Time flies when you are otherwise occupied!

I just realized that I haven't posted anything in almost two months. Not that I haven't had anything to post, just been busy with life.

On the stitching front, I am two thirds of the way to completing my son's afghan - the goal is to be done by Thanksgiving. A very cool crochet tie for him is about half completed. In the meantime, I finished a crochet bathmat, a tunesian crochet shawl, a knit hat for a friend who has lost her hair to chemo, and a square for an afghan for another friend who is also going through chemo. The socks I was knitting and the lace shawl haven't seen the light of day for months.

Aside from knitting/crocheting, I've been working a bit for our Supervisor of Elections helping enter data on the pollworkers they are hiring for this election in November. At some point I had to make a choice to either get involved in the politial side of things or help preserve the process. I chose the process. Until you get involved, you have no idea how complicated election law is and how many opportunities there are for each of us to make mistakes that affects our right to vote. The actual process of voting has gotten so much easier - the optical scan ballots work really well. But here we have something called "motor voter" that has really caused some issues. For one election a few years ago, we had people who came to the polls, said they had registered but they were not on the votor rolls. Apparently, the DMV hadn't forwarded the information to the Supervisor of Elections so we had no record that they had registered. Then there are the people who go to renew their license and are asked if they need to make any changes to their voter registration and answer in ways that causes their party affiliation to be changed - typically to No Party Affiliation and then they go to the polls in a primary and don't understand why their party has been changed and they can't vote for the person they want to. It is no wonder that some people get frustrated with the system.

I think my funniest story when I worked at the polls one year was the woman who came in, wasn't on the rolls and said, " I should be, I voted last month in Key West".....duh - you can only be registered in one county at a time.

And...next week I'm walking in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.

Lots going on!

I can eat THAT?

I restarted a diet this past week, only this time - because I'm trying to get my husband to follow it as well - I'm using the various cookbooks that you can buy for this diet to try and find tasty interesting meals and snacks to keep us motivated.

Diets have such a negative connotation. People always ask, "what can you eat?" or "what have you cut out?" as if a diet is somehow a punishment for prior indulgences. But as someone much wiser than I once pointed out, a diet is what you eat, some are just healthier than others.

So in the process of looking for interesting things to make, I stumbled on three great things this week. The first was lemon blueberry muffins. Oh my, with lemon zest and lemon extract and fresh blueberries, these turned out to be very tasty. And, on this "reduced calorie" diet, you may have two with a small serving of fruit and it's only 400 calories (which is a meal). The second was just a simple chicken recipe - coated in whole grain breadcrumbs and chopped walnuts and baked - sliced and served over field greens with....the most amazing tasty pomegranate dressing - dont' recall all the ingredients, but you use 100% pomegranate juice and you cook it till it reduced by half and then you drizzle it over the chicken/salad. Sweet and tart and totally yummy. I saved the best for last....who ever heard of a reduced calorie diet with Stuffed French Toast? This was amazing - finely chopped semi sweet chocolate combined with that fake cream cheese stuff that starts with an 'N' that I can never spell, spread on a 1/2 inch thick slice of italian bread, topped with a matching slice, dipped into an egg/vanilla extract mixture and then cooked in a skillet with a little margarine. Topped with sliced strawberries mixed with orange zest and a little sugar. WOW - Sunday Brunch at it's best.

With food like this, this "diet" could be fun.

Back to School and other musings

My son returned to college this week and I'm not missing him. Does that make me a bad mom? For some reason I've never had a hard time leaving him, even when he was three months old. I think there is a part of me that is very practical. In each case I knew either I was leaving him or he was going to be away from me and I thoroughly researched where he was going to be so that I developed a sense of comfort that he would be okay. Once I felt that comfort, I didn't look back, I dropped him off at Daycare, nursery school, school, summer camp, college, got in the car and left. Don't get me wrong...I love to hang with my son... but he is where he needs to be and I am where I need to be and it will all be fine.

The silver lining is that I now have control of my house back! No more nasty bad for me snack foods in the fridge and pantry, no more loads of wash going just when I want to do laundry (yup - he does his own wash and has since middle school when he asked how to use the washer). Now I can reprogram the DVR and delete Family Guy, That 70s Show, Mythbusters etc. He is back with all his friends and I'm happy!

What a great name!

I was chatting with a friend about those books that I read on vacation. They were expressing surprise that I had read three books in 12 days. So I explained that they were not "literature" but more what I like to call Chick Lit. As I had mentioned, they were all about knitting, specifically Knit Two by Kate Jacobs and both of the Blossom Street books by Debbie McComber - The Shop on Blossom Street and A Good Yarn. Their response was perfect....Knit Lit!

Where has time gone?

Sometimes I wonder where time goes. The past month has been a time warp where I only seemed to know what I was doing today and tomorrow but had no idea which day of the week today or tomorrow were.

