Interlude

Well, here I am, coming to you from the official drought state of VA. Ain't it wonderful to check the USGS site and find your state is colored in entirely. And your local river has one of those bright red dots for really low. It's near the end of October and we have yet to have a hard frost. The temps are in the mid-70's to mid-60's for highs and 50's to mid-40's for lows (if you live in a mountainous area). We got a smattering of rain yesterday but it lasted about 2 minutes. Just enough to remind you that water could still fall from the sky. I was beginning to think it was a fairytale. NC Gal mentioned to some friends the other night that she had 400 bales of hay and the way they leaned forward, with this gleam in their eyes, and said "400 bales! Where do you keep it at?" was a little bit....well, intense, if you know what I mean. The poor farmers can't even sell the livestock because no one is buying. Doesn't make sense to buy more cows or horses, even if they're dirt cheap, if all you've got is dirt left to feed them. There was a time I actually felt a bit antagonistic toward our up-stream neighbor because he built this big bank around his pond and it dammed up the stream that flows from a spring a bit up the small valley (we call it a holler around here) and cut off the main flow to my part of the creek. I've only had a creek in the spring after that, when the wet-weather springs would rise and feed it. It's been 2 years since we even had a sign of wet-weather spring and the last was more of a slight mudhole. I sincerely hope the bullfrogs that lived there managed to vacate before the springs stopped filling. I loved listening to them. His pond is very meager right now. Actually, it's well below the drainage spout he installed to keep it from becoming stagant and well on it's way to becoming just a mudhole it's self. I noticed his cattle are gone.....

I will never complain about rainy days again. Just please wish some our way, okay?

On the knitting front:

Had a bit of an interlude there between posts. Due to actually knitting instead of surfing. I even have blocked and seamed sweaters to show off:

Josie's sweater and hat. Very nice orange Cotton Classic yarn by Takhi Stacy Charles from Orchardside Yarn Shop in Raphine, VA. It's showing up as a very bright violent orange on my monitor but it's actually a calm shade of orange, if such a thing could be said of any orange color.

The Merry Sweater for Bridget, from Elsebeth Lavold's Designer's Choice no. 11, in Hempathy. I managed to get the green and golden colors very close but again, the orange is rather aggressive. I loved knitting this. The only problem was the yarn fought me when doing the seaming. It's a bit splitty.

The freight and loom conundrum. Well, I now have a Gobelin loom lying in pieces in my living room floor. NC Gal has a Nilus jack loom installed in her home. Both have sustained damage and missing bits and pieces, which we have been assured will be replaced. I had a chunk chipped out of the bottom support of mine but her's had a bad crack in one side piece. We bought these on Ebay at an excellent price but didn't quite know what we'd end up getting since neither was assembled in the photos. All we were certain of was that they were Leclerc looms with "some accessories". The freighting incident kind of got us down there but once assembly began and we realized what we'd ended up with, well, the song and dance began. I hope to have mine assembled for show and tell tomorrow. It takes 3 people to put it together so I have to find 3 people I can get in my living room at the same time that will cooperate to put it together. Where's my son-in-law when I need him? :-)

Rogue. Rogue is living up to it's name in being a bit of a rogue. It only lacks sleeves and I was to the sleeve cap and almost at the binding off point. But I kept having this tinge of unease. It just seemed way too long to me. Instead of reaching for the tape measure to check this, I put it off by checking my gauge. Yes, getting both row and stitch gauge, so I had to be right, oui? Knit another row. Gee, that's an awfully long sleeve lying in my lap. So I dragged myself out of the recliner, found a flat surface, pinned the sleeve down and measured. 24 inches long and I wasn't finished knitting it. No, no, no. That couldn't be right. So I called Tech Gal, hoping she had 25 inch long arms. No such luck-21 and 1/2 inches long. Of course, the sleeves need a slight bit more to set back into the top of the shoulder correctly but still, this wasn't going to work. I have dragged the offending sleeve and schematics and instructions to every knitter I know that would understand such things and measured every person's arm length that didn't run from me. The longest I found was 22 inches. They did state they'd be willing to give the sweater a good home, even with the too-long sleeves. Very nice of them, eh? All I can figure out is that I've done too many rows in the mindless knitting and increasing section after the cable inset part and thus have, well, too many rows. I can't face ripping back yet, so I'm going to start the other sleeve and PAY ATTENTION! What a concept.

And no, I haven't finished that pair of socks. They're still in time-out. I did pull one of them out and try it on yesterday. Instead I decided I needed to start a baby dress for T, after talking to her mom, who said, oh, yeah, the baby shower's November 8th. Yikes. I also managed to mess it up last night while attempting to watch the CBS lineup, increasing all those triangles to 12 stitches instead of 14. See, you start by knitting 13 triangles, which are themselves begun by casting on 2 sts, increasing to 14 sts, then joining them all together to make the bottom hem of the dress. Haha. Got a tad confused on the numbers while watching, well, Numb3rs, Moonlight, and Ghost Whisperer. It is almost Halloween/Samhain after all, so I can be excused for watching ghosts, vampires, and serial killers, right? I think I lost count somewhere during the Fibronacci sequence explanation that they crossed with numerology.....

I think I'd better go try to fix those triangles and have a soft drink. Good thing I don't really like to drink water, isn't it?