Gearing Up for Visitors

We've been enjoying having a friend visit who taught with us in Taiwan. She's my youngest daughter's Godmother and although we've talked on the phone, we haven't seen her since she visited us in Brazil... so it's been a long time. She was married this summer, so I'm trying to get used to a new last name. I never changed mine, so it always seems to throw me off when I have call my friends by a different name. I still look my friend Nancy up under her old name, and my friend Laurie, and my friend Liz... the list goes on.

This past weekend was great to have visitors. The weather was terrific and we were able to visit the South Bank, watch buskers, and just people watch in general. It's always fairly crowded on a nice day, but I've certainly seen it worse. I really enjoyed the painting that you see on the left. The woman has been painting it for the past three weeks. I don't think my back could handle sitting that way for three weeks... Even caught the last performance of the National Theatre's Watch This Space season. I'll definitely look for it again in next summer.

October is filled with guests... three families booked so far. Family and friends. No overlap, but we will have one group leave and the next group come later the same day. I'm just worried about getting the sheets washed :)

So my knitting... I started a cape for the pillow girl's little brother. It's out of the same blue wool my mother-in-law gave me. It was given it by their next door neighbor when his wife died. It's old (can tell from the label), but it's certainly knitting up some nice projects. I have cape boy's initial ("E") on the back and I'm trying to knit a big Harry Potter lightning bolt through it. I botched it up a bit at the tip, but think it should work out eventually. I am proud of the way the back looks. I've been diligent about my stranded color work so it's not a horrid mess in the back. I've done the horrid mess thing in the past, but it didn't seem to matter because I was felting and lining the bag that I did it on. I'll provide a picture later.

Here's me knitting in an over-priced pub along the Thames. You know it's over priced when you order tap water and only one entrée for three to share :)

Is This a Weird Gift for an 11 Year Old?

The pillow is finished. It's sort of cute... smaller than I thought it might be, but that's okay. I started today with just the front sewn together as you can see in these pictures (and that was after staying up until almost midnight sewing on the flowers and completing the first seams). Sewed the rest up today and stuffed it. The kids really wanted to help with the stuffing, but they needed to get to bed and I wasn't close enough at that point to have them stay up to help. I may have mentioned that we were supposed to go to dinner at the "birthday" girl's house tonight, but they had to cancel, so that gave me an extra day to finish. We'll go tomorrow night and now I'll have her gift (only a month late).

The question I have is... is this a weird gift for a kid? Seems like a little old lady gift (perfect for me!) The girl knows I'm knitting her gift, and in a panic today I corned the mom and told her that she might want to tell her daughter I'm not making a sweater or anything like that. I started to think about it and realized she might be really disappointed if she has in her head she's getting a garment of some sort and I show up with a tiny pillow.

Just want to point out that those little spots on the pillow are clumps of beads... as I was looking at the picture, I couldn't tell what they were and I was the one who made the darn thing. Thought it was some lint on the pillow or a mark on my lens.

In case anyone wants to know, this pattern is a mixture of two patterns in the book Knit It! Felt It!

Finally, I just want to show you the card my daughter made for her teacher (the one who has had visa problems and is just arriving for the school year tomorrow). She used one of the flowers that I didn't use and made a pin for her teacher.

Wicked Knitting

Felting in a front loader is frustrating. Could be that I'm just not good at it or don't know the tricks. However, I'm sending the pillow squares for that gift I've been knitting through another cycle in hopes that there will be a little more felting going on the second time around. If anyone has felted using the front loader, let me know what to do. It's so easy to continue agitating the pieces in a top loader... as long as you're paying attention to the time.

So I haven't been around much recently. It's always busy with a new job at a new school. Also hard when you're trying to figure out the routine with the kids. My knitting has been boring (squares), so I haven't had much to talk about. The weather has also been nice, so I've been trying to be outside as much as possible. Once the rain starts and the weather gets cooler, I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of knitting.

Did meet up with some friends from Prague who were here on a school trip with a group of students. Went to see Wicked with them. Knitted a square in the dark... the nice thing about felting is that it's not soooo important that the piece looks perfect (although I must say, it wasn't too bad). The show was big and spectacular. One friend who came with has seen the show several times and felt this was the best she'd seen. Think I'll take my children next time.

I'm off to watch my squares spin. Wish me luck.

Four Hours Sitting in the Rain... at Least I got Knitting Done

The girls are signed up for soccer, but of course they are in different age groups so our Saturday starts at 9 a.m and gets done at 1 p.m. Public transport takes almost an hour so it's an early morning. Many events this weekend were canceled because the forecast was so bad. Soccer (football), of course, was not. It wasn't so bad the first two hours. Met some nice moms and knitted another pillow square, but it was windy, cold and gray. The second session, however, was rainy and miserable. Couldn't wait to get home to a hot cup of tea. Almost finished my last blue pillow square but ran out of yarn, so I started frogging a sweater that I was knitting for my sister-in-law's daughter. It looked great except something was weird along the neckline. I never had the patience to go back and find out what I did wrong, so I'm getting rid of it so it can be used for this pillow. Here it is in pieces. Was frogging on the tube. Would have paid to read the mind of the guy across from me... what a look on his face as he watched me.

Knitting as an Ice-Breaker

I took my youngest daughter to the park down the street after work today. She met a little girl there that she wanted to see again. That little girl wasn't there, but there was another group that were close to her age. She kept trying to get in there and make friends, but they were really into a game and she's a little shy. I sent her back over one last time and she made friends and got into the game and had a great time. So proud of her... although a little quiet, she's always good at making friends... has a sweet manner and other kids respond to her.

So what does that have to do with anything? Well, as she was making friends, I was sitting on a bench knitting and was thinking that I should probably be making friends as well. Looked to my left and there were two grandmotherly women talking to each other (not in English). They seemed to know each other well. Other moms were paired up with the moms of children the same age as their own. Since my kid should have grown out of the playground two years ago, I was sort of out of the loop. Lots of cute kids came up and gave me big grins and shy waves, but no moms in sight. Finally, a woman with two very young children stopped by to get a snack out of her stroller and she made a comment about my knitting and how she loves to knit but the last sweater she knit for her toddler took her months. The baby had on one of her creations, which was beautiful. Wish I had knit when my kids were younger. She was from Slovakia, and when she talked to her kids in Slovak, it all sounded sort of familiar even though I never learned much Czech. So my point being... knitting is often a nice way to open conversations, even if it's someone just asking what you're knitting or saying they wished they knit. It's a nice way to break the ice.

Still working on the felted pillow as a gift. Finished another square today at the park. Only six more to go.