Knitting stitches complete? 0! Number of Women with a greater interest of the outdoors and playing in the woods? 10! So which is more important?

Spent the weekend playing in the woods, ah what fun! I was training a session at Leadership weekend called "Outdoor Exploration" with 2 other trainers and it was a fun session full of just play. As soon as I bring in my camera I will add some pictures. I took the opportunity to teach people about orienteering, geocaching, and letterboxing and they loved it! I hope they will all sign up for our Pathway's class on geocaching. So now I can start working on that class....but first it will be the Halloween Public night this Saturday. Too much to do right now so I'll be back later.

Next project for Udolpho

Now that the Panes bag is done and ready to be donated as a gift for the "Give a Little" campaign to support the American Red Cross and disaster service I can move on to another project! A couple of weeks ago I was all in a tizzy to pick a project to travel with and I had finally narrowed it down to a shrug of some sort. I think I am going to do a "Once Skein Wonder"(OSW) and give it to Katie so she can keep on wearing her tank tops into the fall and at school and I'll probably do a "mini-sweater" (aka boob-holder) at the same time...I think she will like the knickname if nothing else! I will have camp this weekend, to get started, and so the simplier OSW will probably go on the needles first. For myself I will find a simple shrug pattern for the house and for work. Soooooo here we go on two more KALs!

Round 2 on Felting

So I took the Panes bag back to the washer and sent her in for another round. I finally got her felted down a little bit more. This is still one big bag! in the picture she is stuffed with a Gore-Tex jacket, a fleece jacket and a Pashima shawl! I took the picture at work, and quickly, but you can see what our fall colors in the background! All the trees are very quickly starting to turn and it is very lovely. I get to play at camp this weekend (training) and I can't wait! Since I have working with a "play" session I am going to introduce them to macrame and make some little owls! My daughter thought they looked like evil owls but I think they just look perplexed! :-) I found the directions for "Why Knot" There are several other owl patterns there as well.

Felting late at night

Well it took me two movies but I got all my i-cord finished, all the ends of the Panes bag woven in and then got her felted. One warning about mixing black and bright colors, the black bleeds and tends to mute the bright colors a little bit. However I'm willing to reserve comment until I'm finished and she is dry. I put her to bed last night, blocking her over a bucket, but when I got up this morning I wasn't really pleased/thrilled. I think she is going to have to go back in the wash this afternoon for another felting session. The i-cords are done and they came out nice and smooth! Funny but now that I have an iPod I want to type iCords!! Okay, maybe it isn't funny but it tickled me. This weekend the TAS Student, and some friends, headed out to the Museum of Flight for a challenger mission. It was a lot of fun! This time I was data and I had a lot of fun typing all the messages back and forth. Here is my console in 'Mission Control'... There are about 100 post-its on the side representing messages from different stations that I had to send to the shuttle crew. And here is our 'Shuttle Crew' (everyone got to play both Shuttle Crew and Mission Control) Don't they look serious!! They were receiving their instructions and were doing a great job paying attention...I guess since I was running around taking pictures I couldn't be considered doing the same. My daughter Katie is the Medical officer on the far left, she ranks second on the flight crew and if she said "Stop what you are doing and come let me poke this thermometer up your nose" we had to do so. Fortunately she didn't pick on me! And the entire crew. We had a mix of TAS kids and their friends, some other Girl Scouts from my troop and come Cub Scouts that Ken invited. I was ready to do it again! Given this there was little time to knit except late at night which is why I was felting until 1 am. Gross...this morning came way too early! But, if all goes well tonight I will have a picture to post tomorrow (if Blogger gets photo happy again) and I can take "Panes" off the "keeping up with list".

I-cord!

So I am plodding along with i-cord for my panes bag. I need two 90" sections! Geez! I sure wish I could leave out the yarn and have the brownies do it for me!!! :-) I wonder if you can twist and felt instead? I know that when I make baby booties I just twist the yarn tightly, fold it in half, and then let it twist back on its self. A couple of knots in the end and all is done. I think I will take some scrap yarn and try it out but since this is for charity I'll stick with the i-cord torture.

She's back!

