Although it is wrong in every possible way to have to put a sweater on my boy in late June, I am happy to show it to you all.

Katie made and sent this great sweater for Clark, and this is his first time wearing it.

We’re going out, and his little arms and feet were cold, so I had to put socks and a sweater on him. Isn’t it cute? And I have to say, the proportions are perfect. It fits him just great! Thanks, Katie! She also sent the cute Boppy cover he’s laying on. And a great blanket, and.. and.. and… Thanks!

I haven’t made it out to a yarn store yet to find yarn for Christmas stockings. With all of the things I’ve started or committed to starting in the last couple weeks, I have no idea how I’ll do it all. It’s stressing me out. I need to either plan or cancel something.

I found out at church yesterday that another friend of mine has cancer, stage four lymphoma. She’s about my age, and has three very young children. She starts chemo today. She asked me to knit her a hat.

Her prognosis is pretty good. She said that lymphoma is a highly treatable cancer, but she’s scheduled for six months of chemo, every other Monday, and she doesn’t yet know how well her body will handle it. She looked very thin and frail to me yesterday.

It’s so sad.

So I need to knit a pretty and soft hat, and I’m not quite sure what to do. We’re coming into summer, so something lightweight seems smart, but I’ve heard that cancer patients can feel cold, even in a warm room. Maybe an Esther Williams would be appropriate?

Well, that didn’t work. I’m not as better as I expected to be, so I couldn’t exercise. Plus, I wasn’t really home all week anyway. In either case, I didn’t exercise, and I got to snacking towards the end of the week. So I’m not under 220 as I had hoped.

Oh well.

I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to exercise without coughing my brains out.

How was your week?

It’s been a busy week. I haven’t been home, like, at all, and since I’m still recovering from a sinus infection, it’s wearing me out! However, in my opinion, it’s been worth it.

Here I am, talking about starting up a knitalong for Christmas stockings, and then I go and buy a sewing machine and serger.

I am really excited. I’ve never used a serger before, but the shop will give me unlimited lessons for free to teach me how to use both machines to their potential. They are both used. The sewing machine is a Babylock Esante Es-e2, which is also an embroidery machine, and the serger is an older Babylock with some differential something or other. I think I got a really good deal on them, but the shop owner is a TOTAL hard sell/make-the-deal kind of guy, so you never know.

I’m about to start my homework from my first lesson on the machine, which is to stitch out all 100+ decorative stitches, large and small version, to see how they look on fabric.

Hee hee.

Oh, and I’ll talk to Nate about naming and making a button for the knitalong. I looked at Blogger really quick per Diana’s suggestion, but I didn’t see how I could add other users to the blog. So, I have a little bit of investigating to do before deciding whether to set up a knitalong blog, or just do it here like I’ve always done. Any opinions?

That would be 10.

Clark is 10 weeks old now, and completely charming. He started smiling last week, and we’ve been enjoying it. He’s had a happy sort of expression for a number of weeks, but it took a little longer to break into actual smiles. And he’s a bit under 12 pounds now, dropping a little bit in percentile.

What do you think about Argyle Christmas stockings? I think it could be fun. I’ve always loved argyle, but never knit nor worn it. I was looking through some of my vintage knitting pamphlet/books looking for retro-mod sock ideas to convert to stockings when I saw the argyle.

I think I like.

Also, Amy Lu suggested a knitalong for Christmas stockings. What do you think? Is anyone else doing it yet? I don’t know how to do the fancy knitalong websites I’ve seen. And to be honest, I don’t want to spend the time to figure it out, or in my case, make NATE spend the time to figure it out for me. I’d handle it like I have in the past, which is to have participants email me before Friday each week with any pictures they want me to post on their behalf, or to let me know to link to their blog on Friday’s post, Friday being knitalong day.

I think I’d be up for it. Anyone interested?

Good morning! I’m still sick, but I slept well, and I’m on Tylenol, so I’m not too miserable at the moment.

Before I get started, I had the most yummy breakfast shake this morning, and I wanted to tell you about it. I used 1 cup of soy milk, a couple spoonfuls of frozen orange juice concentrate, about half of a very large, frozen banana, and a small handful of walnuts. Plus the Whey Protien Powder and vitamins. Very, very good. I added the walnuts after the rest was blended and only blended them for a few seconds, so there were still chunks left to crunch.

Ok, so this week I’ve been sick and I haven’t done much to be healthy or lose weight. I think I might have done some weights early on in the week, but I’m not sure. And I ate way too much of Veronica’s birthday cake. I weighed 220.5 this morning, which is the lowest I get when I fluctuate, so my goal is to drop below 220 by next Saturday.

Can she do it? YES SHE CAN!

Well, I honestly don’t know, but Bob the Builder jumped into my head at that moment, and I decided to run with it.

In order for this to happen, I need to do what I keep TRYING to do, which is to get my big butt on the treadmill a few times next week.

So that’s my goal. How’s your week going?

