Red Scarf WIP

This is a project I'm working on so a college student who has aged out of the foster care system will get a care package next Valentine's Day. If you want to do it, your scarf has to be in by December 15th, so get crackin!

Sorry, I don't know what's wrong with the photo, but you can click here.

When I vacation, I go to St. Louis

Sigh. No beach or cabana boys or 85 degree days. But drinks! Oh my, there were drinks. Hubs and I drove to St. Louis, MO for a wedding on the 14th and decided to make a long weekend of it with our pals, John and John. They were both in the wedding along with yet another John. We are so Catholic.


The four of us spent nine hours in the car together - both ways. Wow. Since we got there two full days before the wedding, we spent some time wandering the same streets that Nelly might have traveled in his youth, touring the Cardinals' Busch Stadium, bowling, finding out what St. Louis-style pizza is, tasting beer at the Budweiser brewery, and of course...


going to the top of the Gateway to the West arch. Amazingly, there is a whole museum underground, where I'm pretty sure you could survive nuclear holocaust. Riding to the top was probably my favorite part of our non-wedding activities. Five people (me, hubs, John, John, and the groom) climb into a tiny pod which jiggles its way up the inside of the arch with nothing more outside the miniscule door windows than a dim view of the bunker-like walls and winding stairs. Imagine Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth escaping earth in their pod within the Big Boy statue and you know what I'm taking about.


Two things St. Louis (link to map of interest) has in common with Minneapolis: it sometimes smells when you're near the river and they have an ADM mill. Things that are different: they have a park bigger than Central Park, they have Hobby Lobby, they have less traffic, and they have more historical buildings. But we have more lakes, parks, trees, paths, and general awesomeness. Just saying.


There is a handy system of highways between St. Paul and St. Louis, aptly named "The Avenue of the Saints." But because it was the original name of St. Paul, I'm going to start referring to it as Pig's Eye. So St. Louis and Pig's Eye have one major thing in common: THE STREETS MAKE NO SENSE. In Pig's Eye, we like to joke, it's because the town was put together by drunk Irishmen. I have no explanation for St. Louis, but at least they do have some cool street names.


As you can imagine, I did a lot of knitting during our 18 hours of driving, but I can't share because they are gifts. I can share this lovely photo. It's the very last picture from our vacation and it was taken near Hannibal, Iowa, in the parking lot of the Country Kitchen we stopped at for lunch.

Wristy-cuff; half-fail

I had a wee bit of this Patons Kroy Socks Stripes yarn in mulberry (which I don't think they carry anymore) left after making some tiny sweater/stocking ornaments and Penny's doggie boots (more on those later). This was supposed to be a little scarf for Penny to match the boots, but I ran out of yarn so it morphed into a wristy-cuff with a double button.

I'm disturbing this blog rut with another ridiculous creation

$1988. Ridiculous, but fabulous.

If I were a solid-gold dancer. by Theresa 'Orr' Bernard featuring Donna Karan

SO MUCH FUN!

Seriously, check out this website for some awesome, time-wasting awesomeness.

Greenie by Theresa 'Orr' Bernard featuring Burberry bags

"Grrrrrrr," and other things that happened in my house last week

Penny's bestie, Gretzky, stayed with us last week because his people, my sister and brother-in-law, were on vacation.

There was a lot of barking at the window. Squirrels, bunnies, leaves, mailmen. Who knows. Well, I know one day it was a squirrel who had perched on the little table on the porch, just about two feet in front of the dogs, who were apoplectic.


There was also a lot of prodding of the dogs, since we were trying to get both of them to sleep on the floor. The first night, I woke up multiple times to shoo Gretzky off the bed. What I didn't know (hubs told me the next day) was that Penny was on the bed for some amount of time because she's sneaky and bad and didn't wake us up. Poor Gretzky just wanted to be included. I'm extremely disappointed that they didn't snuggle in Penny's bed. Gretzky would just approach it slowly when Penny was in there and then just back away. Pansy.


They did have snuggly moments when laps were involved. More often, they wrassled and growled, tried to hump one another, and were generally instigators of mayhem. Penny tried to sit on Gretzky's face, and he didn't know whether to kick her in the butt or bite her legs. Hilarious.


UPCOMING PROJECT: knitted doggie boots. Stay tuned.

This is how I do it

Well. I guess it's Fall.

And apparently it's also National Coming Out Day. So that's cool.

Hubs and I took down the garden today, so I thought I would share some last bits of garden delight before the snow flies. OH THAT'S RIGHT - it already did. Are we heading for another infamous Halloween storm? The 1991 Halloween debacle holds the record for the most snowfall in one storm in the state's recorded history (28 inches in Minneapolis; 37 inches in Duluth). Luckily, I chose to be the grim reaper that year. Wearing a cloak, I wasn't so cold that I couldn't still go trick-or-treating.