It all started with the anticipated at some point in the future but unexpected at the moment death of my wonderful Father-in-Law. Amidst the confusion of the moment and the attempt to juggle propriety with the schedules of children and grand-children, we managed to book, cancel and rebook flights, re-arrange a previously scheduled vacation that couldn't be totally postponed due to meeting relatives who were coming from overseas (more later), get through a very tough week burying my Father-in-Law, missing a plane flight and losing half a day with above mentioned relatives, meeting relatives, more plane flights, lots of driving, discovering the mountains of North Carolina and Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and finding the best goat cheese ever along with the BBQ at the Farmer's Market in Cashiers, NC which you knew had to be great when you saw all the bikers had stopped there for lunch. After a quiet week home peeling Georgia peaches, baking pies and trying to get life back on track, I was asked to host visiting clergy whom I had never met for five nights.....which has actually turned out to be a lot of fun.

Not a whole lot of time for knitting, even though I took a lot with me on both the flight and the car trip. I made the mistake of also taking along several books and fell blissfully into my occasional pattern of finishing books so quickly that I had to buy more. I think I just was at a place where I needed to escape into the lives of some fictional characters who seemed to be having a less stressful time than I was at the moment. Interestingly, they all revolved around knitting or knit shops, so although I wasn't physically knitting much, I was still thinking about knitting and yarn. Oh! the one thing that I did do was begin to teach my niece to knit - and she is a whiz!

Back to the relative I mentioned, she is my second cousin, which means that her father and my mother were cousins. This was almost a bolt from the blue. About six months ago I decided to try, one more time, to find some information about my Mother's family. While genealogy is slow and sometimes difficult in itself, it can be much more challenging when most of the information you have contains names that are not accurate because someone decided that the anglicized version was more palatable in the US in 1900s than the actual names that your relatives are still using. Having discovered at age 23 that my mother's maiden name was the name she had legally changed it to, and not the name she was born with was interesting to say the least. Anyway...about 40 years ago I had an opportunity to meet several relatives in London. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a whole lot more interesting and I would have asked a lot more questions and made sure to have seen them again before they passed on. However, I did have a few names to hang on to. So...when I went searching on a genealogy website and saw that there was someone looking for someone who I was pretty sure I had met and was related to, I sent off an email through this website to the poster. After a few exchanges, it turned out that some of the relatives I remembered meeting were her parents! She was coming to the US to see her son and her sister and so we decided we would try to meet. In the meantime, she sent me all the names of all the relatives beginning with my great grandparents. I went from almost no information to information overload in a very short period of time. Now I have much more information about my Mom's side of the family, factual information, anecdotal information, stories etc. and it makes me feel more connected which is nice. Now my sister and I are trying to get the same level of detail on Dad's side of the family which heretofore had seemed to be more complete! Here is a photo of my second cousins (yup, a story in and of itself - married first cousins)


So it has been an eventful month, very focused on family in several different ways, and we are all slowly settling back into a routine where I know the day and the date, have appointments and make plans. I'm starting to find time for knitting again. On the needles at the moment are my beaded lace scarf, my son's afghan which I'm tempted to confess to hating and am almost ready to just pay someone to make, my husband's socks (and I have to replace one needle in order to make the mate since I stepped on it and broke it = stupid move), and a surprise for my sister in law. Photos later!

Warning: Unsolicited Product Plug

I don't normally rave about products - but this is an exception.

There have been some times in my life when, despite all the "where is your mother when you need her" do-it-yourself books, online tutorials etc. I just could not get that stain out of the (fill in the blank).

The first incident that I recall really struggling with was the red dirt from the baseball diamond when my son played Little League sometime in the early 90s. I tried everything. Finally, one thing that seemed to work was Fels Naptha soap = but not the flake laundry soap, the scruffy bar soap that nobody sells. Fortunately a bar lasts a long time, so once you found one, you were good for a season or two of stains on white synthetic baseball pants.

Then when I moved to Florida, one day there was a knock on my door and some poor kid was stuck promoting some product called "Supreme" that was supposed to be this wonderful multi purpose product. It even shined brass he said as he proceded to clean one square inch of my door handle. Obviously I had to buy the stuff - how else was I going to get the rest of the handle clean? Well, turned out that this "Supreme" stuff worked wonders on the baseball pant stains too and was much easier to use than that bar soap stuff. But all good things come to an end, and I ran out of "Supreme".

Fast forward to son in a college fraternity. How they manage to get things like footprints in the middle of the back of a dress shirt that even my fabulous dry cleaner can't remove, or random red juice/punch/who knows what stains on shorts, is beyond me. But the stains on the shorts are no longer beyond me because I found Nature Bright.

