It's Ours!

The house, that is. And to keep this blog from getting cluttered up with remodeling news instead of, uh, modeling knitwear, I've started a separate blog, Goodin's Folly. Oh, and I swear, I'm going to post a picture of my completed Cedar Leaf Shawlette. Promise!

Ugh! Fleas! And Not on the Dogs!

This is the house Rob and I are buying. It's in Silverlake and while it needs a little TLC, (okay, a lot of TLC), we're really excited it's going to be ours.

This pic was taken during the inspection. That's my father-in-law on the left of the porch, me on the right and our real estate agent Jody sitting in the kiddy chair.


Now these pics were taken after the inspection. GROSS!!!!

Appears the crawl space is loaded with fleas and the little f*&#ers just loved me! Oh well, we have to tent for termites and the termite guy has assured us that will kill anything.

Cedar Leaf Shawlette

Here's the first few rows of my Cedar Leaf Shawlette by Never Not Knitting.

I used the cormo wool from my Jupiter Moon share. Super soft!

The shawl is actually complete and being enjoyed. I'll get Rob to take a picture of me in it soon.

Martha's Vineyard...Uh, I mean Jupiter Moon Fiber Farm

My yarn from Jupiter Moon arrived back in November. It needed to be gently washed before being knitted, which bought me some time to decide what to make.

Here it is hanging in my bathroom after soaking in the tub. Oohh. Yummy.

I have to confess, I still haven't knit with this part of my share yet. The Cormo, on the other hand, has already been knitted and worn. I'll get some photos of that up in the next couple of days.

Like I said before, this CSA gives me all the benefits of being a shepherdess and none of the dirt. Woo-hoo!

Hippy Ring May Not Be...

...such a good idea after all. It felted tighter and tighter each time Rob washed his hands and then he got a rash from it.

I've scarred a wedding ring onto his finger!

Now the ring has shrunk so much it barely fits his pinkie. Guess we'll be making a trip to the jewelry store soon to get his "real" ring fixed.

Hippy Ring

I haven't posted in forever, but I have done a little knitting in the interim.

The guard broke on Rob's wedding ring, so I knit him a temporary one until we can get to a jewelry store. It felted when he washed his hands.

He calls it his "hippy ring" and he likes it better than his regular gold ring. Hm. Maybe I'll knit myself one that matches.

Food Found on My Block

Canned potatoes freak me out. Who's too lazy to cook regular old potatoes? But when a can of potatoes magically appears on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, than I'm really spooked.

I find random food on my street all the time and I never know what I should do about it. Last week, it was a bag of hamburger buns and an unopened pack of tortillas. Two weeks ago, there was a pizza dough and a bag of grated mozzarella cheese.

And let's not forget the entire frozen turkey I found last November. Still frozen. Poor little turkey. I dragged it to the corner and gave it to the guy who sells fruit because I didn't want it to go to waste. How do you drop an entire frozen turkey and not notice???

Stop, thief!

I planted my garden back in April. I faithfully watered it, fertilized it with coffee grinds; pulled the weeds.

And I've gotten to eat almost NONE of it because someone keeps stealing all of the tomatoes and the jalapenos.

I'm happy to share, but REALLY? Do you have to take every ripe vegetable? Just went down to pick my dinner and I won't be eating ANY of the meals I planned this week because TEN ripe tomatoes disappeared between yesterday and today. TEN?

That fresh mozzarella I bought? Won't be making a caprese salad.

The bacon? No BLT's for me.

The pasta? Who needs fresh tomato, garlic and basil sauce.

Stop stealing my dinner!!!

The Things I Do For Money

This is part of an actual email I sent for work:

"If you don't carry the Pipe Dreams 'Fatty Patty' could you please recommend another midget blow up doll that's around the same price?"

I can honestly say I never thought those were words I'd string together.

My New Bike

Rob and I bought a bike for me on Memorial Day. I'll confess I picked it because it's totally girly, which isn't like me, but it's also super comfortable.

I've set a goal of riding 30 miles a week. The idea is to run all my local errands on the bike. In theory, if I ride that much, in a year I'll recoup what we spent on the bike (and accessories) in savings in gas, wear & tear on the car and parking meters.



Here's how I did the first week:

Tuesday: The Bank: 4.5 miles

Wednesday:
UPS, Fred 62, Grocery store: 3.1
The Bike Shop: 1.6 miles

Thursday:
The Bike Shop: 1.6 miles

Friday:
Two Boots Pizza: 8.3 miles

Sunday:
Caffe Etc. and the Farmer's Market: 4.6 miles
Los Feliz 3 Movie Theater: 2 miles

25.7 so far..and then jury duty started and I haven't pedaled since...

