing.

And this picture demonstrates the very big problem here. I have laid a sweater that fits me well on top of the new back. This is the sweater from which I took measurements in order to get a new sweater that fits me well. Despite all my giant swatching (I used an entire ball of yarn for the original swatch) and careful blocking and measuring and re-measuring of that swatch, my gauge was off enough to give me an extra two or so inches. Maybe I could live with this if I weren’t planning on losing some more weight this summer – it has GOT to happen! But that is not the only problem. The length from the bottom to the underarms is good, but from the underarm to the shoulders, in case you hadn’t noticed, is ridiculously long.

Now, I have already put away the knitting machine. My brother in law is coming to town in a couple of days, and there is a good chance that we will be using the guest bedroom as an actual guest bedroom rather than my personal office and depot of junk. I have at least a week to think about how I want to handle this.

Joe saw it last night and asked “Were you planning to do that cutting thing with this?” I hadn’t thought of that before he asked, but it may be an option – I am planning to knit the front all in one piece and steek it down the middle for a cardigan – why not just lop a little off the sides of the back while I’m at it? This yarn is lovely and soft and nice to work with, but it is very lightly spun – barely more than roving in some places – and I’m worried about what pulling it all apart and re-knitting it through the machine will do to the fiber. I also need to just plain wait and see what happens to the size and shape after the stitches have had more chance to relax on their own – my experience with the swatch tells me that they are likely to settle out even after blocking.

I have a feeling the solution may involve ripping back to the underarms, narrowing the knitting from there up, and steeking below. But if I do that, I may as well rip back to that offensive blue stripe and correct that problem as well. And this is how I’ve been wasting the time I should have been spending on the blankie. Oy.

Here’s some kitty cuteness for you. Harry cat is not the sharpest crayon in the box. He’s laying on a wet sweater here, and I had to physically pick him up and carry him out of the room to get him off it.

Oh, and did you notice that bit of red lace in the corner? That’s the scarf I was talking about last week. I finally got the bottom edging done and picked up stitches for the body. I am forcing myself to keep this project in the car and knit on it only when the girls fall asleep and I don’t want to wake them up. If it were in the house all the time, I would never knit any blankie squares, I’m afraid. Here’s a closeup of what I have so far. It’s going to take a long time at this pace, but that’s okay.

Time to go knit some squares!

Sheesh. One of the very first things I always tell the new knitters that I teach – hell – one of the gems of knitterly wisdom that I slip into pretty much every class that I teach goes something like this: Don’t knit when you’re overly tired. Especially, don’t try to knit something complicated or new when you’re overly tired or frustrated. And really, truly, pretty please – don’t try to fix or rip out a mistake late at night. Always, always walk away from the knitting (it’s not going to unravel or get any worse when you’re not looking) and come back when you are relaxed and well rested, when there is good lighting and nobody is screaming at you to make them a snack. Did I follow my own advice last night? No. And I paid for it.

We had a much more bearable day today that I was expecting. At 4 a.m. when I drifted back off to sleep, I was expecting a day wrought with tears and whining on all parts. Instead, we had a relatively peaceful day at home. Much laundry was washed, and I’m still not completely caught up. One of the first loads dry was the quilt for Julie’s bed – I had put it in the wash at 3 a.m. last night when the first round of puking happened. It smelled so bad, I couldn’t imagine having to touch it more than once, so in it went. This morning, out it came and it was 95% dry, so I brought it up and hung it on the back of a dining room chair. Julie gravitated toward it immediately, and it became a part of the all-day discussion about how, when, and why Julie threw up last night. Trust me, I was not the party leading this discussion.

I did manage to spot an opportunity, though, and I helped Julie make a tent with her quilt and a couple of dining room chairs. She kept herself and Sophie busy playing camping for the next two hours.

Don’t get me wrong – I was pretty tired all day, and still am, but somehow we muddled through, ordered pizza for dinner, and I got my second wind the moment the kids were asleep. Life is much better than expected.