I found this stuff by coincidence - a story that doesn't need to be told here. It is made by Shaklee - a company about which most of us have heard. They make all kinds of cleaning products in concentrated form and you dilute the stuff with water and get bazillion ounces for $19.99 compared to the cost for bazillion ounces of (fill in the blank).

The demo looked pretty good (the iodine dissolved in water disappeared!) so I bought two different cleaning products - one of which was this Nature Bright which was purported to be "better than Oxy Clean".

Home came the two pair of red stained shorts and one with a mysterious mustard/curry colored stain. I tried spraying the spots with the solution and nothing happened. I figured I had nothing to lose so I filled the sink with cold water - poured in some of the powder - swished it around to dissolve it and put in the shorts. The next morning.....drum roll please.....NO STAINS!

I was in shock. Given the cost of those J Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren shorts - that Nature Bright was a bargin! And I have lots left. I'm even tempted to buy some more and give it to my son to take back to school. The parents of all his fraternity brothers can thank me later.

Too much of a good thing

I have been drooling all weekend for two different reasons.

First the needlework: I bought the new Vogue Knitting magazine and found many things I want to make. Then I bought the Interweave Knitting and there is at least one thing I want to make.




Of course there is still the current Interweave Crochet with a certain shawl by Vashti I can't wait to take as a class,


and then there is the prior issue that had the Veronica sweater - which I not only like, but it is my sister's name and was done in a color she wears alot - so it is a must make.



Of course, I bought that issue because of the very cool mosaic afghan pattern but I don't like the colors so I'm changing that one up (see...I'm design driven).


Of course, all of that has to follow the mystery knit that I'm doing with A Good Yarn (that I've decided is going to my mother in law), and a shawl that I need to have done by the end of June for my sister in law because she deserves something nice, the socks that I'm knitting for my husband and the afghan I promised my son. Then there is the lace workshop that I'm taking at the end of May that I am very excited about, and at some point in the future I really want to make this jacket Vashti designed because it is too cool for words.




And then there are the gauntlets (read the last post, but no picture because they're going to be a gift).



If you have gotten this far, then it's time for the second reason I'm so excited this weekend, Earth Boxes!


These have to be the most incredible hassle free way to grow almost anything. In my case it is veggies and herbs (but you should have seen the ones planted with flowers!)


These are boxes that basically have a reservoir and an overflow. You fill them with potting soil, follow the instructions for dolomite for certain veggies and instructions on where to place the granulated fertilizer, cover the box with an elasticized plastic cover, cut holes in the correct places, plant your seedlings, fill the reservoir and leave them alone except to fill the reservoir.

The soil lasts for five years without replacement, but they do suggest that you scoop out the old fertilizer trough and replace it each time you replant. The elastic covers keep the moisture in, the weeds out and only cost a little over $1 to replace.


I got three of these wonders this weekend, one with cherry tomatoes, one with herbs: spearmint, rosemary, basil, chives, parsley, and oregano (they were out of cilantro), and one with cucumbers and hot peppers (jalapeno, habanero, chili) and one sweet banana pepper.

I am totally excited. Here is the link to the people who make them, they are available all over the US. http://www.earthbox.com/


I'm sure I will bore you later with the pictures of my lucious veggies and herbs!

Which comes first, the pattern or the yarn?

I found myself listening to a podcast today with the featured guest being Vashti Braha, a needlework designer (you can follow her blog at http://designingvashti.blogspot.com) An interesting topic came up as designers (an area with which I am not familiar) can approach a design from two angles: designing the project totally on their own, developing the pattern, selecting the yarn, making the project, OR they can be asked by a yarn company to create a project using a particular yarn, in which case they are provided the yarn with which to make said created design.

Obviously, the second route is a method of selling yarn. However, as a beginning to intermediate knitter, I have always had huge issues with that and here is why.

Some people have huge stashes of yarn. They love to go to shops and buy yarn that appeals to them with no idea at the time of what object they will create with that yarn. This often means that more yarn is purchased than is needed for a given project or the reverse...the perfect project is found and there isn't enough yarn.

I admit to having a larger stash than I will probably ever be able to use (unless I stop buying yarn until what I have is all knit up.) However, I came by my stash honestly because it is all yarn purchased with a specific pattern in mind and I have the patterns to prove it!

I am pattern driven, not yarn driven, however the the two are inexorably intertwined. Now..the reason for the huge stash is because patterns always specify a specific weight of yarn/gage and tell you the yarn that was used to make the item shown in the picture(and there is ALWAYS a picture to lure you in.) Sometimes I look at patterns the way I would look at clothing in a catalog - I want that item, in that yarn - probably in that colorway. So....unless I buy the pattern and the yarn when I see it, chances are that by the time I get around to pulling out the pattern, the yarn will be discontinued.

