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I had these wonderful intentions to post at the beginning of the Tour de Fleece. It began on July 5 and ends on Sunday July 27. Better late than never, I guess. I've decided to spin at least 15 minutes a day on my McKenna Lee spindle from Greensleeves. So far, those 15 minutes keep expanding. I've improved so much since July 5. Instead of inchworming along, I'm actually dropping the spindle and keeping the twist out of my fiber. It's amazing how much easier the spinning is when you do that.
Next up on the sewing queue is the It's a Wrap skirt by Indygo Junction. I just have to turn up the hem and then add the waistband. I love how the skirt drapes. Now I just need to find (or maybe make?) the perfect little top to go with it.
In addition to all this craftiness, Amber and I have recorded our first podcast. The podcast is called Craft Mentality. We cover our crafty lives and pretty much anything else that might have inspired us. The blog and first 'cast are here, so come check us out. I had tons of fun chatting with Amber, and I can't wait for next week.
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| I grew up in a small town in NC. My grandparents would take me "to the country" just about every weekend. We'd visit family all over the county. I remember wandering in the woods with Granddaddy looking for grapevines to make wreaths. Granddaddy also had the greenest thumb around. We didn't have a lot of room for gardening, but we always had cherry tomatoes or tommy toes and the occasional cucumber. He spent most of his time growing flowers and plants to sell at the local flea marcket. I learned to cook with my grandmother and even sewed a bit as a kid.
My return to my inner farmgirl began with learning to knit in grad school. Crochet followed a few years later. This spring, I've taken sewing classes. All with an aim to make my time meaningful for myself and my family. I like to stay busy and have something I love at the end of the day.
Having two girls of my own, I want to make sure I'm teaching them the right things. Fruits and veggies aren't magically grown in those bins at the grocery store. Playing in the mud and digging for earthworms is fun. Making something with your own two hands is one of the most satisfying things you can do.
Miss Violet of Lime and Violet has created the Plurkette Hencircle, a chapter of the Farmgirl Sisterhood. The goal is to create a supportive community that shares ideas, projects, and even works for merit badges. The inner Farmgirl is delighted to know I have more fun ways to learn new things and keep creating.
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| But apparently not enough of the "classics."
Swiped from Miss Violet:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Take meme if you want.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (never made it through Return of the King)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I really need to get started on Jane Austen. In my spare time. When I'm not knitting, sewing, crocheting, gaming or learning two foreign languages. Maybe I need to stop sleeping?
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| So what's a mama to do when school is out and camp hasn't started yet? When you figure it out, let me know. So far, we've got babysitting at the gym so mom can swim. Then lots of errands. We'll probably hit the pool later in the week with some school buddies.
Last week, Husband was off work. What a blissful week. We even found time to do some furniture shopping. Sadly, the new dresser arrives Friday while the old dresser was hauled away last Sunday. Let's just say the guest room looks like a clothing rack exploded.
I met up with Sassenach, Laura, and Linda for Worldwide Knit in Public Day. I have to say it was the fastest two and a half hours ever. Lots of socks were knit on. I worked on the neverending Pi Shawl. I suppose it is neverending because I keep working on other things. Like sewing or Lego Star Wars. Or interviewing Jordana Paige for the Lime and Violet Daily Chum. Squee! She was so sweet.
To add to WWKIP excitement, some dude in a BMW convertible hit my minivan. In the parking lot. And my van was parked. He was trying to miss the curb. Yeah. Luckily, my van had a tiny scratch on the wheel well and the rim is scraped. His poor BMW fender looks like crap. Let's hear it for mommy mobiles!
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| From Sassenach:
The rules: Posted at the beginning. At the end of the post, the
player then tags 6 people and posts their names, then goes to their
blog and leaves a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and
asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when
you’ve posted your answer. Play nice, children. 1. What was
I doing 10 years ago: Just finishing my first year of grad school, and rapidly realizing it was not for me. Nightmares about the lab mice, nuff said.
2. What are 5 things on my to-do list today: Go to gym, hang out with the charity knitting group at the J, read my new Anita Blake novel, and really that will take the rest of the day. :)
3. Snacks I enjoy: chocolate (dark, especially), macchiatos, ice cream (chunky monkey), and Chocolate Cream Cheese Pound Cake (grandmother's recipe)
4. Places I’ve lived: Hickory, NC; Maiden, NC; Durham, NC; Norfolk, VA; Chesapeake, VA; and Virginia Beach, VA 5.
Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Travel to Ireland and go back to Scotland, Travel to Australia and New Zealand, take care of my family, take them all to Disneyworld (yes, just like the old commercials)
6. Tag 6 people: I'm not sure who reads this anyway, so take this meme if you want it! | | |
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What's on the needles
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var projects = new Array();
// set up projects like this: NAME, percent done, type
// type can be: sweater, tank, hat, bag, sock, scarf
projects[projects.length] = "Bucket hat, 50, hat";
projects[projects.length] = "Booda Bag, 75, bag";
// set up the colors for works in progress (less than 100 percent) and finished objects (100 percent)
// these can be hex codes, or color names (Green, Red, Blue, etc).
var wipColor = "#33cc33";
var foColor = "#9966ff";
// edit this to get the fonts to display differently if you want
var fontStyle="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:12px; color:#888888;";
// set up height of standard project: adjust this if projects are overlapping
var projHeight = 90;
// initial vertical position from top of container. Adjust if you want.
var position="0";
// WARNING: Don't edit after this line unless you're a javascript queen!
var numProjects = projects.length;
var genericStyle = "position:static; left:0px; width:121px; height:50px;";
document.write(" ");
for(var i=1; i<=numProjects; i++) {
var variables = projects[i-1].split(", ");
var name= variables[0];
var percent = variables[1];
var type = variables[2];
position= );
var styleFilter=genericStyle + "top:" + position +"px; z-index:2;";
var styleImg=genericStyle + "top:" + position +"px; z-index:3;";
document.write("![](/i16.photobucket.com/albums/b18/wolflight/Knitting/sm_") ");
document.write(" "+name+": " + percent + "%");
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