Carole's Ten on Tuesday topic this week is 10 Things I Miss About My Home When I’m Away…
Given that we just came home last week after a full week away, it's very fresh in my mind what I miss.

 

1.  My mattress!  Some of the hotels I have stayed in are actually more comfortable than my own mattress, but our little house on the Cape does not have good mattresses, so this time I bought a memory foam pad with me.. 😉

2.  Knowing where the utensils are in the kitchen and real dishes, not melamine.

3.  My coffee maker!  I love a good cuppa in the morning to set my feet in the right direction.  My coffee maker makes a good cup of coffee.

4.  My shower…you know, the one that Ken just finished.  I love being surrounded by all of that marble which reminds me of the incredible city library of my youth.  Our vacation home has a very small shower in the bathroom we used this year….we call it the coffin shower..ha!

5.  Our big screen tv with extended cable.  Our little home does not have very many cable stations.  Not that we watch tv all that much on vacation, but it is nice to watch some mindless house hunters at the end of a full day of fun.

6.  My big kitchen, but hey…this year we ate out way more than we usually do, so I am not complaining. 😉

7.  Hannah…my last child kind of living at home.  This will be a bittersweet year for us as she finishes her last year of college.  It was great to have her home this summer.  I miss having her here already!

8.  My 5 loving companions who great me with kisses every day.  (I didn't miss picking up the poop though…)

9.  My summer backyard.  I love the birds who share my yard.

10….but really…this was a stretch because I LOVE being on VACATION!  I love our little home, I love all of the different things that we do and I enjoy our quiet mornings on the beautiful deck that graces our little home.

Thank you Carole for a good 10 on Tuesday!

 

 

 

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First ocean visit minutes after we arrived before dark…

As the days of summer comes to an end, I thought I would spend the week sharing some of the highlights of our summer with you. 
This post has a lot of pictures as there are so many parts of our yearly visit to Cape Cod that I love, so beware. 😉

We spent our first day of vacation winding down from the Fiber Revival Show in Newburyport enjoying the beautiful beach that we call home for a week. This year we decided to take our 16 year old granddaughter, Mckayla, with us to spend time introducing her to one of our favorite places.  She loved the Jellyfish caution on this sign..ha!

 

We shared my love for the ocean and my big ocean companions with Mckayla as well.  The sun was bright and warm and the waters were some of the calmest I can ever remember going out on a whalewatch.  We were treated to a number of humpback whales, but the unexpected visit from a large pod of bottlenosed dolphins who were leaping in and out of the waters were such a special treat.

 

I think Mckayla enjoyed the trip out into the ocean. 🙂

 

We also took a trip over to Martha's Vineyard.  Oak Bluffs is a big shopping area which Mckayla loved, but my most favorite part of Oak Bluffs are the cute little colorful Gingerbread cottages that are a part of the old summer Methodist campground, Wesleyan Grove.  This year many of the homes were getting decorated for their yearly Grand Illumination celebration.  What a treat it was to watch everyone preparing their homes!

 

Normally we come in to and leave the Vineyard via Oak Bluffs, but this year because of timing we landed in Vineyard Haven and oh my…it is SO beautiful!  Other than the little cottages, I can honestly say that I am not a huge fan of Oak Bluffs, but I loved everything about Vineyard Haven.  It was much quieter…and just beautiful with all of the colorful sailboats just bobbing along in the water.

 

We also took a trip over to one of my favorite little shops…Eden Hand Arts which is located in Dennis.  It's so hard to describe this little place that you have to have a ticket just to go in.  When I first heard about it and the need for a ticket (kind of like an appointment), my first thought was ….yikes!  How snobby is this?  Once I visited however and saw how tiny the shop was and how little parking they had, and their desire to just keep it small, I understood. 
I am fortunate to have a number of special pieces from Eden that I love. 

 

This year I bought Mckayla her first bracelet to remember Cape Cod and maybe one went home with me too. 😉

 

We spent time dining out with friends…..