So the knitting machine sat there taunting me. I went back to it and took a new tack from last night – one that I had plenty of time to think about today. It was a calm one, a reasonable one, one recommended by the machine manual, unlike the things I was doing last night in the fog of the wee hours. Guess what – 20 minutes later the sweater was back on the machine all happy-like and five minutes after that I had the back knit up to the underarms. That’s the thing that makes all the frustration I went through last night worth the trouble. I now have a sweater back all done and waiting to be blocked.

I really do have to block the thing to make sure that it’s the right size before I go and knit all the other pieces. After the scare I had with the gauge last night, I’m not taking any more risks. Not tonight, though. I’m exhausted.

So last night, I finally gave in to the monkey on my back screaming that I need to knit up that Wooly Stripes sweater on the machine before the winter (what we still have of it after global warming thus far) is over. I was really torn because I don’t want to get behind on blankie any more than I already am, but I decided that if I was miserable about it, I’d better just go attack the thing.

Really, I guess I gave in to the impulse a couple of days ago, because I’ve had the machine set up and waiting since Tuesday. When I did a little math to figure out my plan of attack, I realized I needed about five more balls of yarn than I had so yesterday we drove out to Yarnzilla and picked them up. I had resigned myself to using a different dye lot, but the nice lady went back to their warehouse and dug some out for me in the exact same dye lot that I bought at a different store over a year ago. Nice.

I had several reasons for wanting to do this sweater on the machine -

1. I don’t get nearly enough practice on my machines. There is lots of skill involved in using them, and mine is quite rusty. I have to open up the manual and follow the steps line by line every single time still. I really am a knitting machine novice, and the thought has crossed my mind more than once about how embarrassing it is for me to think that some expert machine knitter will come here and read about my clumsy dabbling, but we do have to start somewhere.

2. This yarn really needs to be knit flat versus in the round for the stripes to work out, and I loathe knitting back and forth in hand knitting. I don’t have any problem doing the finishing – that’s the fun part – but I can’t stand row after row of boring stockinette stitch when half of the rows are purls.

3. When I mentioned the machines before Christmas while making Sophie’s stocking, a couple people expressed interest in hearing more about the machines, so this will be a good opening for me to organize my thoughts and put them out there.

4. I want the freakin’ sweater this winter, but I really need to be focusing on the blankie. To be really honest, even if I were to make handknitting a sweater my only priority right now, I might not finish it in time to wear it this year, and even if I did I would probably wait to wear it so it could go in the fair. The State Fair does have machine knitting categories, but I don’t consider my machine knits to be fair-worthy. Not yet, anyway.

5. My hands are sore. I have a tendency toward repetitive-stress injury in my hands, and I think I’m still suffering the ill effects of knitting with that flax before Christmas. It doesn’t help that I’m also typing on a laptop now and that I’m constantly carrying a 20-pound baby around and doing a million other tasks often one-handed during the day. Knitting on the machine is still working with my hands, but it’s a different type of motion and will give them a break.

Anyway, last night was my night to dig in and get started on the sweater back. I was sure I could get the back at least whipped out in one evening. Only Sophie had taken a late nap, and it was almost 10 when she finally went to bed. No problem, I thought. I still have two hours before midnight – which is very late, but happens to be about my normal bed time.

I followed the steps in the manual for casting on a nice tubular-edge rib – thread the machine, push the appropriate number of needles into place, knit some waste yarn, knit a row of ravel cord, knit the appropriate number of rows of project yarn…all that took about half an hour or so. I’m slow at this. Then I remembered, I was going to measure my gauge swatch one more time and recheck the math before I committed to the numbers. The next step in the ribbing is very labor-intensive, so I paused to dig out the tape measure.