My First Socks

I started these socks for me late last summer, so I'd have practice before I attempted Rob's Christmas (okay, birthday) socks. I got one done and then stopped. Rob didn't love the yarn -- I'd originally bought it for a sweater, but he'd strongly discouraged that. I wasn't in love with the pattern and I thought the finished sock was too long in the toe and too tight in the calf. Rob and I joke that I have 50 pound ankles, but it's kind of true. I was thinking about frogging it, but then I tried it on again and decided it wasn't bad. Maybe I'll get around to knitting the other one...

First Garden Harvest

Yum!

How Do I Spin This?

This is how much Idget sheds in just a couple of days. He's not a very large dog, about 15 pounds, but I'm convinced that it would only take a month to get enough yarn for a scarf if I only knew how to spin it!

It Doesn't Get Any More Local Than This

In a month, my beans have grown this much...










I'm so happy that ugly wall is getting covered. Best of all, I've even got a couple of beans coming in. Woo-hoo! I'm betting they'll be ready to eat in about two weeks ago -- right before the "Keep It Local" challenge ends.

Local Challenge

A friend in Chicago invited me to participate in the "Keep It Local" challenge run by Erin Loughlin. Erin started this challenge because she wanted to challenger herself to eat locally and thought it would be fun to have some company while doing so.

Part of Erin's inspiration came from this fact: "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That’s not gallons, but barrels." Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. (2007) p. 5

We only have to do one local meal a week, but I'm an overachiever and have been doing more than that. Here's a few photos of my local meals so far:













(sausage and bell peppers on sourdough bread, black bean and sausage stew, bison and root vegetable stew.)

Living in California, and being a devoted shopper at my farmer's market, I thought that it'd be easy to find local EVERYTHING. Since starting the challenge, I'm beginning to rethink that. I've realized I don't know where half the farmers at my market come from (although by law, it has to be within the state of California.) But that means the food could be traveling up to 725 miles and, while that's still less than half of the 1500 miles the average American meal travels, it's still not exactly local. With this in mind, I'm going to start paying more attention to where the farmers I buy from are located.

I've decided for the last two weeks of the challenge, my local meal has to be vegan as well since the United Nations has found that almost a fifth of all global warming emissions comes from livestock production.

Just in Time for Summer -- Part 2

I made these gloves as a Christmas present for one of Rob's friends. They were a tad too long in the fingers, so I took them back to shorten them and just now got around to finishing. Yikes! Good thing he lives in Southern California where gloves are just for fashion -- not necessity.

Per Janice's Request....

A photo of me in my new hat!

This pic is after felting. The ones in the previous post were not. Felting smoothed out a lot of the rough edges and took out the curl in the brim that had been caused by my uber tight tension.

Just in Time for Summer

When I showed Rob the pattern for MK Carroll's Matilda hat, he said, "That looks like a hat you would lose."

He had a point. When we drove across country to see my family for Christmas two years ago, I left a very similar brown cloche in a pool hall in Memphis. In a strange twist, I found the exact same hat two days later at the French Market in New Orleans, only to leave it in a restaurant when we got back to Los Angeles.

Undeterred, I ordered enough black yarn last summer to make one for my business partner and one for me. I finished hers in a week, but as of March, I hadn't even cast on the one for me. I just couldn't bring myself to knit it in black. Brown is my color of choice for a cloche and I'd knit mine in brown no matter how much it tempted fate.

I had some chunky alpaca laying around that I'd been meaning to find a use for. I knit it on larger needles and used black to attach the brim to the top, for a slightly different aesthetic. I felted it slightly and will post pix of the final product once I get Rob to snap one of me wearing it.

I have a pretty tight tension, so the edge of the brim rolled a bit, but it worked itself out in the felting process! One bummer is that I ran out of brown a few rows before the brim was done. I used black for those last rows instead and wear the black patch over one ear. Surprisingly, it doesn't look like a mistake!

The View From Here

Rob and I have taken to hiking in Griffith Park on the weekends with the dogs. Well, we've gone twice but, as far as I'm concerned, that's a pattern.

As much as I like to complain about our neighborhood, this is a stone's throw from where we live.

Photo credit goes to Rob. I tried, but only succeeded at scaring a lizard sunning himself on a log.

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