Vacations!

Yay! I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm not sure if I'll be able to post or not, but I'll try. We'll go to Mexico and Guatemala. Hopefully it will not be as blazing hot as here. It's 100 degrees out there and I no longer enjoy my daily walk to work.



I'll do my best to stick to my yarn diet but, who knows? Mexico has always been a temptation for a cheap knitter like myself.


See you!

Packing and planning

This has been a bad week for knitting, but I'm proud of my accomplishments. Not only has it been a very productive week at work, I also got tons of stuff packed and I sold a few items. I need to keep at it because we're going to Mexico next week and when I come back I'll have very little time to pack.




I regret giving away my plants but at least I kept a few. For example, here's my violet. Remember how happy I was about finally getting some blossoms last December?







This violet and I like keeping each other happy. I keep feeding it and it keeps blooming for me. She's overdoing it a little but that's OK, I'll let her show off. By the way, that pink thing next to it is the front of the raglan. It's taking me a while, isn't it?

There they go again

Whether Al Quaeda or just sick imitators, I'm glad they failed and no one got hurt. Still, it scares me to think what could have happened if they had been succesful. And it saddens me a lot that there's still idiots out there who don't care at all about harming innocent people. How can they remotely think that Heaven could welcome them?



I've been busy packing and taking lots of pictures, mostly of the furniture and household items I'm selling on craigslist. I do manage to knit a few rows once in a while, but there's not much progress to show. I'll show instead a present I got out of the blue from my husband, who thinks playing with putty will help me prevent carpal tunnel syndrome:






I don't know if it will work, but I've had some fun "spinning" putty.



Not only is moving to another state very expensive, packing materials are expensive too. I've been scavenging hospital supply boxes for a while, but I have not found one big enough for my spinning wheel. Today I found out that an appropriate box would cost me 19 dollars. I'll keep on scavenging. On the bright side, yarn is a wonderful filler. Who needs styrofoam peanuts when you have yarn and rovings? Even WIPs can be used as padding.

Thanks for the good vibes

We found an apartment and we did not have to look that hard. All were equally expensive but at least we got something near a bike trail and a train station. My husband will be riding his bike to work, so we won't need a second car. Too bad, because we had even chosen the car we would buy when we had the money, and we even got to test drive one purely by chance: We had an economy rental car but it had a leak, so we returned it and they replaced it with a pricier car which turned out to be the model we had been thinking on.



The apartment has a kitchen window, which I love, and a small balcony, which my dog will love.



Dog? Yes, I have a dog. Or used to have one. He's been in Mexico for a while and my parents have turned him into a spoiled brat. I think it's time I get him back, although my father might not be willing to give him up after two and a half years. I bet the dog would rather stay with my mother, but I believe she's tired of taking care of him. My husband is not crazy about him, but he understands that I need some furry company and that I miss my pooch.



Jennifer, you were right, it was very hot, but I believe it's hotter in North Carolina just now. I think I can stand the Bay area heat (at least it cools down during the night), and I'm sure I'll love the mild winters.



No knitting pictures this time. I did not bring my knitting with me but I just made a few more rows on the raglan.

Raglan front

It looks just like the back, so I took a picture of both pieces (lest you think I'm cheating and posting old pictures):



Thank you for the felting encouragement. It is really fun and I will keep at it. I will also try to keep posting (and knitting too). I've been busy selling some of our stuff on cragislist... I even gave away my plants! Not all of them, of course, but most of them are gone now.



I'm off to California this weekend. We'll be mostly looking for an apartment and won't have time for tourism. Hopefully we'll find something. Wish us luck!

Still outraged

I don't buy the "they hate our way of life" explanation. It still looks like a bunch of mentally deranged sociopaths got together and as a result many innocent lives were lost. My heart goes out to the victims' families and friends.




Here are some pictures of my trivial felting adventures:







That's my purse, before and after felting. As you can see, a lot of color was lost in the felting progress. I was very careful and tried not to get any of it on the yellow strap, but was not very successful. The lesson I learned is this one: Don't felt with Kool-Aid yarn, especially if you have different colors. Which stands to reason, after all, my little felted case lost a bit of color in the washer (causing a little domestic disaster in doing so), so I should have been warned.




Here is another felting story in pictures:






Pretty ipod case, right? The problem is, that front pocket cannot accomodate the cable, much less the earphones. That should have been obvious before felting.



So I ripped that front pocket and made a bigger one, which I half-felted before attaching it to the case with crochet stitches, and then I re-felted the whole thing except the flap, because I did not want it to shrink any further. Pretty challenging. Here's the result:







The front pocket looks less felted than the rest of the case, and the earphones still won't fit. But the husband says he likes it, which is what really matters.

I don't get it

What happened in London (and previously in Madrid, New York and Washington) was obviously an act of hatred. What exactly do they hate and why? Why does killing innocent people who have nothing to do or say regarding world politics help their cause, if they have one? I hate feeling so helpless and I wish there was something I could do.



I'm in a pretty depressed mood and I have no pictures. I'll come back later to blog about my trivial felting adventures.

Ipod cozy

Here it is, pre-felting:






I have a little of felting angst. What if I shrink it too much? Also, I believe i need a front pocket for the headphones, though it might not be big enough. We'll see. In the meantime, I've finished the back of the raglan.







And every now and then I remember I have a bag with lots of ends to weave in.

Communication woes

The reason there's no knitting content today is, simply put, bad communication.




Here's a recent example of bad communication:

- Did you want the light blue or the purple yarn for trimming?

- The flap should be light blue and the trimming purple.

- But I already knitted the flap in navy blue.

- Well, you should have asked me before.



So the ipod cozy is going to the frog pond and I have no pictures to post. Instead, I have this:







I read about it on Stacie's blog. I love participating in surveys except when they get exceedingly nosy or when they have a heavy political content.



Have a happy weekend and enjoy the fourth of July.