As promised...new stash!
These are my new goodies from the retreat. Oops! more Opals!
The Opal on the left is, I think, an old, nameless colorway, and is much more of a rich golden yellow than it appears here. The center Opal is the new Tiger, and the one on the right is from the Elemente collection.
The wound-up balls are Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock. On the left is Oceanside, on the right is Socknitter's Fall Sunset, one of the colors from a special dyeset done just for The Fifth Stitch.


These are Cherryl's new beauties. As you can see, she has considerably more self-control than I do! Her wound-up balls are LL, too, but I don't know what the color name is. The ball on the left was wound on Lorie's nostepinde.

Cherryl's Opal is Rainforest Fish.

I think I need to knit some socks just for me and just for the fun of it. This past year I've spent most of my knitting time developing my designs for a couple of online groups, testing patterns for other designers, or knitting socks and things as gifts for other people. I'm becoming frustrated, and need to use up some of the beautiful yarn I've acquired.
Rich's boring navy blue Opals are past the heel and maybe a third of the way down the foot. Liz and Frankie are stalled, as are the Spiderman socks. Ducky Dew will be making another kit appearance, this time as the December kit for a Yahoo! group.

The new job starts tomorrow. Wish me luck! These first weeks will be spent setting the store up and getting it ready to open. What an adventure!

Knitting Retreat 10/05
My sister and I went to the knitting retreat at The Fifth Stitch in Defiance, Ohio yesterday. Ellen Upp is the owner of the store. She carries an astonishing assortment of all sorts of yarn, patterns and knitting notions, but her sock yarn display is beyond belief. Of course I forgot to take a picture of the sock yarn! Guess I was too busy trying to buy it all...

Cherryl outside the store, waiting for Ellen to open up


There's no set schedule for Ellen's retreats, but there's always someone there who can teach various knitting techniques. While we were there, knitters were learning the magic loop technique, knitting two socks at one time on two circular needles, and using a nostepinde.

Cherryl learns to wind a center-pull ball with Lorie's nostepinde

This is the sockline. We bring one sock from every pair we've completed since our last visit to the store and hang them up here. These are mostly Cherryl's and mine.

This was Cherryl's first visit to the shop, but I attended my first retreat here in the spring of 2003, just after I'd learned to knit socks. Lorie taught me the 2 socks/2 circs technique during my first visit. It was also my first visit to a 'real' yarn shop, and I was completely overwhelmed. It was fun to see the same response on Cherryl's face yesterday! It was great, too, to see so many familiar faces there, and to meet a nice bunch of new folks, too. The owner of Catalina Alpaca yarns was there and told us all about his yarn. There were lots of yummy goodies baked by George. His wife, Doris, is one of the Fifth Stitch Sockers.

Tomorrow: new stash acquisitions!

I Have A Job!
Beginning this coming Monday I will be gainfully employed once more! After three-and-a-half months of reading the classifieds, and mailing resumes, and fruitless interviews (although I DID see a vegetable or two...), and working as a substitute teacher's aide for minimum wage, and asking everyone I met if they knew anyone that was hiring, I had two, count 'em, TWO job offers to choose from.
I will be working at a store in Shipshewana, Indiana. My employers own several shops, and I'm not entirely sure which one I'll be in. They think they want me in their home decor shop in the Davis Mercantile. I'll be meeting with them later today to tour their stores and see which will be the best 'fit.' This feels 'right' to me. I haven't had a job feel right since I started at the elementary school library twelve years ago. Wish me luck!

Spiderman Socks
These are fun! I found the idea and the chart HERE at Stephanie Pearl McPhee's site (The Yarn Harlot). Steph knitted mittens for her nephew, but I'm adapting her chart for a pair of socks.

Another Test (these are silly, fun, and sometimes even a little accurate!)
I found it here: Knitting It All Together

Your Element is Earth

Your power color: yellow Your energy: balancing Your season: changing of seasons Dedicated and responsible, you are a rock to your friends. You are skilled at working out even the most difficult problems. Low key and calm, you are happiest when you are around loved ones. Ambitious and goal oriented, you have long term plans to be successful.

What Element Are You?

I am a rock! Friends: bear this in mind! Do Not Mock Me!
You may one day require my skill at working out your most difficult problems!
The yellow power-color part may not suprise anyone. Since we bought the BigYellowBike I find myself oddly drawn to anything yellow, and have even found myself with enough yellow clothing to make up an entire wash load. Perhaps the bike released something in me??? Sometimes I'm tempted to buy things for which I have no conceivable use, just because they're the 'right' color of yellow. A sickness? A compulsion? I prefer to think of it as exquisite taste.