I knit this gauge swatch last month when I had the machine out for Sophie’s stocking, and blocked and measured it then, so I felt pretty confident that I had good numbers, but you can never do too much to assuage the gods of the gauge. I couldn’t believe my eyes – my gauge had changed from 5 sts/inch to 4.5 sts/inch, and my row gauge had changed similarly. I knew that with machine knitting, these changes could be drastic once the yarn relaxes, but WOW – good thing I checked.

I ripped everything back off the machine, sorted all the yarn, rethreaded, refigured some math, and repeated all the steps above. Only the stitches magically fell off the machine at one point, so I had to start over a third time. Now it was some time well after 11. I decided to give it one more try for the evening. I got everything cast on and the stitches for the ribbing knit – 15 rows worth, plus three rows for the tubular cast on part. I put in a book on tape and began hand-reforming stitches into ribbing. My very simple knitting machine can knit only in purl stitches, so to get ribbing I have to drop each stitch that I want to be a knit column down to the base, then use a latch-hook tool to pick them back up as knit stitches.

I had cast on 94 stitches the second time around, and reforming the stitches took me about an hour. Finally, I had the ribbing for the back done. I had finished it in no more time than it would have taken to do by hand, at least, maybe less. To celebrate, I decided to go ahead and knit a few rows in stockinette. That’s the really fun part on the machine because it takes about two seconds to knit a row once you’ve got everything set up properly. Whisk Whisk – oh shit! The damned stitches dropped off again from about half the needles. I have no idea why, and this is the frustrating part of machine knitting. I am still at the level of experience where sometimes things happen that I just can’t explain, and it sucks. I really need to go to some lessons – there are some machine knitting retreats that I could go to if I a)had the money and b)were willing to leave my kids behind for a couple of days. Maybe in a few years.

So now it’s well after midnight. I should be in bed. Joe sticks his head in the office and kisses me goodnight, tells me not to stay up too late. I say “Uh, yeah. I’ll be up in a few minutes.” I spent the next hour cursing under my breathe and struggling to get the stitches back on the machine cleanly. Argh! you can see from this picture that the stitches are still not right this morning.

Or, maybe you can’t. The resolution isn’t all that great here, I guess. You’ll have to trust me, it’s still a mess. When I checked my watch and it was after 1:30, I realized that I’d better get myself to bed if I wanted to get any sleep. Miraculously, Sophie didn’t wake up as I climbed the stairs and changed into pajamas. I laid in bed and tried to relax, tried to stop thinking about the mess on the knitting machine downstairs.

At what turned out to be 3, Julie woke up crying. Normally, we’d lay in bed and call out something to reassure her and she’d go back to sleep, but last night I heard her say something about “I’m all sticky!” uh-oh. I stumbled over there in the dark and try to pat her to comfort her, and sure enough, there are chunks all over her and the bed. I got her changed and into our bed with Joe, then cleaned up the mess. I’m not going to describe the depth of nastiness except to say that I’d take a whole pail of poopy diapers over a pukey bed any day.

Back to bed. 4:30, and I wake up as Julie’s barfing again – almost completely missing the bowl I had brought up just in case. We all get up and change the bed, the jammies, etc. This time, Sophie woke up too. Once the bed was made, Joe and Julie climbed back in and I took Sophie downstairs so I could nurse her back to sleep without the risk of her getting barfed on by her big sister. Luckily, that was the end of the barf for the evening.

Julie is doing pretty well this morning – she’s running around playing like nothing ever happened, although she didn’t eat much of her breakfast and of course I had to keep her home from school. I’m hoping it was just a little virus and that nobody else gets it, at least till after I get the mountain of chunky laundry cleared out of the basement.

In the mean time, I’m soooo tired and I have myself in large part to blame. I’m just hoping I have the energy to tackle that knitting project again tonight after the girls go to bed. Also, I’m well aware that tomorrow is Blankie Friday, and I’m going to have to come to reckoning on exactly how far behind I am now and how much time I can afford to spend on this sweater project without getting too deep in the blankie hole.

