Summer's here!

Summer is most definitely here. It's hot. School is out. Sports are done. We've had our big party, and it was a good one (thank goodness the forecasts of severe thunderstorms with damaging winds, etc., were wrong).

We harvested our first carrots, and boy do they look weird!


They taste good, though.

My summer projects are going well. Here is Adamas (am I the only one who thinks of Battlestar Galactica when I hear the name of this pattern?):

I've done 11 out of the 14 required repeats of chart 2, then it's chart 3 and the cast off. This may sound like I am almost done, but it is deceiving since you increase the number of stitches every other row. I started with 5 stitches and now I think I have over 300. Each row takes quite a while to get through, at this point, and the last few repeats of the chart are going to take some time.

I am also working a little slowly because of this laceweight yarn. I really don't enjoy working with it. I just can't get used to how light it is. There's no weight to help me manage the tension of my stitches, and that is slowing me down. Well, I wanted to try laceweight, and now I have. Don't think I'll want to do it again. Frankly, I think this shawl would be just as nice, if not nicer, with a slightly heavier yarn. In fact, I have seen some of the Ravelers doing this shawl are using fingering weight yarn and I think the stitch definition on their projects looks great.

The Summer of Socks is underway, as well, and I have started my first pair.

The is Apple Laine's Apple Pie yarn in the Blue Bayou colorway. I've had this yarn hanging around for almost 2 years, and I decided it finally needed to get used. It's rather light, so I wasn't able to get a good gauge with it on my usual 2.5mm no.1's, and that is why I had not used it yet. But I recently purchased a set of 2.25mm no.1s, and the yarn looks great on that size needle. I thought about doing Baudelaires but decided against that pattern because the yarn is so colorful. In addition, the mohair content of the yarn gives the knitted fabric a major halo, so a lacy or complicated pattern would be impossible to see. In the end, I decided a simple rib pattern would be best, so here it is. The fabric is incredibly soft because of the silk and the mohair in the yarn. VERY nice.

We went to the library this week and signed the kids up for the summer reading program, which was just the last little nudge CatGirl needed to start reading again (Mathboy doesn't need any help there). As Mathboy settled down with the EarthSea Cycle by Ursula LeGuin, C picked out a whole bunch of books, including--get this--a Nancy Drew. I had been recommending Nancy Drews to C for a while, but she was never interested BUT a little girl she was talking to in the Juvenile Paperback section that day told her that she had read tons of Nancy Drews and loved them. After that, C came over to me and asked which Nancy Drew I would recommend she start with, and we happily found her The Secret of the Old Clock. You know, peer pressure can be a good thing. :o) Meanwhile, I am still listening to The Pillars of the Earth, but I am ready for it to be over. I have enjoyed it very much, I just want to have something new. I am also still reading The Last Child in the Woods, and I am tired of that one as well. I think it was very interesting, but I feel like I've gotten the point and I've had enough of that.

So that's it. Summer's here!