In this installment of “Mom Thing I’m Keeping For Now”, I have a knitting booklet from 1959 featuring Vita-Spun yarn.   According to the ad on the inside front cover, this yarn “does things no other knitting yarn has ever done before”. It’s a 93% wool, 7% textured nylon blend that stretches and springs back. […]

I put Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn in my Amazon shopping cart based on seeing a picture of the cover socks in a group I belong to on Flickr a couple months ago, putting it in the “save for later” section because I already own a fair few knitting books I’ve yet to make anything […]

With ski season coming up (my ski season, that is—I know those of who are fortunate to live near mountains have been skiing for some weeks now), I need to get some travel knitting lined up. Socks are good—the yarn doesn’t take up much luggage space, and making a pair keeps me occupied for way […]

I spent some time earlier today rearranging some quilt blocks on my felt wall, hoping to rekindle my interest in that stalled project. In the four months since I last updated my quilt to do list, I’ve gotten only one thing on it done (and all I had to do on that one was the […]

Amanda came to visit this past weekend, to coincide with the Yarn Harlot (a.k.a. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) making a tour stop in Ann Arbor, and I’m happy to say everything worked out much better than the last time, starting with the way Amanda and her luggage both arrived in Detroit Thursday night on the same flight, […]

Podcasts are now a regular part of my routine. I listen to them on my commute when I’m between audiobooks. I listen to them when I’m working on quilts. I sometimes listen to them when I knit, though more often I knit when I watch tv, because I can knit without looking at what I’m […]

I would very much like to curl up under my desk and take a nap right now. No, that’s not quite right. I would very much like to get in my car and go home right now and get some stuff done so when bedtime rolls around I might actually go to sleep instead of […]

I made these caps for the Charmed Knits Knitalong using leftovers from the other hats I’ve made. That explains the slightly wonky stripe pattern on the Hufflepuff on the left; I started out making the trapped bar style but then realized that I didn’t really have that much yellow but had plenty of black, so […]

I’ve been reading more knitblogs lately (in part because I’m curious to see how other people’s accounts of the Yarn Harlot’s Ann Arbor appearance compare to mine–estimates of how late she was and how long she spoke vary rather more than I expected), and I’ve noticed many people are participating in Knit From Your Stash […]

Expectation: I’d pick Amanda up at the Detroit airport on Saturday morning. Reality: I picked Amanda up at the Toledo airport on Saturday afternoon, after her two-state two-hour journey to visit me turned into a six-state ten-hour odyssey. We did still get to go to DTW, though, because that’s where her bag ended up. Expectation: […]

I ran across a mention of the Red Scarf Project in Jenipurr’s knitblog, and the idea of participating myself got into my head. I am all for former foster kids going to college and getting care packages. Surely I could finish a scarf (or even two) by January. I have scarf knitting experience, after all, […]

Mr. Karen and I took Friday off and went to Chicago for the weekend; now I am back at work and sleepy and haven’t yet had time to sort my pictures and write up a trip report. Later today or tomorrow I will. Right now, look what I got:   Note I said “got”, not […]

  While waiting for my sweater yarn to come in, I’ve been buying single balls of different yarns and making swatches. I figure at some point I can use all these odd balls as accent colors in a multi-fiber sweater extravaganza. Yes, that’s perhaps a stretch, given that I have yet to knit a successful […]