I have six, count 'em, SIX different pair of socks on the needles: boring navy socks for Rich, Liz & Frankie for me, Cathy H's Reindeer socks, and Spiderman socks for the little boy I'm working with at the school. It's insane, INSANE, I tell you!
The Spidey socks are based on a mitten pattern I found at the Yarn Harlot's site. Right now they are just a bit of ribbing followed by a short span of red-and-black spiderweb and a massive tangle of black yarn tails. They're going to be cool, though!

Cherryl and I are going to a knitting retreat at The Fifth Stitch
this weekend. The retreat is all weekend, but we're just going for one day. This is the place where I REALLY learned to knit socks...and to hoard sock yarn. This will be my sister's first visit there...Bwah-hah-hah-hah...! We may have to rent a U-Haul to get all the yarn home.

Hands...
I went to my knitting guild meeting yesterday and I was thinking about something that touched me.

The little shop where the group meets just opened in August. There was a Grand Opening Day, and a crew from a local television station came with a camera to do a 'color' piece. A bunch of us from Stranded in Michiana, our knitting guild, showed up to congratulate the new owners and get them off to a good start. I was working on a pair of socks, either the duckies or Cathy's reindeer pattern test and not really paying much attention to the news crew.

A few days later, my daughter-in-law told me, she was at home and my son was in the living room watching TV. She said all of a sudden Nick was shouting, "Nici! Come here! My mom's on TV!"

She ran in to the room, but all she saw was a pair of hands, knitting. My son recognized me solely from seeing my hands. I was not working on anything he should have recognized, and was not wearing anything especially distinctive that he would have seen in the background. He just knew my hands when he saw them.

This touches me beyond words. My hands held him when he was a baby, soothed him when he cried, sewed his little shirts and then buttoned them when he couldn't do it for himself. They cooked his food and wiped his face (and the other end, too), tied his shoes and wrote notes to his teachers. They spanked him when he was naughty.

He and I have had some difficult days...ok, years! There were far too many times that my hands were clenched in anger and far too few when they patted him on the back. There were times when they wanted to reach out to him and pull him through, but I knew he had to do it on his own so I kept them in my pockets. My hands held him when his grandmothers died, and then our friend, Dan, too.

Over the years I've watched as my hands change into my mothers hands. The shape and the size are the same. The same fingers are beginning to twist in the early stages of arthritis. I looked at my sister a few months ago and was startled to see MY hands at the ends of HER arms! Our hands are the same shape as our brothers' hands, too.

There is an old song that was sung by Bill Withers back in the seventies, called
"Grandma's Hands."
Grandma's hands
Clapped in church on Sunday morning
Grandma's hands
Played a tambourine so well
Grandma's hands
Used to issue out a warning
She'd say, "Billy don't you run so fast
Might fall on a piece of glass
"Might be snakes there in that grass"
Grandma's hands
Grandma's hands
Soothed a local unwed mother
Grandma's hands
Used to ache sometimes and swell
Grandma's hands
Used to lift her face and tell her,
"Baby, Grandma understands
That you really love that man
Put yourself in Jesus hands"
Grandma's hands
Grandma's hands
Used to hand me piece of candy
Grandma's hands
Picked me up each time I fell
Grandma's hands
Boy, they really came in handy
She'd say, "Matty don' you whip that boy
What you want to spank him for?
He didn' drop no apple core"
But I don't have Grandma anymore
If I get to Heaven I'll look for Grandma's hands

My daughter-in-law has beautiful and expressive hands, but I hope one day I'll look at one of her children and see my mother's hands again.

Last Camping Pictures

Rich is closing up the camper, and Cherryl and I have torn down her tent.








Bill, Ross, and Dan with Ross's bike and trailer.

Sure wish the whole weekend could have been as nice as it was on Sunday!

Broken Arrow Campout October, '05
Ross, also known as 5Ross, is a very nice man we know from a Goldwing board where I spend a lot of time, GoldWing Riders. We met him in person at the WOTS rally in North Carolina. He posted a note to the board inviting anyone who was interested to come camping at Broken Arrow Campground in Winamac, Indiana, this past weekend. Ross, Rich and I, and Ross's son and daughter-in-law were the only ones from the board to show up, but several of Ross's GWTA friends came.
We invited my sister, Cherryl to come along, and she followed the BYB and camper in her Jeep with camping gear we provided and our dog, Claudia. It was cold! I rode the bike as far as I could stand it, then abandoned Rich to the elements and rode in the car the rest of the way (wuss). It was Cherryl's first time camping, and she got her trial by ice. It got down to the thirties on Saturday night, but with the help of a little electric heater and a warm dog to sleep with, she had a great time, and is now talking about buying her own gear and starting to camp out more in the future!

the intrepid (I think that's a fancy word for 'really cold') campers around the campfire. From left: Bill, Rich, Mikey, Jeff, Ross and Dan.