Aaaaanywho. This, once again, was our garden post-grass-tearing-up and planting/transplanting. Something I learned at this stage: it is WORTH IT to rent the ridiculously heavy and hard to operate sod ripper. Also, do not start your pole beans indoors - they will grow too fast and wrap their tendrils around each other, making it impossible to transplant them. Don't start carrots or herbs indoors, either, because their roots won't be big enough to transplant and you'll be forced to extract the clump of them from their little pot and put the very same clump directly into the ground, lest you try to separate them and thereby turn them all upside-down.


The easiest part of the season is when your little seedlings are becoming more substantial and you're all excited and all the hard work is done, you just have to water. This is the part when you go out there twice a day to see if you can maybe see a little bit of progress or maybe even a bud and it's very exciting because sometimes you actually can see progress! A watched garden, it turns out, does grow.


After a month or so, your hovering and hand-wringing pays off and you have peas! Hubs doesn't like peas, but he liked these ones. Your other plants are now budding and flowering and showing you what's to come. Suddenly, you realize that you should've planted more peas and carrots but fewer broccoli and absolutely no corn. Something else learned at this stage: tomato cages as sold in stores are totally insufficient - they should be about three feet taller and have more rings.


By the time the peas are done and dried out, the garden in is full splendor and the plans for canning begin. We were reading up on blanching and freezing and I can't believe all the stuff we learned in our first year. I started tallying our yields and couldn't be happier with our results. Here are the estimates:

Basil: a couple handfuls and growing more.
Pole Beans: hundreds, perhaps thousands. One day yielded 71 beans. Next year we'll be more diligent about picking every day and freezing batches.
Broccoli: three small heads. Could've picked a few more but they flowered first.
Carrots: aside from the mutants, 11. Delicious.
Chives: a lot, but we never used them.
Cilantro: a few handfuls.
Sweet Corn: zero. Failure. The cobs never got more than 4" or so and then the birds ate them.
Lettuce Mix: one row. Could've planted more rows for another harvest.
Oregano: four or so handfuls that we dried to store.
Green Onions: 10ish. Never really used them, though.
Yellow Onions: a few, but they never got bigger than about 3/4" so they weren't really edible.
Italian Parsley: about 10 handfuls, which is a lot. That stuff is prolific.
Snow Peas: many dozen. We'll do more next year and hopefully freeze some.
Green Peppers: eight, plus I'm still trying to grow some indoors since I couldn't bare to let the poor tiny things just sit outside and die.
Jalapenos: 22, and I'm trying to grow a few more inside as well. The heat level has been really inconsistent, but still worth it.
Red Bell Peppers: seven.
Chili Peppers: seven. Not hot, but good.
Spinach: none. It was too shaded by the broccoli.
Thyme: three handfuls to dry and store.
Better Boy Tomatoes: about 50.
Roma Tomatoes: over 100. Delicious. We'll do a lot more tomatoes and canning next year.
Zucchini: about a dozen. With four plants, I thought we'd be overrun, but we weren't.

And now it's all cleared out, but we've got beans in the freezer and salsa in the pantry. When the kids were here, they really appreciated growing and picking vegetables, even though they wouldn't eat them, and that was fun to see. I'm already excited for next year.

My first decorated cake is literally a "wreck"

Yesterday we had a baby shower for our friend Kim; it was officially the first gathering at the house sans family. We had a great time talking about babies and birthing and whatnot.

I love hosting things because I can indulge my organizational chakra and play event planner without the crazy demands of a bride or other such paying party. This time I wanted to do a carrot-riding babies carrot cake, a la Cake Wrecks. I was delighted to find the exact baby figures at JoAnn, and had planned on picking up a carrot cake at the bakery. But the places I talked to either didn't have carrot cakes with the frosting carrots on top or they had just had a sale on carrot cakes and were out. Blerg! So I made my own:



A wonderful young woman at the Cub Foods bakery sold me a couple tubes of frosting that she colored and then showed me how to make the carrots. As it turns out, it's not that hard. Sure, my weak little hands made the carrots come out kind of squwiggly, but they look more authentic that way, right? The hardest part was sprinkling/throwing the chopped walnuts at the cake to get them to stick to the sides. Then I just had to add the babies:

ready for fall. and, apparently, winter.

Wait, no. I am not ready for winter. That is blasphemous.

But now that it is officially Fall and the trees have started becoming that dry, yellow/green combo, knitting feels more cozy and comfortable. In that spirit, I finished a cowl:



And it matches my hat!



This is what it looks like open:



No, I'm not angry. That's just my face at rest. This one is better:



The pattern is "Swirling Petals Cowl" by Casandra Roberts and it's available as a free Ravelry download. After looking at a gazillion cowl patterns, I decided to add the button and loop so I could sinch it tighter for the winter months of December, January, February, and March. Sigh.

I also decided to start a scarf for the Red Scarf Fund using this pattern and some nice, soft, inexpensive Paton's Chunky Shetland Tweed (in red), the same stuff I used for my green hat, Penny's ill-fitting sweater, and my hand warmers.