erm... yeah...

I never know how to start a blog post after an inexcusably long absence. It's sort of awkward, you know? Like when you see someone you know but you don't go say hi but you know that they've seen you too and you know they know you've seen them, and then later on they come over to where you are, and it's all just a little uncomfortable,  but you kind of pretend it's not... you know.

Well, anyhow.

There it is... here I am.

Life goes on.

In a nutshell:

1. Christmas happened. (The Christmas fairy didn't show up... I had to do all the work myself. Bummer.) It was good.

2. The eldest daughter moved back home. Temporarily, as she is quick to tell anyone who asks. It's a long complicated story that involves school, roommates, finances, and anything else you feel like throwing into the mix. It caused great upheaval here as I suddenly had to make a five bedroom house out of a four bedroom one. It all worked out in the end, and resulted in great mounds of stuff being taken to the thrift store (a task that I was intending to accomplish over the next few months anyway... just not all in the first week of January!)

3. I found my knitting mojo. Much to the detriment of my to-do list.

4. I started eating Paleo. I'm doing it in an attempt to lose weight. Ironically, I have now gained another five pounds. Sigh. I'm hoping that's a temporary thing.

5. There is a rather large pile of costume sewing to be done. I'm playing Mrs. Darling in a production of Peter Pan... we open 4 weeks from tomorrow. Not one of my costumes is completed yet. That's why I spent the weekend devouring the Hunger Games trilogy...

6. I'm back at pottery classes... joy and bliss!!

7. We actually had winter for over a week. The whole town shut down. But now we're back to rain rain rain, and all the snow is gone.

snow right up to my boot-tops!!

That's about it for now...

the mid-December gasp

So, erm... yeah.
It's the middle of December. Life is flying by as fast as usual.

Not much else to say, really. I'm living in denial, but making Christmas presents anyhow, just in case the Christmas fairies forget to show up at my house in the next couple of days. The next thing I need to do is to start planning Christmas dinner, since apparently it'll be happening at my house this year...

a glorious sunrise in my rear-view mirror.

frosting.

the perpetually-blooming rosebush.

Ellie's ballet recital.

November: redux

It's time for my monthly gasp... how is it the end of November already?????
There... got that over with.

Here's what I've been up to:

knitting... That's the big one. I signed up for NaKniSweMo... the goal being to knit 50,000 stitches in the month of November. I succeeded. Big time. Like a boss. (yikes! I've been hanging out with my teenagers too much, I think!)

Both of these cardigans are built upon the same basic model... top-down, contiguous (meaning that they look like set-in sleeves, but they're knit all in one piece), and seamless. Ellie is wearing the Tomboy Cardigan, slightly modified, and mine is the Romy Cardigan (with added cabling).

This is a huge accomplishment for me... til now, it's taken me upwards of 6 months to complete an adult-sized sweater.

being sick... not an illness in sight all year (it feels like), and suddenly this month I come down with a two-day fever-thing followed by a UTI. Not fun. On the bright side, though, it did allow me to indulge in the following:

reading... all of the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cromwell. All. of. them. That would be 24 books (including 3 short stories). Why yes, I am a fast reader. Why do you ask?

schooling... it is such a joy to teach a child who has realized that things are easier and more fun if you choose to be cheerful about them. One day, Ellie just decided to enjoy copywork... something that she'd complained bitterly about every single day. Now she loves it. And it was her own decision. She's amazing!!

pinteresting... filling up my pin boards like nobody's business. And actually doing stuff, too. I love that place.

enjoying... a lot of lovely weather. Yes, we've had a lot of rain, and even a storm and some snow, but we've also been blessed with a lot of sunshine. I'm grateful for it.

Ellie and I went for a walk, only to find the path ending abruptly in a small lake... proof that we have indeed had lots of rain to go along with the sunshine.

cooking... I seem to have gotten a bit of my kitchen mojo back again. For a while there I just couldn't think of anything to make. But lately, there's been lots of good things appearing on the table... some of it in my own pottery dishes, too!!

apple-almond pudding in my pie plate.

planning for next month... Christmas, naturally. A thing that, frankly, fills me with a bit of dread. I dislike shopping... I prefer being solitary to attending large gatherings of people... Christmas as it is commonly practiced is not my cup of tea. But I do like to make my family happy, so I do what needs to be done, and try to make it a joyful occasion.  (I feel like such a curmudgeon, even putting this out in type... oh well.)

So, that's November. On to the next month...

(linking up to Megan at SortaCrunchy)

hanging out with the internet

A while back, I discovered Emerging Mummy... a blog about church, and life, and being a mom, and love, and politics, and hockey, and christianity, and all kinds of thought-provoking things.

I was happy to discover, in my reading, that Sarah lives in the same town as I do - it's fun to find out that you're reading a local-to-you blogger. And imagine my surprise, when I saw her walk through the door of the dance studio where Ellie takes classes!

A few weeks ago, Sarah invited the Internet to her house for coffee and prayer. And today, we showed up.

first snow

We had our first snowfall last night. Not much, of course... and it won't last long.

Never does around here.

In the meantime, though, it's gorgeous on my roses-that-won't-stop-blooming.







(Textures on the photos are by Kim Klassen... I'm linking up to her Texture Tuesday.)

more pots

Last night I got to go pick up most of the pots that I made in my last class... oh my! I'm so pleased with them!!

my favourite piece so far. 

7" mini pie plate.

9" plate/shallow bowl

wee little carved bowl.

another carved bowl... this one's a bit bigger.

even bigger bowl... this one has fluted edges like the pie plate.

another small bowl.

I'm ridiculously pleased with myself for attempting this one!

NaKniSweMo

I've gone and done something ambitious.

Rather than sign up to write a novel in the month of November, I've signed up to knit a sweater. Or, more precisely, fifty thousand stitches.

So far so good. I cast on a Tomboy Cardigan for Ellie... I'm making it with long sleeves, and cabling the front panels. Of course, I didn't buy enough yarn for that... so I knit up all that I had and ordered some more.

And then I took a good look at what I'd done so far. I hated the cables. They just looked sloppy. so I laddered them back to the beginning, and re-knit them. Fun times!!

the original cabling

yarn spaghetti!!

I hate trying to knit with little short bits of yarn!

that's better!!

how it looks so far.

So that's approximately 16,000 stitches done by Friday.

On Saturday, I cast on for the other half of my big project - a cardigan for me... only, in typical wendy fashion, knit from the top down, seamlessly. Not from the bottom up, in pieces as the pattern is written.

So I knit and knit and knit and knit... and didn't like it. The yarn is just wrong for the pattern. It looks good, but it's just too thin, and I want a cozy cardigan. So I'll be trying that pattern with something different some other time, and using this stuff for a different cardi.

shawl collar and cables

cables... I love them so much.

needles out...

... and... all gone