What I Learned After Almost 13 Days Without Power

Get a generator and learn how to hook up your furnace to it.
Boiling pots of water on your stove does heat up your house.
Fill up you car and your gas cans. Have lots of gas cans.
Get a smart phone.
Get a car charger for your smart phone.
Sign up for twitter & Facebook. Follow your town, power company, local radio station. Social media is faster and more accurate than anything I heard on the radio.
Have a battery radio and batteries.
Flashlights are lifesavers in the bathroom.
Help your neighbors.
Call your power company every day. Sometimes they think you have power when you don't. (I'm talking about you PSE&G)
Texting works even when the phone doesn't.
Fill your freezer with anything you can fill up with water: Tupperware
and containers from the recycling bin work great and keep the door shut.
You can vacuum, watch DVD's and charge your nook with a generator.
Have lots of candles and not all scented. Vanilla, pumpkin,cranberry, apple, cookie dough all at the same time is bad.
And you can knit in the dark.

Days 4- 8

We're in Delaware for a bit of a vacation but I'm still spinning. It's a beautiful merino from a vendor I found at the NJ Sheep & Fiber Festival last year. She didn't have her cards with her so I took a picture of her sign. Sadly, this sheep is no longer with us but if all her fiber is like this I'll definitely be looking for her again.

Tour de Fleece Day 1 & 2

Tour de Fleece Day 1

Last year I did a whole fleece. Never again! My goal this time is much more modest: 4 ounces of this beautiful super wash BFL from Zarzuela's Fibers. So my wheel is cleaned and oiled and I'm ready to go.

Have I Shown You My Grandchildren Lately?

It's Hot and I'm knitting dish cloths

Too hot to touch wool so cotton it is. But the Tour de Fleece starts Saturday so it will be wool then. I can't wait.

We have twins!

After 38 weeks and one day BDE did the best job ever. Two perfect little ones.

Jude Ryan, 5 pounds 13 ounces


Leighton Elizabeth, 6 pounds 5 ounces.



They go home tomorrow and then the fun begins!

When It's This Cold Outside. It's Time to

bake bread!

Rye, this time, yum.

My Own Damn Pattern

As I put on this sweater this morning, I realized that I've never talked about it and it's one of my favorites. It started out on my first trip to Rhinebeck in 2008. I fell in love with the yarn from Briar Rose Fibers. And although it was pretty pricey I bought it anyway. And it couldn't be just any sweater, it had to be a special sweater. So I found a pattern I loved and knit away. But it was awful. Wrong pattern for my special yarn. So I frogged it and knit another pattern. But it was huge, really huge. So I frogged it.



And I decided to knit my own damn pattern. I got out my The Knitter's Book Handy Book of Sweater Patterns and figured it out. I wanted a simple cardigan with some ribbing like on a sweater I owned, not too long, with a little shaping.



And I needed a button band that would hold up the buttons I bought.





And when I was done, I had a sweater I loved and I wear it a lot.


I wore it to Stitches East the next year when I took a class with Lily Chin. She pointed to people one at a time and had them talk about the sweaters they were wearing but she skipped me. The look on my face must have given me away though because she came back to me and said, "You didn't make that sweater." Best compliment ever.

2011

It was the best of times it was the worst of times, no wait, someone wrote that already. But it's true. We lost Duffy. Of all the dogs, he was such a special one and we were so sad.



Especially Dunkin, dogs do mourn. So we got Dougal. And he has brought us a lot of laughter.

But best of all, Piper came into our lives in November.


And BDE is having twins next month!


So there has been a lot of knitting going on here in our house.