Back to Blogging

Well that was a long time of no blogging. It wasn't intended of course. Life got busy and before you know it, it's a whole new year! I've decided to pre-select some sock yarns to turn into socks this year. Here they are all caked and ready to go:

I started at the upper left with the extremely soft Princess from Rapunzel Yarns.

It's much farther along than this (I'm actually on the second sock), but I haven't had a chance to take a recent photo. The yarn is fairly fine and a bit fuzzy. I'm using 00 needles to try for a sturdier fabric.

I've also decided to spin more regularly, so I tried to turn this:

into a chunky single, which I haven't been able to produce reliably since I was a very new spinner who could do nothing but big fat singles. I came up with this, which has moments where it looks like it was gonna get chunky, but then thought better of it and went skinny again. Still pretty though.

It's ok. I have lots of fiber, and 11 more months to go. I will have chunky singles!

Old Timey Train

We went on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad last weekend. Jersey family was in town and Jersey Baby is a big fan of all things train. It was an hour-long ride from the small town of Cumberland to the even smaller town of Frostburg, which I knew of mainly because the Redskins used to train at the university there. It was hot and disgustingly sunny, so I only explored about 1 block of Main Street before hiding out in an air-conditioned cafe surrounded by cold beverages.

The railroad was indeed scenic, though we seemed to be on the slightly less scenic side, so there was a lot of craning to see past riders on the other side of the train. Here's a pretty picture from Cumberland, when we were on the more scenic side.

I started the O w l s sweater and worked on it through during the trip. I decided to go sleeve first to try out some gauge-related pattern changes.

Nationals Stitch 'n Pitch

What's more disturbing? The massive size of this nacho plate:
Or the the fact that it matches the color of my sock?

Weekly Update

It was another weekend of semi-random crosstown rambling. My friend Kim and I went to the Greek Festival at St. Sophia's.It grows a bit each year though it's still a pretty cozy event. The food is good, but if you want the gyros and souvlakis (Of course you do! You're at a Greek Festival!), come early or be prepared to stand in an insanely long line.

After the festival, we explored the newly re-opened Social Safeway, which was amazingly amazing! It had an unbelievable prepared food section, with sushi, gelato bar and, of all things, a nut bar:

Pre-packaged peanut butter just not doing it for you? No problem! How about some freshly ground honey roasted cashew butter? That's so much nicer, so much more worthy of the Social Safeway. Despite the name, we didn't make any new acquaintances, but we did get to lounge in the living room, er, I mean, cafe seating area.
Don't you wish your living room opened into an amazingly amazing grocery store?

On Sunday, I ran into an Asian festival in Silver Spring, which had a tinikling demo.
Tinikling is a Filipino dance that's kinda like the hokey pokey, only bad dancers are punished by having their ankles whacked. I didn't have enough free memory on my camera to get video, but fear not, there are plenty of fine examples on Youtube.

I haven't posted much about knitting, since I haven't really done too much lately. Most of my knitting time has been spent on this scarf:

It's a modified Loopy and Luscious, knit in the round, forever and ever. I'll finish it someday, though it's getting a bit bulky to carry around to all the weekend festivities.