We had four tents and three pop-up campers (see ours in previous posts). Saturday morning we went into town for breakfast, then most of the campers bundled up and went for a ride on the bikes. Cherryl rode with Rich, while I stayed behind to start supper and have a lovely conversation about books and history with Bill, who is retired from the National Parks system.

Cleaning up after Saturday night's supper: Becky, Ross, Tami...well, Ross said he was helping with the dishes, but it looks like coffee-time to me! Ross's wife, daugher, son-in-law and grandson came out to join us for supper, but did not stay the night.

All packed up and ready to go home: Ross, Dan, Bill, Jeff, Tami, and Cherryl

We came to the consensus that keeping a petting zoo at a campground is not the best idea, especially if you throw in a few free-range chickens (hi, Michelle, lol). The roosters were, ummm, 'insistent' that 4:00 a.m. is truly the most optimal time to get up. As I left our camper at daybreak on Sunday morning, I heard several loud shots in the not-so-distant distance, and thought, "Yeah! No more roosters!", but, alas, it was not to be.

Note to folks who plan to share a campground with others: if your taste in music runs to compositions featuring lots of drums, base, and, apparently, tribal chants, and played very, very loudly, it's polite to turn the music off some time before 2:30 a.m.

(that's 3:30 a.m., Michigan time!)

I'm just saying...

Sorry there aren't more pictures: we were just having too much fun to take any!

Knitting: Cherryl and I both took our socks-in-progress along, but she got a lot more knitting done than I did. I did get three-quarters of the way through my new Yarn Harlot book

(see note above regarding very loud music which made sleeping difficult).

Here's a test:
You appear to be a Knitting Guru. You love knitting
and do it all the time. While finishing a piece
is the plan, you still love the process, and
can't imagine a day going by without giving
some time to your yarn. Packing for vacation
involves leaving ample space for the stash and
supplies. It can be hard to tell where the yarn
ends and you begin.
http://marniemaclean.com


What Kind of Knitter Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

This is funny:

40 Things That Only Happen In Movies
Or, as I often say while watching a movie, "NOOOO, young soldier, please DON'T show us a picture of your sweetheart back home!"
It comes from this library newsletter:

NeatNew and Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other
Information Junkies
Sign up for the newsletter to have informative stuff delivered to your mailbox each week. There's something interesting in every issue.

There's a Contest at Quiddity. It's called, "Show Me Your Socks." Here they are, at least the ones I haven't given away.

It's Fall, otherwise known as "The season we're given so that we can be numbed by its beauty, thus lulling us into complacency about The Season That Comes Next." Here's a sign. When we left for North Carolina this was the view from the sidewalk in front of our house :

When we came home, this was what we saw :


It's hard to tell the difference without enlarging the shots, but in the first photo there's corn in the field. In the second, there's none. They picked it while we were away. Next the leaves will be changing, then falling, then there will be snow. Sigh. We are one day closer to spring.

An Ode to Opal Yarn
The Opal Chatters Yahoo! group has "Topic Tuesday" each week. The moderators pick a topic for everyone to discuss during the coming week. This week's topic was to write a poem about Opal. Here's mine.



Feet Dream of Opal

My feet tread, blessed in socks of Opal,
past the stash in dreams of hope: al-
though steel needles all are filled
with socks for Jen and Nick and Bill,
my lovesick arches long to feel
sweet stitches warm of Crocodil
or Lollipop, Handpaint, Brasil.

So, ever yearning, near they pause, it
seems, to tarry near dark closet
where, in deep, deep slumber rest
the plump, soft skeins, the very best
of Soxie's gleanings. Line my nest
with Opal: there I'll end my quest.

writ by me this 4th day of October, 2005

Disclaimer: I'm not actually knitting socks for anyone named Bill (or Jen or Nick either, sorry guys!), but it rhymes... Oh, I found 2 more skeins of Opal after taking this picture, and I know there's another one around here somewhere. SABLE.

More North Carolina pictures

This is what we saw Sunday on the Blue Ridge Parkway...;~D Pea-soup fog for miles, and miles, and miles...When we finally got out of the fog we met a nice couple on a BMW and chatted for a while with them, then rode on through the back roads of western North Carolina. We stopped for lunch in Loafer's Glory, North Carolina, and I had a wonderful barbecue sandwich the southern way -- with slaw on it. No pictures of the rest of our ride, though. The camera battery died. It was beautiful, and I'm sorry you missed it!

We spent this past weekend in Hubbard, Ohio, with our friends. Wonderful time, as always! Pictures in the next post.