I'm in love with those socks on the left. I hate the ones on the right. I have no idea what the people at Knit Picks were thinking when they came up with that odd striping pattern but it's awful. The Arne and Carlos socks on the left are supposed to be reminiscent of their trip to Africa but they are screaming Halloween to me. I see black cats and bats.
Another Hue Shift row is finished. I'm moving onto yellow next. I love this project. I can't believe I let it sit in my stash for years before I picked it up out of guilt.
The Chestnut sleeve is growing slower than I'd like. It's mainly because I have so many other things I'm really enjoying working on right now. It's hard to choose which project to pick up when I have a spare moment.
I'm happy to say I met my September goal with the Doodle Cowl. I think I'll sit out October because it's getting soooo long. The pattern calls for it to be 34" and it's already 26" so that doesn't leave me much room for holiday knitting. I want to work on it during Arne and Carlos' Christmas stocking KAL podcasts in November since I don't need another stocking. My goal is to wear it to the town Christmas parade on December 5th so I should be able to finish it up by then.
And a big thank you to Dee who sent me this beautiful yarn and adorable stitch markers. This is a new-to-me yarn brand that is incredibly soft. Right now it's on my "pet me" shelf until it tells me what it wants to be.
Slowly but surely the outlining is being done on the Craft Sampler. It's been so dark and gloomy here that it's been hard to see what I'm doing.
That's why I picked up Patchwork Automne again. It's been nice to curl up on the couch under a bright light with this little frame in my lap. By next week I'm hoping that there will be a squirrel on the branch I just finished.
The hand quilting has hit a speed bump. I've got to get a new rhythm going and I'm not feeling it quite yet. I miss working on the big blocks.
My latest Dear Jane block is finished and has joined the other blocks in row E. I'm now halfway through that row so I thought I would lay them out to give myself the motivation to keep going. As you can see this has been a strange row. Jane must have been starting to run out of ideas. She must have then got a second wind to make a couple of hundred more blocks after this one.
A big thank you to everyone who responded to Sunday's giveaway. Check your messages because I'm sending out tracking numbers since I've had a few packages go missing lately. The shelves are not quite empty yet so there's still time if you haven't put an "order" in.
Here is the epic quilting project I was talking about yesterday. It's another kit that Dad and I collected over the years. My goal this year was to work my way through them all and so far I've only managed to almost complete one. That's the Zig Zag. This one was very fall themed so I pulled it out last week to get started on it.
Here's a closer look at the pattern so you can see what it involves. It involves a lot.
There's been So. Much. Cutting. Argh...any pattern that starts with "cut 88 2 5/8 inch squares makes my hair stand on end. I've been cutting piles of 2 7/8 inch, 2 1/2 inch and 2 1/4 inch squares and rectangles all week. I finished up all of it yesterday and maybe today I'll be able to wrap my mind around how all this goes together.
The weekend was rainy and windy but we made it through the storm just fine and here's the Skellys to prove it. This yard, right off the boardwalk and in the flood zone, is full of them doing all sorts of things. They keep it up all year and change them often.
When we went down to the marina to check for flooding we found this car that had three Skellys attached to the roof rack. I'm not so sure this is safe or even street legal. I'd love to see them explaining this to the police.
This is going to be a very laid back soap giveaway.
I've got a lot of soap to move and now that the weather seems to have turned for the better it's time to move it.
Instead of climbing up on my shelves and taking the soap down to do another post about them here's some throwback photos of Soap Week 2026.
If you go to my sidebar and click on June you can see them all being made. Start with the Soap Week post and end by reading the TNT: A Big Finish post and you can see them all in progress.
As usual, send me your three favorites and I'll do my best to send you two of them. I can never predict what is going to be the most popular. I always run out of something rather quickly it seems.
The room where I usually do the "dressing up" of the bars doesn't have a single inch of space to spare right now so I'll most likely be shipping them in a plain white wrapper au naturel. I've got an epic new quilting project going on that is taking up a ridiculous amount of room that I'll post about tomorrow.
