Portage Lakes or "Happy Birthday Nate"

AJ Knits

Episode 43

1. Productions scheduling

   1. Events

   2. Production

   3. What's in my Tea Pot

   4. Materials sourcing

   5. After 5

2. Events

   1.Wool fest June 23 & 24, 2012 at Lake farm Park

3. Production

   1. The Juno Regina Miriam Felton

      1. back from the dead! I sat down with my charts and a stitch marker this week and tinked back the row 3 times before I found the spot where the titch was missing. I picked it up and the lace hole ma be a touch bigger than the rest but I’m back on course and in the beginning of chart # 3. This is slow going because it's not to the point of being social knitting yet. The long easy part in the middle is coming!

   2. The Hitchhiker by Martina Behm

      1. I'm doing a KAL with a friend I met at Camp Kip. We decided back on Towel Day (May 25th for all you non Douglas Adams fans out there.) I chose to knit mine from the Briar Rose yarn I bought from the Great Lakes Wool festival. I love this yarn it has a bit of nylon in it and all the garter stitches shine a bit like beads. The color way I’m using is called Sea Pearl but I had about 6 in m hands and had to pare way down. I could have spent my entire budget in that stall.

   3. The Basic Sock by Patons

      1. One sock down and one to go. I finished the first of Nichol's bday socks. Hopefully I'll get this sock to her ASAP so she can try it on. I'm a bit worried about the length. She does wear a bigger size than I do but I'm nervous I've over shot.

4. What's In My Tea Pot

5. Materials Sourcing

   1. A few weeks ago I caught a LOOP update on ETSY. These updates are much like trying to snag Woolmeisse or getting a Phat Fiber box. I was amazing luck because I got stuck at work on managed to get a bat while sitting in the car at Day Care. B was pretty annoyed that mom was looking at the phone and not driving but I got that bat. The bat I got is called Hint of Mint it has lavender purple, hunter green, acid green celery green, hot pink, and mint all in a 5.6 oz of Merino, corriedale, nylon, and angelina. SPARKLE! There's sparkle all through this bat. I'm down to the last of the color progressions I have the last of the hot pin and the mint green and just the plying left to go. I'm pretty sure this will be a n-ply to keep the color progression intact.

   2. I started washing my fleece this week as well. I sectioned two pieces out that would fit into one of the many dish tubs I have and pre soaked them for about 20 minutes in luke warm water. BLECH that was some dirty water. I then put the sections in old pillow cases and tried to do the washing machine method. I don't think my hot water heater gets hot enough to get the lanolin out because after 2 rinses in hot water when the fleece dried it was still very sticky. So I took a smaller piece the next day and soaked it in hotter water from my teapot and some dawn dish liquid. This seems to have gotten it but the fleece is still drying .

      In my impatience I did grab some of the grease fleece and test spun some locks. I had never spun in the grease before. I can see why some people think it's gross. But once my hands were already greasy what the heck. I flicked the locks open with a handy dog brush and the spun well. On my high speed bobbin I got a fingering weight single. I need much thicker for my sweater so I'm going to make some adjustments to my counter weight brake and see what I come up with.

6. After 5

   1. The craziness continues.

      1. The work situation is still the same for Joe and I. He got of work this weekend I got to spend Saturday desperatly calling truck drivers. Woohoo!

         1. Last week was Nate’s big 18th birthday party bash. This whole party started out because I couldn't think of something to do that was to immature for him and his friends. So I had two ideas. A city wide Geo cache scavenger hunt or Zombie tag. He picked the Geo Cache so the planning began. I drove around town and picked out 8 spots to hide the clues and that had a great picture spot nearby. I got the GPS coordinates for all of these places and encoded all of the driving directions and set up the decoding system. I ran around Saturday morning hiding the boxes. In the beginning Nate had invited his entire face book friends list and passes out fliers at school. This was about 150 invites. I was pretty worried about that but was relieved to have only gotten 20 RSV P’s. So I got a sheet cake and 2 sheet pizzas a cooler full of pop and enough “car Goodies” for 5 cars full of teens. What shows up? Nate's 5 best friends. A bit of a let down but Nate had a good time running through the city with his friends and I have some awesome pics and a TON of extra pizza and cake.

         2. I took some time out to read a book this week as well. Every may for the last couple of years brings the newest Sookie Stackhouse book. The latest is called Dead Locked. I'm pretty invested in this series but if I were a new reader I don't think I would have continued the series. I felt that Charlaine was wrapping up the series and perhaps ma have given away the answer to the big question. “Who will sookie end up with?”