Something Old, and Something New

I promised you I would share about my knitting and Ravelry. Well, here goes…..

My husband and I had a very nice time driving up Interstate 5 past the orchards of almonds and fields of cotton, corn and cows, to Oakland. I knitted along the way working on my orange Wishbone sweater. I was able to knit up to the armpits and part of one arm when we arrived in Oakland seven hours later. Working with Size 11 needles makes this project go very quickly, but soon I tired of doing only stockinette stitch.

I had packed several knitting projects with me. When I was able to focus and concentrate, I worked on my Candlelight shawl. This lace pattern takes my whole concentration. I am knitting it on Size 4 needles and I had wished I had brought my magnifying glass with me. It just doesn’t seem fair to loose our sight with old age eyes, as we get older. This is when we finally have time to sit and actually do some needlework. I am finding it harder to knit with small needles, no matter how often I change my prescription of my glasses.

I also brought with me my baby surprise jacket and started to knit a hood on it. Everywhere I go, I get many compliments on it. The colors are so bold and jeweled. I am trying to add the hood without a pattern and am guessing the size of my granddaughters head. I am trying to decide whether to add a drawstring so that she can grow into it. Someone commented to me that it is a shame that for all the trouble we take to knit baby clothes, they grow so fast and cannot wear it for long. How true is that? I guess it’s the love and care of making and giving the gift that makes it special no matter how often they get to wear it.

I started the Tofutsies socks with the yarn I purchased at the Knit and Crochet show, for my Dad. I am knitting a k2 P2 ribbing. I didn’t get very far in this because my husband got sick on the way home (we suspect food poisoning), and so I had to drive home. I did, however, see some hundreds of sheep on the way home and actually picked a couple of bolls of cotton to see if I could spin it.

I brought my laptop with us on our trip and was very pleased to have some occasional wireless access in our hotel. Low and behold, I got my Ravelry invite when I checked my email. At first, I tried to leave it until I got home, but it kept calling to me. I finally caved in and set up my site. I happened to have a lot of pictures of my projects on my computer, so I immediately started to enter my recent projects. I was very intrigued with the amount of detail I could enter. Ravelry can even match a published pattern to a book. I spent several hours trying to investigate all the possibilities of using this tool. It may need a book of instructions to use all the features to its fullest extent.

Lately, I’ve been trying to learn about RSS site feeds. None in my computer literate family seem to be familiar with this so tonight I finally got a book Blogging for Dummies. I’m still wondering if it will work to increase my readers of this blog.