Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all. Here is a photo that I took this morning with my mother's day present. It is a telephoto lens for my camera. What a lovely family I have. By the way in case you are wondering the thing in the photo is a fig that we have growing on our fig tree.




And here is one of the mother's day packages that we sent out earlier this week. Note the washcloth that I knit sitting on top.




My wonderful husband also made buckwheat crepes fill with strawberries, plain yogurt, and some sugar. They were wonderful and it would have been better if I had taken a picture before I started to eat, but they were too good to wait.

Lena also gave me this really cute bee's wax turtle candle that she bought at the farmer's market. It smells so much like honey you would think that you could eat it.

Yarn review

I recently used some Knit Picks Simply Cotton Worsted in Marshmallow to knit up some washcloths for Mother's Day. To be perfectly honest I am not a big fan of knitting with cotton, but this yarn is undyed, unbleached and 100% organic. It is also less expensive than some of the other organic yarns, so I had to try it. Here are the results....

For a cotton yarn it was really soft, probably because it isn't has processed as bleached and dyed cotton yarns. It would work just fine for a baby blanket and you can feel good about what you are putting next to the baby's skin. I am not sure how it would work for a sweater, but then again I am not fond of cotton for garments, so I may not be the best judge. The pattern is called Chinese Waves and is a free pattern available here. One 100g skein will make two washcloths.

Socks done!

I always have one pair of socks that I am knitting, I usually have a few other project on my needles, but I am always knitting a pair of socks. They are very portable and they offer a lot of knitting time for the cost of yarn. My only rule is that I only work on one pair of socks at a time. The problem is that I have been itching to try this sock yarn that I bought last year (more about that yarn in a future post). Well, Friday night I finished the socks that I was working on for David. He wore them on Saturday and declared them his new favorite pair of socks. It is truly a win-win situation. I get to start a new sock project and he gets a new pair of socks.

I love compost...

maybe too much. For Earth Day I made these cupcakes. Here is how mine turned out. They could have been a bit better if the frosting that I made was a bit stickier.They were really very yummy and tasted almost nothing like compost;)


I have not been had much to blog about lately because two of the main projects that I am working on are top secret. Here is a bit of a taste of what I have been working on.

Some sewing...


and a pile of yarn that is slowly being turned into something nice. What nice earthy colors.

What is that buzzing sound?

Ever wonder what a swarm of bees looks like? Here it is. These little guys came to visit us and hang out in our apricot tree. By the way that mass is a lump of solid bees.
We were excited to see these little visitor, but we were also worried that someone would get stung. They were only a few feet from our well traveled sidewalk. Hubby really wanted to keep them as pet, but we decided to let them go to a better home. We contacted a very nice local beekeeper who came by our house and took them away for us. He just held his box under the swarm and banged hard on the branch and down they fell right into the box.
Someday we might have bees.....
but not today.

Knitting WIP's

For those of you who aren't in the know WIP stands for Work in Progress. Just about everything in my life seems like a WIP, but for this post I will be limiting myself to showing just the knitting WIP's. I actually have four, but one of them in top secret and can't be shown in this public space yet.


1. Here is the sweater I started last summer for Hubby.... I think is should be done just in time for this summer.... I am not really sure about my planning skills, but at least he won't grow out of it over the summer. The pattern is Cambridge Jacket by Ann Budd for any interested parties, but if you do try this pattern you will likely need to make the arms smaller and maybe the arm holes too.2. Here are the socks I am currently knitting. I try to always have a sock on my needles. The yarn is ONline Supersocke 100 Afrika Color. It has such long repeats in the pattern that I don't notic the repeat at all. The pattern is just my own every day toe-up pattern that I keep in my head.
3. This is a left over log cabin method throw a la the Mason-Dixon girls. So far I have not purchase any yarn to make this it is all partial skeins leftover from other projects. I may have buy some to finish it up with as I have run out of pinks and greens.


4. Top Secret.

Camping in April

Not a very creative title, but it pretty much sums up one of the reasons that I love California. I really can't stand the cold when I am sleeping outside, but even I wimp like me can camp in April. (Note the flip-flops on the child above) Earlier this week we packed up our two kids and two dogs and headed to south Mt Madonna Park. The park itself was so beautiful and lush with plenty of banana slugs.

We relaxed.I managed to find time finish a knitted wash cloth or two. The yarn is organic cotton and it seemed very appropriate to me to be knitting with organic cotton while camping.

Lena also had a lot of fun with some leftover glow sticks that we took with us. It was hard to get a good picture with out a tri-pod, but I did my best.