On the true confessions side, I found a magazine with two patterns that I wanted to make. One was a scarf, the other was a pair of gauntlets that I thought would be perfect for one of my nieces. I tried the scarf with a different yarn bought at my local yarn shop, didn't like it, and went online to find the same yarn used in the picture. It came out great and the recipient loved it. Now for the gauntlets. Well, even though this was a current magazine and a current pattern, low and behold, the yarn had been discontinued. There was nothing overly special about this particular gauntlet pattern - in fact I don't particularly like gauntlets and I'm not so sure I will enjoy figuring out how to do the thumb parts. What was special and screamed out about these gauntlets was the yarn.

So.....it was back to the internet to try my best to find this now discontinued yarn. I searched everywhere I could find for this yarn and my persistence paid off. I found it! In France! I had to resort to higher level math to calculate the exchange rate and total cost including shipping and determine just how badly I wanted to make these gauntlets. Fortunately for my niece, the total cost was reasonable for a Christmas present and I ordered the yarn. It is now in my stash and toward the end of the summer I will have to drop everything and start those gauntlets.

But the point, despite my detour into finding the "same" yarn, is that what motivates me initially to make something is the pattern, not the yarn. Sometimes I have the courage to "change it up" and sometimes I want my catalog item, but for me, it always starts with design.

Frogging through life

For the non needleworkers out there, frogging is what you do when you make mistakes - rippit. The knitters like to get technical - if you pull out the needle and just unravel the yarn, you are frogging...if you undo the knitting stitch by stich it is tinking (tink being knit spelled backwards).

Today, I tinked as much as I knit - literally. I've been working on a "mystery knit" at my favorite shop A Good Yarn in Sarasota. Somehow I got 700 stitches into the latest section of the mystery project and realized that something was wrong. So, I undid 600 stitches, reknit them and got back on track. After five hours, I felt as if I had made no progress.

Last week I decided to stitch all night until I finished the 72 rows in the section - and it took me till 2:30 am. I'm not going to do that tonight, it wiped me out for a few days!

However, thinking about the ability to undo and redo one's knitting or needlework made me think of all the times I've said, "if I knew then what I know now", or the times I've wished for a "do over". It is often easy in hindsight to wonder if the choices we made were the "right" ones, and how our life might be different had we made the other choice in a given situation.

But I think that spending too much time thinking about the "would'ves, could'ves, should'ves" of our lives is downright unhealthy. Certainly we need to learn from mistakes (and I will pay more attention to my knitting patterns so that I don't have to frog or tink so much), but it is more important to focus on what lays ahead and what choices are before us. Unlike needlework, we can't frog our way through life.

#1 The struggle to get Brunch

I've thought about blogging for awhile now. I always thought nobody would be interested, but after reading many blogs recently, I figured I have as much to muse about as everyone else. The name of my blog is Needleless Chatter which is obviously a pun. I love to do needlework - knitting at the moment, but have also done needlepoint, counted crosstitch, embroidery and some sewing. A blog is basically chatter and I can't knit and type at the same time, ergo Needleless Chatter - cute huh?

This will never be a single topic blog- more musings about what happens to be on my mind at the time. It might be needlework, it might be current events, it might be about relationships, today it is about brunch - or perhaps the struggle to get brunch.

Ever want to go grab something quick after Church on a Sunday? We tried that today without a lot of success. There is a new breakfast/brunch/lunch place in town that will remain nameless. The first time we went on a Sunday, it was still Season in Sarasota. Season means that the population is inflated by the presence (much appreciated by the way) of folks who are only in Florida for the winter - or perhaps six months and a day so that they can claim residency here. We expected a wait and we did wait - for a short time. The service was prompt, the food was good - not stupendous, and the scones were great! So, when we had to choose a place to go this morning, we decided to try again and take our son who just returned from college and had never been there before.

The wait to get a seat wasn't too horrible, the server took our order promptly, and then the wait began. One of the things that I like about going out to breakfast or brunch is that none of the food is difficult to make - it should come out of the kitchen pretty fast. I think the most complicated thing about our order may have been the poached eggs for my son's Eggs Benedict. I happened to overhear a different server tell the guests at one of her tables that the cause of the delay was a lack of clean plates because they had been so busy. These people are running a restaurant - you don't run out of plates! We were able to read almost the entire Sunday paper in the 50 minutes that we waited for our food. My husband's order included pancakes and mine included toast. His pancakes arrived but not my toast. No butter or syrup was provided. We asked about the toast, the butter and the syrup and were told, "no problem, we will get it". The butter and syrup arrived and were told that the toast was in the toaster. Huh? We were finished with our meal when the toast arrived. I'd like to think that perhaps this debacle of a meal was because today is a Sunday and they are busier than usual. I'm still debating whether to give them a chance for redemption during the week but have decided that for brunch, I'm sticking with the tried and true.