Here are the pictures I should have included in tonight’s earlier post, but didn’t because I was in a hurry to get to the knitting. Now that I have completed my minimum of three blocks for the evening, I will throw these up before continuing on one more block before bed.

At the Science Museum. I was taking a picture of Joe with the girls, and some nice lady offered to take this picture for us. I do this for other people whenever I get the chance – quite a bit when we go to the Mall of America – it’s fun to know that you’re helping someone preserve a memory with the whole family in the picture, and I am grateful to this woman for doing the same for us.

Last night at the party. We had seven kids in the house, and this is just a little taste of the baby action.

Julie and two of our little friends, Anders and Tia, disappeared up the stairs for a few minutes, and when we went to check on them we discovered this little scene. It was getting pretty late by this time, and it was so cute to see them snuggled together “reading” books.

Here I am tonight on the couch. Joe rolled his eyes as he snapped this picture capturing me in all my nerdly glory. I’m listening to a book on CD transferred to my MP3 player on my Sidekick while knitting and glancing at blogs on the computer. He’s right – I am a major knerd.

We had a busy weekend here, in a good way. Julie has been somewhat interested in dinosaurs the last few weeks, and we like to encourage things like that so the whole family went to the Science Museum on Saturday to check out some bones. They actually have a nice little collection – there was a nice Triceratops and a Diplodocus that was quite large indeed, among several others. As we walked through, I kept thinking about the people of some religions who claim that dinosaur bones were buried in the ground by the devil, trying to confuse people about God and evolution and part of me was laughing at them but part of me could see how a person of a certain kind of faith might believe it – dinosaurs are -uh, were – pretty awesome creatures, and it’s amazing that we still have evidence of them.

We also had a little party here last night – it was a semi-potluck dinner for Joe’s friends from college and their families. The guys still get together often, but the wives end up at home with the kids usually, so I wanted to get the whole gang together. Unfortunately, a couple of families had sick kids, so it didn’t quite work out, but we still had a great time. I made a giant pot of chili and some corn bread, and the kids had fun strewing every toy we own around the living room floor. I was proud of Julie for sharing her things as well as she did.

I’m telling you all this partly to explain my lack of posting and partly to forewarn that Friday’s blankie update may be a little on the light side. I didn’t get nearly as much blankie knitting done as I would have liked this weekend, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fully catch up – but I’ll try. I keep thinking about that sweater I want to whip up on the knitting machine, but if I stop to do that, I will get hopelessly behind on the blankie knitting, which is not so acceptable – and next week is going to be even busier.

Joe’s brother has lived in Korea for something like six years now, and he just moved back to the States after Christmas. He and his girlfriend are going to live in New York City, but next week they are coming back to Minnesota for a visit. I want to make sure I do everything I can to make them feel welcome (especially her – I think they’re pretty serious, and I want to make her feel comfortable in our house even though we have such different backgrounds.) So anyway, there will be cleaning and cooking to do again. Julie worships Dave, so I’m looking forward to seeing them playing together as well.

Now on to the title of this entry. I tried a new recipe for dinner tonight, and we really liked it. Joe is not especially fond of vegetables in general, but he even gobbled his serving down. It was a head of escarole lettuce washed and torn up, sauteed in olive oil with garlic till tender with a sprinkling of salt. So simple, but really tasty. Although I didn’t do formal resolutions this year, one of the things I really want to get back in the habit of doing is eating more dark green leafies. We were really good about it over the summer, and somehow got out of the habit this fall. They’re so good for you, and can really be quite tasty as well. Not to mention that we must train the girls to appreciate this stuff while they’re impressionable so that they won’t have to think too hard about it when they’re making their own food decisions later.

Finally, let’s talk about “Why?” – It’s such a simple little word. It’s a good word. Until your three year old decides to use it 20 bajillion times a day. Let me tell you, we’ve been hearing it a lot for the last couple of weeks, and on the one hand, I keep reminding myself that she is just trying to engage us in conversation, to figure out how things work, to understand her world. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure she’s just trying to drive me freakin’ crazy. ‘Cause it’s working! I’ve been good about answering her “why”s as best I can, but after a while – especially after I have already explained the same thing to her several times in one session, I have to just tell her that I’m done answering questions for a while. If we’re in the car, I put on some music and turn the volume up a bit to hopefully distract her.

