earthquake day

Well the east had an earthquake today. The first that I've ever experienced. I was at school sorting band music, putting the mess in order that my predecessor left. I was wondering what the custodians were doing that would shake the building... turns out it was an earthquake. Whodathunk??

I made Betz White's cashmere bunny for two baby gifts. Paired it with a copy of the Velveteen Rabbit. One couple are both colleagues from work. The other mom was a student of mine for my first years of teaching.


DD needed a few more things tonight for school and I noticed a sale at Staples. We got a boatload of stuff: 6 one subject notebooks, 5 retractable bic pens, 12 dixon ticonderoga pencils, a package of 6 mechanical pencils, 2 reams of copy paper, an 8MB thumb drive, a clear 18" ruler (for me), 20 pencil top erasers, 2 sharpie markers, 100 sheets of notebook paper... between the $5 off coupon, and our staples rewards and the sale. I spent $1.53 and we put in for $11 in rebates... ROCK on thrifiness :-)

My Phillies won tonight and the Little League team from PA won too!

Peanut butter cookies surrounding Reese's peanut butter cups baked after dinner.

Great day!

recycled yarn

I've been recycling yarn lately. Remember the cashmere sweater I wrote about a few weeks ago? Well I took it apart but had some troubles unraveling, so I let it sit. In the mean time, I unraveled a 100% merino XL ladies long sleeve sweater that is 2 ply laceweight yarn. I've learned that I need to be really careful when undoing the seams. It's even harder to see the threads that you can cut on these fine weight yarn sweaters. Well this cake is from the 2 sleeves and the front of the sweater. I have another smaller cake from the sweater back. The ends are spit spliced so there'll be no knots in the skein. I'll wind it on my skein winder, wash it and probably overdye it.

I also frogged merino longies that I had made for DS2 quite some time ago from a JCrew merino sweater. I had frogged the rest of the sweater and have about 1000 yards from that. Now, there's an additional 400 yards (give or take) from the longies (both arms) so I'll add that to the other and have quite the mother lode of very soft 2 (very loosely) ply merino in hunter green.

So tonight, after spinning for the tour de fleece, I decided to try my hand at one of the sleeves of the cashmere sweater and lo and behold... it started to unravel :-)
It's super fine weight cashmere and the places that I've cut wrong I just spit splice and it turns out fine. I'm so psyched now. My first cashmere.

I've been spinning up a storm and DD has decided to get rid of her polly pockets, so we've been organizing to take photos of them to list on ebay. She should get a haul since the collection is immense. We counted 100 pairs of shoes (just shoes, not including the 20ish pairs of boots) I'm making her do most of the work, after all she'll get the cash, but a little supervision is always a good thing.

We went miniature golfing today with the kids. On the way home DS2 asked where are apo and aba? We told him that they went home yesterday. He wants them to come back. LOL Guess 6 weeks wasn't enough.

I've cast on for the 3rd time for the yoga bag... this time I used circulars with a bigger circumference AND a stitch marker forthe beginning of the round. The pattern is written for flat, but I'm knitting it in the round :-]

I also started Tina's cloth for the love2knit dishcloth exchange. I hope she'll like it. I think I found a perfect cloth for her!

OK... it's soon time to wake up and I've yet to go to bed. I heard someone stirring upstairs at about 4 AM... lately one of the 3 kids has been up at that time for the past week.