Rag time

My "little" brother is about to graduate college and this is what I had to give him.  It's all his t-shirts from his "early years."  He couldn't believe it and loves it.

This is the way I recommend to do rag quilts.  All you need is the top (10 or more inches square) and the back (fleece; eliminates the need for any batting), sew it together with the seam on the right side (NOT wrong side) with a seam allowance of 0.5 inches, sew 0.5 inches (or more if you want) around the border to hold it all in, and snip the seams to make them fluffy (careful not to snip the sewn line).  No kidding, that's it.  You pop it in the washer to get everything curled around the edges and throw it on the bed.  Crazy, huh?  So's little bro so it all works perfectly!  :)

Aspen is lovely this time of year

My afternoon extra daughter has been busy when we aren't doing homework.  The first picture is her own creation: a sock dog.  She has since made another so this one could have a friend.  The second picture is our Christmas present to her: her own quilt, done rag quilt style.  Highly recommend this technique for the speed of completion but do not recommend doing the squares this small, unless you just really want to.  She was worth it and it turned out so lovely.  However, I don't think I'll be doing squares that small again; just the snipping of the seams gave my fingers nerve damage and they still tingle a little from time to time.  She was worth it all, though!  She's a sweetheart!

Merry Merry Christmas!

Our tree finally has an angel.  Wanted to share this with you and wish you the merriest of holidays ever. 

Now finally...

My socks!

The Schlep backpack!

I finally got the pictures taken.  I finally got two more projects out of the "To Do" stage and they are now "Done."  Rah rah ree, kick them in the knee!

Socks are out of the yummy yarn I got when LMSS's little one was on the way and the backpack was my tutoring child's inspiration and request.  I carry a bag in that pattern but it has regular bag straps.  She asked if it could be made into a backpack and that's all she wrote!  She picked out the fabrics from my slowly shrinking stash (HAPPY DAY!!!) and here it is!

Thank U (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

And now for a moment of immaturity...

A friend stopped by today to drop off my kids and her daughter.  She had been watching them while I did a mad dash of grocery shopping (with kids it takes 2.5x longer) and her daughter is staying the night tonight at my house while she goes out.  Totally normal thing, a swap "this" for "that" arrangement, always is going on with mothers of young to middle age range children, the other half of the swap sometimes happening simutaneously or weeks later, all of it coming out in the wash eventually.  I was feeling totally fine until my daughter ran up to me with a huge cookie cake, all smiles, exclaiming that I needed to look at it.  I was puzzled (it's no one's birthday) so I looked at it and it just had a huge "thank you" to me on it.  I pasted on a smile, intentionally not huge, talked my way through the drop-off, went inside, put the 3 kids outside with bathing suits and the sprinkler, and proceeded to grumble my way through putting away the groceries.  I don't like cookie cakes.  I didn't want a cookie cake.  Why do I now have a cookie cake.  If you want to spend money on me, my purse needs replacing.

Let me explain myself at the risk of being ungrateful.  This is a friend who is extremely vocal about being health conscious, frugal, and knowing what everyone individually wants.  Keep this in mind and add that she brought me a greasy, chocolate chip cookie cake that runs about $28 (I know because I footed the bill for two of them birthday season) and I don't even like sweets (dark chocolate yes but 80%; Hubby is the cookie cake nut).  We as a family ARE very health conscious, on an EXTREMELY tight budget, and have to watch our sweet intake because we have certain other family members who feed us and don't care about that one bit, thus sweets get offered LOTS. 

Gifts like this causes two reactions in me, neither of which I'm proud of:
1)...the odd Monty Python-like skit in my mind where John Cleese is my dad, me saying "But Fahhhtha, I don't WAHHHNT it" and him jumping around me saying, "Yes you do.  Yes you do" and me just smiling on the outside hoping I'm fooling everyone...
...OR...
2)me telling the person "You know I don't like this."

I have done both.  The first one makes me feel like a doormat/liar and the second, I suspect, makes everyone else think I'm a b*tch.  So where do we draw the line?  Where does this get solved?  There are all those self help people who say "Be true to yourself" and all those feel good conventions that have lovely stories about how wonderful people are when they are grateful for what they have.  How do we solve this, people?

This brought to mind an episode where the Bee received something and she became upset because it wasn't what she wanted.  Hubby and I consoled her like most parents would, telling her the person didn't know and be grateful for what she receives because she doesn't have to get anything.  I told myself that, but it didn't make me feel any better.  There is still a stinky cookie cake on my counter that I'm going to have to (ack) eat or (frown) give away, regretfully contributing to someone's weight problem, hurting my witness of healthy eating and care.  There is also the issue of me facing her daughter at supper tonight, knowing that she will report everything to her mother on what was done with the cookie cake (kids are great like that; cookie cakes are their dream so isn't it every adult's?  And adults can buy them anytime they want, too!).  So I wasn't reaching much balance in this problem.  Throwing it away is also an option but that seems wasteful and would definitely get reported back.

