Cooking and Knitting, Oh My

Last weekend I put together a Christmas Sale in an attempt to sell the many Christmas decorations I don't put up each year. Plus I was hoping to make a little money. In preparation for the sale, I made homemade Chili and my grandma's / mom's recipe for Apple Squares. YUM!!! I made these two recipes because I knew I would have enough food for whoever was here when it was time to eat. My friends; Jackie, CJ and Phil enjoyed the food and we each enjoyed each other's company.

Since the traffic at the sale was SO slow, I thought I would use my time wisely and do some knitting. The sweater I'm working on has a very complicated pattern that I need to follow closely so I wouldn't be able to work on this and chat with my friends. Therefore I decided to start making another Itty-Bitty Hat. I was going to make another simple hat like the last three, but saw this cute striped pattern on front of the book. So I did a little shopping at my own garage sale and picked out three skeins of yarn from the sale trunk and started working on this hat. Oops. I'm supposed to be trying to sell myself. Ha!!!

Anyway, I started to make this cute striped Paper Bag Hat. I knitted about 2/3 of the hat on Saturday (at the sale) and finally finished the hat tonight. It is so cute. It makes me want to make more in different colors. These would make cute gifts.

Well, I need to focus on my studies now and put the knitting aside. I have two exams on Friday.

Got a Facelift

Finally after 4 years, my house finally got a well needed facelift. When I bought my house in Sept 2006, the paint on the wood shutters on the front of the house was peeling badly and made the house look a bit shack-like.

The above picture is a before picture of what the house used to look like.


The two pictures below are what the house looks like today. I was fortunate to have my cousin's nephew install the new burgundy shutters and I painted the front and side doors to match. I really like the color, I think it pulls out that reddish color in the brick. So proud of getting this project off my to-do list.

Since the pictures on the blog are a bit small, if you click on each picture you can see a larger view and more detail in how bad it looked than and how much better it looks now.

Girlfriend Crafting Weekend

I had a wonderful weekend with my friend Kathy from Kenosha. She came to visit on Friday afternoon and stayed through Sunday afternoon. We spent the entire weekend crafting, eating, shopping and enjoying each other's company.

We began the weekend by visitng to Ruhama's Yarn shop in Whitefish Bay on Friday evening and enjoying dinner at El Guapo's Mexican restaurant.


On Saturday we drove to Brookfield and spent the afternoon at River Boutique and Yarn shop in the knitter's circle. They have cool looking comfy charis for us to sit and knit with the regulars. (Photo on left.) We both love this shop and the way it has a warm, comforting feel. Plus the staff is very welcoming too.




We also visited a couple of bead shop and a consignment shop. You'd think with all of that, we wouldn't get much knitting or beading done, but we did. This picture shows the two Itty-Bitty hats I knitted from Susan B. Anderson's book. Susan lives in Madison and I had the opportunity to meet her at a Knitting Guild meeting earlier in the year.

I also worked on a sweater that I had started probably 20 years ago. I only had the back and one sleeve done prior to the weekend. I finished the other sleeve and began the front. My goal is to finish this sweater by the end of the month, so that I can begin a new project. Pictures of the finished sweater to follow.