Thank the powers of the universe, she’s finally back in pre-school this week, but even that may not be enough to save us – it is only three mornings a week after all, and even Joe is tiring of it with his limited exposure. We are really looking forward to our Canadian friends coming back from Ottowa tomorrow. If it were still allowed, I think we would be standing at their gate waiting for them with little flags and confetti or something when their plane lands. Instead, we will settle for waiting till their ready for a play date. It just better be soon, is all.

I’m catching up on reader mail and other various computer business tonight. This new computer
makes it oh-so-much easier to get some of the stuff that I’ve been putting off done since I can do it while watching a DVD from the couch. I have to apologize if, after tonight I haven’t responded to something you think I should have. I am a scatterbrained mama sometimes, and nowhere near perfect. Please contact me again with a reminder.

Anyway, the first thing I want to point out is the new link way down on the righthand side to my previous post – it’s about Jo-Anne and her bears. She’s given me permission to publish her pattern, so if you didn’t read the last post and want the bear pattern, there you go.

Secondly, I want to share a picture from another reader/friend Cindy. Remember when I had several whole skeins of sock yarn that people had sent in when I was collecting scraps and wanted to give them away to be knit into socks? Cindy was one of the people to whom I sent it. Cindy’s daughter Karly got a pair of Koigu socks in part thanks to all the generous people who sent me their sock yarn bits. Cindy, thanks for sharing the photo!

Now, I’d like to direct your attention back over to the right hand column. I’ve updated my blogroll. It’s a little embarrassing, actually, how many blogs I read on a regular basis. To be totally honest, this isn’t a complete list, but it is most of the blogs I think my readers might be interested in. And oops I just realize that I didn’t include any of the blogs from my “local knitters” folder – will have to do that another night. There are a lot of awesome knitbloggers there, most of them ones that everyone and their dog has already been reading forever, but a few that might be new to you. If I’ve linked to you and/or you find a problem with one of the links, let me know.

After loading up all my blog listings to Google, I realized that suddenly I might have a slightly larger capacity for following knitblogs, and I’ve always felt like I must be missing out on some awesome ones that everyone else is reading, or just some really cool knitters. Which leads me to the contest. I wanted to do a contest this month since it is my birthday month, and it’s just as fun to give as it is to receive. I’ve got a couple of prizes to offer, and the entry is easy. Post a link in the comments to a blog you think I’ll like so much I want to read it every day and add it to my blogroll. This link can be your own blog or just one you really like. Try not to submit one that’s already on the list. I like awesome knitters, especially if they are moms, are liberal, and like to cook. But I also subscribe to blogs that meet none of those criteria so go crazy with it.

Now, for the prizes. First, I’ve been making some note cards – I think I may have mentioned them once or twice before.

Prize number one will be a dozen of these notecards.

Prize number two will be a skein of Euroflax in a cream color. It’s enough to make about three
wash cloths. The wash cloths are lovely, and if you can stand to knit with the linen, I will be happy to pass it along. If I happen to select someone for this prize who doesn’t want the linen, I’ll give them the choice of note cards instead and give the prize to a third person.

I’m going to come up with one or two more prizes, and at least one will involve some awesome chocolate.

The drawing and prize announcement will be held at the end of the month – you have till January 25 to submit entries. Please feel free to invite your friends to submit, and make sure you leave an e-mail address or some way I can contact you if you win. A comment with a link constitutes an entry – one entry per person. I’ll draw prizes randomly from all the entries whether the link makes my blogroll in the end or not.

This is my first time doing this, so if you have any questions or I’ve missed something, be kind but feel free to ask.

Now, I’m off to knit one more square on the blankie before bed.