…and dining in with friends… 
Those friends would be my dear friends, Dale and Carole. 
It was Carole who helped me find our little home on the Cape and I love that we get to spend one week as neighbors. 

Dinner out at Anejo's and the Raw Bar….yum! 
Snacks and Bananagrams at my house and Lobsters at Carole's.  So much fun!

The days in between were filled with time in our cottage, reading, relaxing and knitting for me. Time outside in the bay with kayaks exploring the beautiful nature that is part of the Cape… but we finished our vacation the same way we started it.  Enjoying this wonderful beach that we call home for one week every year.
I am already looking forward to next year!!

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Do you love this design??  I know I do for sure…I love it!!

This lovely sock pattern, Milkweed, was designed by my good friend Anne Podlesak of Wooly Wonka Fibers.
Anne and I have worked on a number of patterns over the years and I am always amazed at her talent and flattered at what she creates with my yarns.

Milkweed was knit with my Pearl yarn in the Cornsilk colorway, which happens to be one of my favorite colorways. 
I knit a sweater with this color and a shawl in this same color is wound and ready for casting on once I finish my Marklee sweater. I'm thinking that a new pair of socks would be a nice thing too now after seeing these beautiful socks.

Anne and I have very similar color sensibilities.  Last year she designed this stunning Three Sisters Shawl using the colorways Suede and Butterscotch for her Free Spirits book, which is an incredible collection of patterns.  A book that you should check out for sure!

The colors of Autumn are my most favorite colors and I love that Anne creates the most scrumptious designs in these colors!

Fall is definitely in the air isn't it?  I am not quite ready to give up summer this year as it feels like it has gone by much too quickly, but I can feel the change coming up here with the days getting a bit shorter.

I have not been good about blogging this summer, but I was pretty good about taking pictures, so next week I will spend a little time sharing what we did this summer before it comes to a close….it's been a nice summer for sure!
xoxo

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Alternate between the solitary and the social.
Whether alone or with others, keep serenity.
Deng Ming~Dao

This post has been marinating for a while….it's about how I spend my lunch break.
Most of you know that I now work at my local vet hospital and it is indeed a very popular and busy place with a phone that is forever ringing.  Finishing a thought or a conversation can be a challenging thing during the day, but it is a day that almost always passes quickly.
When I first started my job and watched one of my co-workers spend his lunch in his car instead of the lunch room we have, I asked him why?  He just smiled at me and nodded his head, mentioning NPR and quiet.  What?  I quickly came to understand why he chose to spend his 1/2 hr in his truck.
No ringing phones, no mindless conversation…..a true break from work for a short time.
I too now spend my lunch enjoying the quiet in my car listening to NPR while I eat my lunch and squeezing in some quality knitting time.

My summertime knitting is Elizabeth Doherty's sweater pattern Marklee in my Airy yarn in the Violetta colorway.  I will be vending at the Indie Dyer Trunk Show in Rhinebeck, NY this fall so I am on a mission to have this sweater finished. It is what I have on my lap at lunch, while I watch tv at night and when I am fortunate to sit at the beach.  Knit in fingering yarn, it is a much slower knit than my Helvetica Sweater, but I am really enjoying the process.

One of the beauties of Elizabeth's design is you can block the top part of the sweater to see if you are at the correct gauge or if you should make adjustments before you have invested too much time.  While I made a large swatch for this sweater to get a good idea of what my gauge would be, I was nervous as I was knitting the sweater.  I was worried that my gauge was too loose, but once I soaked and blocked the back of the top part of the sweater, I was spot on.  Whew…I was already prepared to rip it out and drop down a needle size, but blocking it told me  that I was on the right track.

Between working at the Vet Hospital and dyeing on my days off, my knitting time is limited, so not only do I knit in my car…I block yarn there as well..ha!  This portion of my sweater was mostly blocked at home, but I gently placed it along the passenger seat of my car to finish drying so I could pick up stitches during lunch for the next section.