Communication is the same as it always was. Send me your three choices and your mailing details to either my soap email on the sidebar or message me on Ravelry and over the next few weeks I'll start mailing them out. No strings attached. I'm just grateful to be able to empty my drying shelves so I can make more.
Everything has been cancelled here this weekend because of the Nor'easter out in the Atlantic. It's brought us glorious weather all week but today might be difficult for those on the water as the storm moves closer. We are not in sand bag mode but the city was in a tizzy getting ready for the high tide that could be several feet higher than normal today.
All week long the strong tides have brought the water up to almost under the swing set. The Mister and I both said that this would have been very tempting when we were kids. You can swing right out over the water and jump.
The Farmer's Market might be canceled but we did get to see the dedication of a new statue in the koi/sculpture garden yesterday. It's a beautiful, glittery mosaic that's going to catch the sun as it comes over the bay in the morning. I had to laugh at this dude sitting on top of it. We left before the installation was complete so I'll be curious to see what all the fuss about the top of it was.
I was kicking myself the day after this year's MDSW because it seemed like I bought the same braid of fiber-twice. They are both very similar in color but one is Cormo and the other is Polwarth. It may have been a good thing after all because I have a plan.
I want to spin enough for a simple little cardigan.
This one to be exact. It's Dust Bunny by Hedgehog Fibres. I saw someone wearing one on a podcast and now I want one too. I'm thinking that I can spin each braid and then ply those singles together and get enough yardage. I read that Cormo and Polwarth are so similar that this can be done without an issue. We'll see.
The handspun Pimpelliese is turning out as pretty as I thought it would. I have several of these but this one will be the softest and fluffiest of the bunch.
And the best news of all this week is that I found the little piece that holds my Spindolyn together. It was in a basket the holds the floss for the Patchwork Automne project that I haven't picked up all summer. I got the basket out to clean it out so I could start stitching on it again and tangled among the threads was this little thing. I have no idea how it got in there but I'm very glad it did. I thought it must have gone out in the trash.
What a difference a day makes. One day it's in the high 80's and the next we barely make 60. I love it but the seabirds are not enjoying the nor'easter that is churning things up out in the Atlantic.
They've all taken refuge on the shore. Every where you go it looks like a scene from the birds.
We haven't been out on the big pier since spring and we were the only ones out there yesterday enjoying the fierce north wind and the wild waves. This is my kind of weather.
I could have hung out there all day but The Mister needed a cup of hot coffee and muffin which made Pup very happy. Blueberry is her favorite.
On the last day of summer I managed to finish both pairs of summer socks. The Grand's "snow socks" in a watermelon colorway were fun to knit. The acrylic wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be. The Stroll socks in the Hummingbird colorway were fun to work on. No worrying about making anything match. They look better than I thought they would so I might have to give Stroll Effects another look. I think I have some in the stash.
I get twitchy without socks on the needles so I spent a morning winding up some fall colors. The first colorway is Masi from the new Arne and Carlos Socks and More collection. It looks like Halloween to me so it will be my October knit. I also wound up a Regia stripe that's been sitting in its matching project bag since last spring. It will be my November knit.
For the month of December I bought some Christmas yarn from an Etsy shop. Last year I enjoyed knitting along with everyone on the Cozy Knitter's Advent Sock but I couldn't justify the $42 plus shipping so I'll sit it out this year.
Edited to say: Dammit. I made the mistake of looking back at my blog posts from last year to see how much I paid for the Cozy Knitter's Advent skein and darned if I didn't get a lump in my throat looking at all those beautiful holiday posts. It was a very good Christmas. I then went ahead and pre-ordered the yarn. I got a good jolt of "you can't take it with you" and at almost 73 who knows how many Christmases I have left? I've already outlived my mother and grandmother. It's only money and money buys memories. Somebody get me a tissue.
