Tonight I finally finished my Valentine’s Day treats for my co-workers. Phew! I only go in the office two days each week (I work from home a lot!) and the last time I was in was last Tuesday. There was no way I was going to be done by then.
Earlier in the week my daughter was touched by a friend at school who has recently suffered a senseless family tragedy. So, tonight as I was knitting on the last heart of the bunch, she asked me to teach her how to knit them. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Diana can do basic garter and stockinette stitch, and can weave in her ends like a champ. But these hearts, as small as they are, contain slipped stitches, double decreases, and short row shaping. Typically she gets very frustrated when trying new things, but I didn’t want to discourage her from trying. So I bit my lip about saying that really I just wanted to get mine done and go to bed, and we pressed on.
“They’re small, Mom. I can do it, she said.”
And she did. The blue one in the front of the picture is all hers. Her heart came off the needles a little wonky and she wasn’t happy with the shape. But, I suggested that she take out the darning needle, and as she was weaving in, tug here, and pull there, to get the heart into shape. She did just that, and her heart actually came out shaped better than any of mine. (I opted not to weave in any ends, and use them instead as ties around the baggies. Am I lazy, or what?)
I am so proud of her! Perhaps somewhere there’s a real knitter in her yet.
To refresh your memory, the heart pattern is on page 155 of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Workshop
Playing with the Blog Again!
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll find that things look REALLY different around here! I’m like my mother, I guess, who re-arranges the living room furniture or the kitchen drawers when she gets restless. (You can’t ever go there in the dark and sit down if you haven’t been there in a while; the chair that you thought was where it’s always been might be somewhere else altogether!)
But for me, it was about more than just being restless. I loved my previous theme. A LOT. But different people come to this blog for different reasons, and I wanted to have a way to highlight knitting content versus family/personal content. This way, hopefully it will be easier to manage just one blog, instead of trying to juggle three. I was constantly updating this one anyway, and throwing in family content, and my others have been sadly neglected. I’m hoping this solution will be the best of all worlds for me, and I would love to hear your feedback!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
, in pink. You know what? I didn’t want to like this camera. I really didn’t. But I can’t help myself. I LOVE it. I really do.
, and I got it because it has several advantages over the Flip. One, it stores video to a memory card, which means you can swap cards on the fly without worrying about filling up the memory. Better for a full day of shooting, right? Also, it shoots video in full resolution, which could be better for showing on TV than the Flip. It was small, but a bit awkward, and the video quality wasn’t that great. In addition, and perhaps most important, I had a hard time holding and operating it.