Marklee, like Helvetica is mostly stockinette knitting which I have to say I completely enjoy, but there are definitely some challenging portions in her patterns for sure.  Fascinating techniques that truly do create a well fitting garment.
Tonight with some of the challenging portions of this knit behind me, I took the sweater to our local Concert in the Park put on by North Conway's Art Jubilee. 
The concert was a duo replicating Simon and Garfunkle's concert in Central Park, NY.  I have always been a huge fan of their music and with each and every song a memory of a moment in my life growing up was wrapped up in each song. 
While this may not have been Simon and Garfunkle in any way, it still made my heart smile.
Summers are short up here, so I better get knitting!
 

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"A garden requires patient labor and attention. 
Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions.
They thrive because someone expended effort on them."
Liberty Hyde Bailey

As long as I have been blogging I have been sharing my love of gardening.  My successes and my failures.
This year my raised beds had finally told me that they were finished.  The wood on the beds were at the point where we were going to have to redo all of them…they were falling apart from the years of sun and rain beating down on them.

Last year with all of my good intentions, the vegetable gardens were neglected.  I was just too darn busy to keep up with everything and they were the one thing I let go, and it made me sad to look at it.  We still reaped a lot of deliciousness from them, but a lot went to waste as well, which I didn't feel good about.  Sometimes 24 hours in a day is not enough is it?

This year money has been a little tight since I changed my website…another story for a blog post about SEO soon., so I spent a lot of time thinking about making gardening fun and manageable again…and affordable as amending the big beds each Spring is expensive.

We are a much smaller family now that the kids are all mostly on their own, so there really is no need for me to produce the volume of food that I did when they were growing up.
I thought about the things that we enjoy most from the gardens….

Lettuce…we eat a lot of salads all year round and it's really nice when you can go out into the garden and cut your own for a salad…I love it!
Thus the new lettuce bed with basil growing in between.  We use basil all year round and it's so easy to freeze.

Another must have is my herb bed.  I love growing and drying herbs. 
Having them to use all year round is always a treat. 
I have a new herb this year called "Curry Plant"  It's the one right in the front center, which is going to be moved to the back center now that I know how tall it will grow.  I think it will be an interesting addition to the family of herbs that we enjoy.
Some of the herbs are going into individual pots…the ones that if left to their own devices can take over a garden, such as my chives.  The mojito mint another garden hog will live in the whiskey barrel flower grouping by the stairs. 
I look forward to using this herb in mojitos this summer.. 😉

I have never been a huge tomato fan even though I love the flavor of tomato…it's a texture thing for me in it's original state
. 
Now that the kids who were veracious tomato eaters are gone, I decided that one grape tomato plant would be enough.  We do use a lot of these over the summer in different dishes, so one patio grape plant is all I will have. 
This big table will be going away soon and the tomato plant will live in a new plant stand.

The beds I am using are made by a company called Veg Trug. I have 2 of them now and will add a third one when I can for the single plant vegetables that I will grow such as Broccoli, Peppers (hot and sweet), radishes, carrots and a few others, but the season is late now, so there is no hurry to add that third bed yet, until it's time to plant fall garlic.

You can purchase different cover to extend the garden season which is awesome. One to shade the lettuces, one to keep the pesky bugs away and a greenhouse shade….but the beauty of these beds is that they are very manageable for my back.

I thought about giving up the gardens, but at the end of the day, I just couldn't.
Gardening is in my blood and it always gives me so much summertime enjoyment.  This is definitely a new way of doing things, but I think the smaller volume and the elevated beds will make it so much easier.

Garden on!

 

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“Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…”
― Susan Polis Schutz

I have so enjoyed the time that I have had to play in the dirt this week.  The happy faces of these Zinnia's in my favorite summer colors make me smile.  How can you not love all of the colors that summer gifts us?