Ouf. The terrible summer is over. The temperatures have dropped but the humidity seems to have headed back up so it's not very comfortable to be out just yet. To avoid the worst of it, we are still walking Pup in the morning so my afternoons have been for stitching during these long, miserable months. I wish I had more to show on the Crafty Sampler this week but I'm outlining and I'm ripping out as much as I stitch. I did get one corner done. I'll tackle the other bottom corner this week.
I finished the bottom third of the needlepoint project. I'm never sure what to call it. I think it has a name. I'll have to check. Edited to say: I did check. It's called Patterns on Blue which is unexpected since all the backgrounds are not blue.
Dear Jane is still giving me fits but I did get all the stuck papers out. I'm on the LAST big block of the Patchwork of the Crosses quilt but I still have the border and a lot of the smaller crosses to stitch.
We celebrated the last day of summer by checking something off The Mister's bucket list. He's been dying to try the food at a new sandwich/ice cream shop near the boardwalk that opened up a few months ago. Pup and I shared some French fries while he had a double hamburger that he declared very good. Yes, those are napkins stuffed in his shorts so the bay breeze doesn't take them away. I've never seen anyone so fixated on always having a pile of napkins around. I pick them up from all over the house.
I wanted to show my plant loving blog friends what the flower beds on the boardwalk look like right now. For the past two years they've filled them with sweet potato vines and it's pretty spectacular. I miss the color of the flowers but you have to admit it's wild to see a good half a mile of this stuff creeping out in every direction.
It's a good thing I've been ironing out each block on the Zig Zag quilt before I take it over to the machine because yesterday I found a wonky seam. There was a Zig that didn't Zag and it had a big pucker. Thankfully, it was near an end so I could pull the sandwich apart, rip it out and hand sew it back together.
To be on the safe side, I gave it a discreet stitch in the ditch for good measure. Up until then I could say that this particular machine quilting adventure had been uneventful. I'm only doing one block a day to keep from getting tired and making ugly mistakes. I'm using a very fine machine quilting thread so mistakes are not quite so noticeable because try as I might, my default meander always turns out looking like obscene graffiti.
The striping on Spiral Chicken has been happening all week.
And I think I like it. It's more fun to do than the solid gray so that's a bonus. It might have cost me a bit more money but I think it was worth it.
It was a busy week since we had decent weather for most of it and we were out and about again yesterday. The Farmer's Market in the morning and the annual Taste of the Beaches festival down at the ball field by the marina. The Mister ate his weight in free sliders, shrimp and egg rolls while I.....
...had my usual free snow cone sitting in the shade listening to the band. Standing in line in the sun is not my thing but it doesn't bother The Mister at all.
Now that the tourists are gone we can get down to the water without having to pay or make our way through the crowds.
It's a bit of a walk to get to the beach that allows dogs but we just plop Pup in her stroller and off we go down the shady path.
Since her hip surgery, she's not very mobile but she does like a good wander on the sand.
It's good to have the place to ourselves again.
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Dear Jane is still giving me fits but I did get all the stuck papers out. I'm on the LAST big block of the Patchwork of the Crosses quilt but I still have the border and a lot of the smaller crosses to stitch. 
We celebrated the last day of summer by checking something off The Mister's bucket list. He's been dying to try the food at a new sandwich/ice cream shop near the boardwalk that opened up a few months ago. Pup and I shared some French fries while he had a double hamburger that he declared very good. Yes, those are napkins stuffed in his shorts so the bay breeze doesn't take them away. I've never seen anyone so fixated on always having a pile of napkins around. I pick them up from all over the house. 
I wanted to show my plant loving blog friends what the flower beds on the boardwalk look like right now. For the past two years they've filled them with sweet potato vines and it's pretty spectacular. I miss the color of the flowers but you have to admit it's wild to see a good half a mile of this stuff creeping out in every direction. 
