Knit My Dog

Today Howie and I made our almost-annual trek to the Common Ground Fair. It's our favorite fair by far. The fleece tent is wonderful, we watched the sheepdog demonstrations, saw some great animals, native crafts, beautiful organic veggies, and more. Even the fried dough was whole wheat and organic. It was more low key than usual because Howie is recovering from a minor surgical procedure so he was moving a little slowly. We didn't make it through the whole fair and only stayed three hours. But it was worth the drive. And today was the perfect day to be outside. Sunny, warm, low humidity, light breeze. I brought my camera but didn't take any pictures. Bad blogger!

After making our way home, I made a yummy potato leek soup with veggies I bought at the fair. It was delicious, and so simple. I've been doing a lot of cooking lately because we're getting swamped in tomatoes and other veggies from our CSA. I can't keep up with it right now! But I better enjoy it while it lasts because we only have a few more weeks before I'll be forced to buy veggies at the supermarket.

This weekend I also ventured to a new LYS. Tess' Designer Yarns has been around for a while but just opened a shop in Portland. The pictures of the shop on her website are pretty accurate: beautiful colored yarn everywhere! I was looking to expand the sock yarn inventory around here, and buy some lace weight for a future project. Here's what I came away with:

Three skeins of her sockweight superwash merino. I don't remember the colors; she just rattled them off to me when I was paying. The green one on the right is going to be a pair of monkeys for me.

Two skeins of lace weight merino. I love the color and it's so different for me to choose something orange so I just went with it when I picked these up.

No purchases from the fair. I looked at and touched all of the fleeces but didn't buy one. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet - my spinning is still in its infancy.

Posted by Brenda at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I guess this blog will be even more neglected in the next few days because my Ravelry invite is here! I just set up my profile and my username is brendab. Come by and ask me to be your friend! I'm just stumbling around checking out the place so hopefully I won't get lost ;-)

Posted by Brenda at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Just like the weather, I've been hot and cold for the blog lately. I have so much to blog about, but lack the time and patience to sit and write. And boy, was the weather hot and cold this weekend. I have a good friend that was selling her creations at a local craft fair and I volunteered to help her both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was HOT. And humid too. I don't think anyone in their right mind went out for crafts and her sales showed it. We were lucky enough to have a corner booth in a tent right under a tree. So at least we didn't have to bake in the sun. Or sweat in the middle of the tent with no breeze. Last night the weather turned, and this morning it was about 20 degrees cooler than yesterday. Then it proceeded to rain and get colder still. Good thing I packed a pair of socks to wear! Again, not the best weather for a fair, but at least we weren't sweating and wishing for water. Yesterday we had the air conditioners running and today we're wearing sweaters. Only in Maine, I guess.

On the knitting front, I finished a pair of socks for my sister's 45th birthday. The scary thing about that age is that I'm only one year younger. I'll be 44 in about a month, so I'm not far behind.
Here she is modeling:

If you look closely, you can see that there is more pooling on the leg of the left sock (her left leg) and that it's somewhat larger than her right. She was in a major motorcycle accident a number of years ago and has had multiple operations on that ankle. The most recent was to have it fused, so there's no joint left. No flexing of her ankle, just a ninety degree angle. She has so much scar tissue that her ankle is much larger than the other. She always complains that it is hard to find socks to fit. So I knit two different sized socks. She loved them and they both fit perfectly!

Just a simple stockinette sock with picot edge out of Mountain Colors Hand Painted that I won from Suzanne. Thanks, Suzanne! The yarn was great to knit with and I love the subtle color changes. The photo doesn't show it, but on top of the shades of red, there's a deep purplish hue and a dark orange.

I keep saying that I'm going to blog more regularly, but I'm not making any promises anymore. I want to blog, but life gets in the way.

Posted by Brenda at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)