I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend in your corner of the world! 
Summer is short, so enjoy it to the fullest!!

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Pattern:  Helvetica
Designer:  Elizabeth Doherty of BlueBee Studio
Yarn:  The Woolen Rabbit WW Kashmir
Colorway:  Forever In Blue Jeans
Needle Size:  US 10

Can I tell you how much I love this sweater?  It was a delightful knit!  Even though it is mostly stockinette it is designed in a way that is completely different than anything I have ever done which kept it interesting….and the best part it fits!!  I have some body challenges when it comes to knitting and rarely does anything fit my shoulders.  This one does.

As you can see in my first picture, when I knit this sweater again and believe me I will, it will be 2 inches longer.  I used a batch of yarn that someone returned so the luxury of going longer than the pattern called for was not mine this time.  Those body challenges usually pull up the design by a few inches..ha!

God only knows what I was explaining to Hannah in this picture.  As usual I was talking with my hands, a trait that my husband is forever making fun of me for.
See how nicely this sweater stays on my shoulders?  I have never had a top down knit sweater fit so nicely in my shoulders.
Love it!

The back of the sweater is a little bit longer than the front which I love.
Overall, I really enjoyed this knit better than anything I have knit in a while.  I learned so many new techniques along the way.
Thank you Elizabeth for a wonderful pattern!
I loved it so much that her Marklee is now on my needles.
It may take a bit longer given that it is knit with fingering weight yarn…and you know how slow I am, but I do enjoy simple stockinette knitting, so who knows, I may wiz right through it. 😉

Today's Ten on Tuesday is what we did this weekend….and we packed in a lot in my shortened weekend with working on Saturday.
I am going to post a few pictures instead of listing everything out….a little unorthodox, but I have no clue how to do a collage..ha!
Technology used to be my strength…not so much any more.

Ken had to put out some fires at one of the places he works at, so I had a luxurious Sunday all to myself to do the things that I no longer have time to do.  Working full time has been a huge adjustment for me even if I am doing my 40 hours in 4 days.  Thankfully that extra day gives me the time to get my dyework done in between.
Because I worked this Saturday, I lucked out with a mini vacation as a reward…4 days off in a row.  w00t!
I spent Sunday leisurely shopping in town, something I haven't done in a while. 

I take my lunch to work everyday, so a new lunch bag, a hot hydroflask and a cold hydrolask made their way home with me, along with some summer shirts and maybe some shoes…a girl can never have too many, right? 
Oh and that cold flask went to the fireworks with me filled with some goodness, along with some new knitting on the 4th just sayin'…it works great at keeping drinks icy cold.;-)

There was some gardening that I will share with you later in the week that made me smile and our Sunday evening was a typical summer night in the yard, listening to tunes, snacking and stretching our brains with some brain games.

Up and out early for my favorite Summer kayak trip...the marshes of Scarborough and let me tell you, it was one hell of a work out!.  The ride out was enjoyable with some challenges here and there, but the ride back in padding against the afternoon sea-breeze was a beast!.  Note to self…see what direction the wind is going to be blowing when kayaking in the marshes.  Easier to paddle into it on your way out than on your way home when you are tired.  Still worth it though seeing all of the beautiful Snowy Egrets and birds who inhabit this Marsh.
Do you love this little beach that we had our lunch on?  I do.

After the long paddle we relaxed in the yard for a bit and then cleaned up to head into town for the annual fireworks.  If you have ever been to North Conway in the summer you most likely have seen what the traffic can be like.  Pretty unpleasant, so when the Scenic Railway started running a train from Conway to the park in North Conway last year we gave it a try and it was so sweet!  Easy in and easy out.  This year, my little cutie and his parents, along with my other grandson Aidan joined us for the ride in comfortable wicker chairs. 
It was so fun to watch Asher's face every time the train blew it's horn..ha!  He is a pip for sure!