I was off at the 50th National Girl Scout Congress and National Convention in Atlanta and it was fantastic! It was a wonderful experience as a leader I never really wondered how the bigger picture worked, I trusted the process, but didn't know how it worked. Now I do. On the knitting front I didn't get much done because I broke one of my needles! :-( It was very sad I had to limp along with one sock on one circular needle that was just at the limit for 'magic loop' knitting. I will try and post some pictures but for now I am just trying to get back to normal. Cheers

Wednesday!

I just love lunch-time on Wednesdays! Love it! Love it! Loooooove it! I belong to such a lovely group of knitters and crocheters. I finally remembered to bring the camera so I could get a shot of what folks are working on.... Jeannie was working on a cabled project (a pillow cover I believe) but for knit-time she has switched to something that allows her to knit and talk at the same time...a basketweave project. Gwen has been working on socks. This is her first toe-up pair and she reached a HUGE milestone today!! (Fanfare!!!) She is at the heel! (and the crowd goes wild) So she spent lunch time getting the waste yarn row put in for the afterthought heel. Notice that she is also sporting a very lovely pair of socks she made from the top-down. Gwen is creating quite a collection of socks. May is new to the group and she has been wanting to make socks so Noreen got her started on a pair of toe-up, two-circular, afterthought heel socks...Noreen has all but finished her pair...ah the student becomes the master!!! From left to right we have May and her brand-new, just on the needle sock, Noreen taking over the roll of sock instructor, Belinda who is starting on the back of a gorgeous mohair/novelty/sparkly yarn drop-stitch sweater and Carolyn who is, prepare yourself, swatching!! Carolyn is such a good girl! Deb, in the front, is newly retired and I think she is busier now that when she was working! Tennis everyday, swimming, thank goodness we still get to knit with her! Jeannie is next to her, then Gwen and at the counter is Charlie. Gwen and Charlie own the "Metro Coffee Shop" where we meet. It is very conveniently situated right in the middle of campus. Aren't we lucky! A knitting group with their own personal coffee shop! Okay so I really need to get back to the job of packing and getting ready for the trip!!! Yikes, just a few more hours.

Running out of time

Yike! Okay I leave tomorrow at 4 am (gasp!) and I still have not gotten may act together on knitting so I will just talk along the socks that are gathering lint at the bottom of the knit bag. They have been so ignored by other projects they deserve a little lime-light! Besides, socks are one of the best travel projects ever! Oh right! I still have to pack! (hee, hee, hee) The iPod is loaded and ready to go, I loaded up Jane Austen's "Persuasion" for my walks, pictures of the kids, and 1 gig of music. Who needs a toothbrush and clothes! Ha! So this is the pair of socks that is waiting for the 'sock knitting class' in our knit group to catch up. I wanted to have the heel done so they could see what the afterthought heel looks like and I have a heel ready to pick up along with them when they are ready. Note on afterthought heels: I took my original directions from Dawn Brocco's site but found that with 0-needles and 0000-needles it take many more rounds prior to decreases and inbetween decreases to get the fit right. My advise to the group is to start by knitting 4-5 round then try the sock on! Use your heel to monitor the decreases as you go! If you just follow the directions blindly you will end up with socks that are so tight across the heel you won't be able to wear them! I'm sure that this is due to the smaller size needles. But, since the group is using sizes from 0000 to 2 we are going to follow the 'fit as you go' instructions. My boss, the only active knitting man I know, is wearing his first pair of handknit socks today and he is very proud of them! He did a great job and did some beautiful work on the heel. It is nice having a boss who knits because he doesn't even think about it when I pull my knitting out in a meeting. Today is also Wednesday which means it is Knitting Day! Wahoo! I will try to get some good pictures of what the group is working on today.

Decisions

Yikes! I think I picked the volume with 6.5pt font! Now where did I put those reading glasses... As far as my project for "The Mysteries of Udolpho" is concerned I went from 3 ideas to 10...that is the wrong direction for sure. Last night as I was reading I decided that I really should have a shrug/bedjacket so this morning I pulled out a pattern that I downloaded a long time ago, the "Shrug-Shawl Bedjacket" by Linda Wish. I think I will go out and find a nice soft blended yarn to try this out with and if I like it then I can find a nice alpaca. I think to make it would with the book I will find a nice rich earthy color and add some leafy motifs along the way. I am also going to make it longer so it will cover parts of my hands. I made the mistake earlier of adding some new software to the computer so I lost the previous blog on the mandatory reboot...bleck. I'm sure what ever I said wasn't very important.