I thought about what the friend would want me to do.  She would say that she would want me to tell the truth but I don't think she would receive it well and would feel like a failure in not making me happy.  I don't really want to deal with her constantly reminding me by trying to make it up ("oh, sorry, I brought a cookie cake for your husband so I brought a completely different dessert for you"), or making excuses ("sorry, I know you don't like this but it's all I had"), or trying to accommodate my tastes (my tastes are definitely not everyone else's and really, now that I think of it, it's not that big a deal).

Throughout putting groceries away and all this running through my mind I remembered something I have said several times: I love working with kids because they actually try to do what we teach them, unlike the parents who don't, WON'T, and should know better.  I realized that even though I might not get THE ANSWER for this problem, I should follow my own parenting advice and be grateful (even when I don't want it), don't pin my happiness on someone else's actions, and work with what I get, whether it's to keep or to give away.  Do I understand it completely?  No, but I don't want to be one of those parents who fusses at their kids to be responsible and then won't do it themselves.  I'd rather be a good example and strive for the answer than the b*tch with only my interests in mind, not considering the other person's mind state, gift habits, and/or personal guilt.

Dear God, please grant me the grace to accept people for themselves, not what I think they should be.  Please help me be happy through me, not others actions.  And most importantly, help me BE the person I tell my children they should be.  No lip service, please.

Thank you for your time.  I feel better now.

Beginners luck

Car pool is back to being my personal/sock knitting/phone call catch up time, sometimes one of the above, sometimes all of the above.  This has given me lots of time to work on the socks for me (no pics yet, alas) using the lace pattern the Bee picked out.  Totally loving using a pattern in the foot/leg of the sock; it makes the foot go so much quicker and the lace pattern I'm using is stretching out the yarn just right.  I might get 3 inches on the leg which is ideal.  I was expecting something close to ankle socks but am glad they aren't as extreme ankle as I thought they might be.  I'm a size 10 foot so there is lots of yarn going that length before even thinking about turning the heel!

The other day I had realized I had the foot long enough and was trying to figure out where in the yarn pattern to stop or do a little extra without having complications when the short row heel was finished and it was time to join the heel stitches back to the top of the foot.  I've never done this before and wasn't really thinking about the complications about the lace pattern exactly, more the past experience of not realizing how short a short row heel is and not doing the foot long enough, thus having a sock an inch too short with a heel finished and me chewing nails because I don't want to frog a heel.  (Don't ask me why frogging heels can be so daunting; I think it has something to do with the magical way some unseen force suddenly transforms the questionable tube into a sock , the knitter being only a pawn in this game of love and war, and to undo the miracle would be sacrilege.  Or at least make the knitting gods mad at your insolence and consider striking you down.)  Well, Harriet (my knitting muse) was on my side this time.  I quickly looked over everything, thought "ho hum, I'll finish this 6 row slant, stop before the knit only row so I have that knit only row to collect my sanity after doing the heel and before starting the pattern all the way round and do my heel."  Gave me a little extra length just in case and seemed to make sense. 

That evening I knitted the heel (DID forget to put the extra stitch I had on the pattern side back on the heel side so I was working with 29 sts instead of 30.  Oh well, just one little stitch) and was looking at starting the leg when I realized that not only thank the good Lord I had that "knit only" row to get everything even, I did not even think about the way things were slanting and needed to slant when starting the pattern.  I don't have much experience with lace.  Things go every which way.  I was having to start the pattern on a no pattern side and for the zig-zag to look right it needed to go left, not right, and I was so lucky to have stopped on the beginning of a "go left" slant. After some prayers of thanks (I really didn't need any progress in my life halted) I continued on and I'm almost an inch into the leg and everything is looking great.  I've been tempted to try it on but haven't.  Partially I'm concerned about stretching the lace pattern when the leg is still in it's infancy but the other is worried I've done socks too short, yet again, and I don't want to give these away.  As you can see from above, frogging is not an option, and I don't want any more fictional divine characters mad at me, vowing to wreck havoc on my mudane existance.  Or at least not just yet.

Slow but steady wins the race

AAnt's afghan is actually being worked on.  I'm using up all my old acrylics for it in a queen sized bedspread/blanket.  The yarn skeins are nice and wonderful colors, especially for him, and I'm thrilled to have the excuse to use them all up (that whole "moved on/destashing" kind of thing) and I'm crocheting them one line at a time, either single or double crochet depending on how wide I want the stripe.  It takes a while to do one stripe so I think he'll get it birthday of next year.  It was supposed to be his birthday gift last year with this year as an alternate but I've since gotten realistic and discovered how much fun reading is.  Thus, I'm doing a line whatever night I feel like doing it and enjoying watching the skeins slooowly disappear.

There's also been a sock-in-progress traveling around with me and I'm very excited about it.  It had started as another plain toe-up sock in a lovely skein I had picked up a year ago while visiting LMSS.  The yarn was so expensive I split one skein to make a pair of ankle socks but have since realized that if I throw a lace pattern on the top of the sock foot and leg I can spread the yarn out more.  The Bee (SuperGirl) picked out the lace pattern she liked and I got to work.  It's turning out beautiful and works wonderful with how the yarn's colors are placed.