Boom…and just like that it was over!
I hope that you had a wonderful weekend in your corner of the world too!

 

 

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I have been plugging along on my big Blue Jeans blob that you have seen here and there and now that it is almost finished I have been swatching away, dreaming of my next sweater and building a stash of yarn swatches for the yarns that I carry.

I have decided that my next sweater is going to be Marklee.  It looks super comfortable and now that I know how cold it always is in the office where I work, I think it will be a nice fall sweater to wear into the winter.  I swatched Airy in both a size 4 and 5 and also Dove in a size 5.  Both Airy and Dove knit at the recommended gauge in size 5 and while I really love the fabric that I got with Dove, I think for this particular sweater I will go with Airy in the Violetta colorway.  I just love this shade of purple.

I have also been tinkering with bags here and there when I have had free time and this is the first zipper insert I have ever done and this is what my leather bottomed totes will have for an inside pocket.  I know myself, I use my zippered pockets all the time in the various bags that I own.

As you can see in the yarn picture, I have also been working on a few knitting bags.  Once I get a bunch of them finished I will put them up in the shop.

Lastly, I have been contemplating sewing a few tops/dresses for myself.  I used to sew all the time, especially when I was a young mom.  I made all of my older girl's dresses when they were young, but it was mostly because it was the mother of necessity, not the desire to create.
I learned how to sew when I was a young girl.  My mom taught me how to hand stitch when I was in the second grade.  I was always sick with tonsilitis and it was a way for her to keep me busy while in bed or on the sofa.  When I was in the 4th grade she sent me to sewing classes at the Girls Club.  She would put me in a taxi and off I would go for a few hours.  I will forever be grateful for the early gift of knowledge she gave me.
I no longer have to sew out of necessity.  I am looking forward to seeing if I can still do this..ha!

Saturday was a normal work day around here.  I worked on a few orders, while I cleaned the studio and Ken worked in the yard, mowing the lawn and getting the pool ready to be filled.  Sadly there are a few holes in the pool ring, but so far it appears that the patches that Ken applied will work, but next year we are going to get a solid pool instead of my ghetto pool.

The weather prediction for Sunday was hot, hot, hot, so we loaded up the kayaks and headed off to a place called Campton Bog, which truly is in the middle of nowhere.  Such a serene place to plop your kayak in and spend an afternoon. 
This video gives you a sense of how it feels to be there.
(I apologize for the crappy video….this is new for me….and I still can not make that save button go away….grrr!)

 

 

Even though we did not "see" any wild life, we certainly saw and heard enough evidence that we were completely surrounded by wildlife.  We saw a number of beaver lodges that we carefully crept around because seriously, who wants to run into an angry beaver?  Not me!

We also heard the almost deafening sounds of the Bittern herons around us. An almost invisible bird to see as they are incredibly stealthy, but they are there all the same.  I have to believe that right now must be the time when there are a lot of new babies in the reeds because it was incredibly noisy.  Bitterns make a sound that sounds like it should be a frog.  We came across areas in the reeds that sounded like there had to be huge communities, given the crazy the amount of noise that we heard coming from those reeds.

My favorite part of the trip both coming and going was this beaver dam.  Last year it was easy to pass over but this year it was a good 2 feet higher which presented more of a challenge.  Ken scoped it out and we both pondered how we were going to get over it.  After a few minutes, Ken paddled up to it, drove his kayak in hard and then stepped out…and what a surprise he had..ha!  It was much deeper than he expected and short of capsizing he kayak, he managed to climb up on top of the narrow dam.
After watching Ken, I backed up and then powered my kayak hard, hoping to hit the top of the dam…nope, only 1/2 way up, so while Ken pulled my kayak up, I also used the thick twigs of the dam to hoist up the kayak.  Whew….we both made it over!
Let me tell you how much fun it was to fly over that dam on the way back!

We had a very enjoyable weekend in our corner of the world and I hope that you did too!

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