Time traveling weekend

This was the weekend of the Tacoma Astronomical Society student camping trip and starparty. The plan was to drive to Goldendale and take part in the Klickitat County Starparty. Some of the other things the kids wanted to do was to visit the Goldendale Observatory, visit the Stonehenge replica and, as they are all teenagers, eat, sleep, and just hang out. We left late on Friday and it rained all the way to Goldendale. Not one person in the 3 vehicle caravan had been there before so we were relying heavily upon posted directions and what we could find via Google maps. We got there after 5 hours battling narrow highway driving with ubiquitous semi-truck spray...you know the stuff that you can't wipe off the windshield. It was still raining when we got there and the starparty had been cancelled but we have previously decided that we would stay the weekend no matter what. The good thing about the fact that it was raining was it meant we could turn on all the blasted white lights we wanted! It made setting up much easier. The boys slept in the camper, the girls slept in the truck cab, Alice slept in the back of the truck under her portable awning and Ken pitched his tent under the awning of the camper. No one needed any encouragement to hit the hay early we were zonked! It stopped raining around 3am but the clouds stayed with us all through Saturday. We jumped in the two truck, bath towels in hand, and did a little time traveling. Did you know that there is a certain point on Hwy 97 that if you hit a particular curve going just the right speed...54.7 that you can transport yourself to the Salisbury Plains of Whitshire, England? Best part is that you are there around 1400 BC! AND, you are much, much, taller! This replica is not full size but is apparently laid out based on the best guess of current archeologically findings as translated by Sam Hill the creator. After seeing Stonehenge this summer it was really creapy to see a replica with all the stones inplace and standing upright. The above picture was taken by Katie Dennis and you can see just how overcast it really was...what you see is all the sun we had. This is the group with the heelstone in the background. After that it was back to Skyview Acres for lunch and some down time and the NWRAL meeting. The sun decided to try to clear things up but after an hour of playing with our feelings it gave up and went back to bed. After dinner and a movie (man there are definately some advantages to having friends with motorhomes! DVDs rock!) it was time to head off to the observatory. Now, I would like to state for the record that before we went to the observatory I told all the kids in my truck to bring their red-lights and cold weather gear because it would be dark when we got back and if it cleared we would be working with starparty red-light policies! The Goldendale observatory was delightful and it was interesting to hear about the history of the scope and the observatory. There was a full house and maybe only 1-2 stars TOTAL in the sky when we finally got to scope viewing time. Steve, the observatory manager, was very dutiful and did give everyone a chance at the eye piece. Michael and I were last and we started noticing that it was getting colder and colder as we waited. I was musing that it might actually be getting clearer and low and behold it was! We grabbed the other students and headed back to camp to find it perfectly clear! There was only one cloud and as Dan pointed out it was black. It took us a while to realize the significants of a black cloud at night and then it finally sank in...there were NO lights reflecting off of the clouds...nada...nicht...zzero lights. It seemed like everything was naked eye viewing. We had several hours of wonderful stars. Sure it was still really wet everywhere but even with a slight wind, and air full of water it was still better than any night I have experienced at Table Mountain. Phil, the owner, was very supportive and ameanable to all our ideas of future events at Skyview Acres. Now the tough part. With clear skies comes what....anybody....anybody....Beuler? Right, cold air. And what do you get if you combine realllly cold air with water??? Right! Ice. I got up at 2am and my tent, my sleeping bag, the zippers everything was frozen. The coyotes were happy and singing in the adjacent campsite and I was crunching through the grass to the porta-potties. The next morning the tent rainfly came of as a solid cap...it was cool! At $5 per person per night I am definately going back to Skyview Acres if I want some seriously dark skies. So, on the knitting front (yes I haul it everywhere) I got a few more rows done on the Panes bag and not much more so I am still looking for a project for Uldolpho! It needs to be a good traveling project since I am heading for the Girl Scout National Convention this Thursday, at the crack of dawn no less! I picked up my copy of Udolpho and I'm glad I didn't try to read this online, it is much longer than I expected and with tiny type I will probably have to pull out my reading glasses! Anyway I have to figure something out by tomorrow!