Wednesday night, around 10 pm I started to feel a little sick. Sinus pressure and sore throat. At 1 am I woke up completely miserable, and ended up having to miss out on Olivia’s field trip to the tide pools at Mukilteo Beach yesterday. I had a fever of 102, and I wanted to die most of the day. I seem to be better today. No fever, but my sinuses are still sore and congestion is moving into my chest. Bummer. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in JUNE! Of course, it doesn’t really look like June.

But making lemonade from lemons, I have dinner in the crockpot already, figuring I’d take advantage of the little bit of energy I have this morning, and the cool day to make some Hamburger Barley soup.

So far, Clark is healthy. I pray he stays that way and doesn’t catch this, because if he gets it, we’re ALL going to be miserable.

Thanks for the tips on sock knitting. I don’t know which method I’ll try, but I’ve been thinking about testing one or both on Christmas stockings. I want new stockings this year and the larger yarn might help me out in the beginning while I get used to using circulars. As I said yesterday, I like doing two socks at the same time, but I prefer doing each part of the sock one at a time. I do one cuff, then the other, one leg, then the other, one heel flap….. So I need two sets of whatever I choose to use. But if I start out with Christmas stockings, I can use the larger circulars that I already have, and see which way I want to do it. Make sense?

The trouble is designing the stockings. In our new house, the style we’ve been going for is Modernism, except that we’ve broken one of the “rules”, which is a limited color palette. We have lots and lots of color in our house, but I’d still define our style as somewhat Modern. As I’ve been thinking about stitch patterns and colors that might fit in our living room, I’m not coming up with much. So I went to this website, looking for inspiration for graphing out some intarsia insanity to make a retro looking fabric. Like this, or this.

I can’t decide if it’ll be really cool, or really stupid.

And there’s also the choice of fiber. It needs to be the right fiber, and I don’t know what that is yet.

Yesterday, Veronica turned 5.

We had a fun day. It started off at the doctor’s office, where both she and Clark got their shots. (Not so fun). Then we went to Sur La Table where we bought some mini bundt pans to bake Veronica’s cake. She loves to bake and decorate her own birthday cake, and when she found out later that you can’t frost and sprinkle a bundt, that was scrapped and we ended up making a 9×13 sheet cake so she could have her fun.

After Sur La Table, and before the cake baking, Veronica enjoyed her first “spa” experience with a pedicure and manicure.

It was cute, cute cute! I was originally just going to have her fingernails painted, but they up-sold me into doing both the manicure and pedicure for her, and a pedicure for me. They cut the price for Veronica because she’s so little and wouldn’t need exfoliating. (Or because they wanted more money out of me). I wasn’t planning on having a pedicure myself, and I hadn’t shaved in quite awhile. However, I decided that it would be a bit vain and silly of me to pass up a pedicure in a massage chair with a swirling foot bath, just because I was hairy.

Clark was a dear and slept in the sling the whole time.

Then we went to Claim Jumper (her choice) for lunch before heading home to bake the cake before family arrived to celebrate and sing.

I’ve been knitting on the socks a little bit. Both gussets are done, and I’ve started the trek down the foot towards the toes. I’m tired of being poked in the palm by the double points, and have thought about trying my hand at socks on circulars, either two circs or the one long circ which I think is the “magic loop” method, unless I’m mistaken. The problem is that I like to do both socks at the same time which is the only way I think I’ll ever finish a pair, as opposed to just the one, and the only way I’m at ease about them both ending up the same size when I’m done. To accommodate that, I’ve bought two sets of double points in the small sock sizes. If I move to two circulars, thats FOUR circular needles per size I’d need to buy. If I choose the magic loop (which is what I’m more interested in) I’d need to buy two circulars in each size.

I don’t want to.

Which is why, thus far, I continue to get poked in the palm when ever I knit socks. But it’s getting old.

Yesterday I was able to knit some. I was desperate, so I knit over poor Clark’s head while he was nursing, or under his bum when he was sleeping on my shoulder. (He’s been really fussy, so I haven’t been able to put him down much. Fortunately, he mostly stops fussing when I hold or feed him).

I’m still knitting on the green socks, and am half way through the second gusset.

Yesterday, I noticed one of my size 1 bamboo needles was looking quite bent, so I tried to straighten it and SNAP! Dangit.

So I knit yesterday, in between painting. Our formal dining room is being trimmed out in cedar this week, and we needed to finish up with the red paint. The last owners of the house had painted the top half of the walls a really dark purple, framed by white plastic chair rail on the bottom and white plastic crown molding on the top which sat right against the rough cedar ceiling.

Picture that for a minute. Bright white, shiny plastic crown molding next to rough cedar planked ceiling. Um, yeah. Not pretty.

We really dig the cedar ceiling, and are going to make the most of it by putting more cedar in the room, but we didn’t realize the crown molding NEEDED to come down until after we painted the walls red. When our friend Dave pulled it off last week, we were left with more painting to do. And that’s what I did almost all day yesterday. And for most of it, I had Clark in the sling on the front of me. He was helpful and slept a lot, which was nice.

Slings rock. I could never have done all that with the Baby Bjorn. It’s just different.