Down time?????

So tonight was the kids school carnival or Hoopla as we call it. They have the classes collect different items and then you can buy tickets to enter them in a chance at winning the baskets made from the collected items. The kids have some Grand Prizes to win and lunch with a teacher that only they can enter but the rest are open to any family member. We put our tickets in roughly 5 baskets. Two years ago I won a scrapbooking basket after putting about 20 tickets in the bag. LOL! This year my youngest daughter, Becca, won the Girls Reading basket! Woot - more books! Can't go wrong with that........except now I have to email the book buyers in the family and let them know we have these. I believe it is safe to say that all 3 girls now have a copy of Charoltte's Web once someone claims my old copy. LOL It's a good book and now they will never have to fight over who wil get a chance to read it. That and Freckle Juice - we still have my old copy and now and extra. :) We got some more journals - oh joy they will fill out every other page and then claim to need a new one.......these are going into hiding until I use them or they proove they have used all the pages in the ones they have now! HEHEHE I have some new pens....... >.> 'Hi my name is Jen and I am an office supplies addict.' "Hi Jen" lol ;D What can I say - my first job was working for my mom in an office. We got a ton of free pens in the mail or from the office supplies reps who came out - I got my pick from them after mom claimed the ones she and the bookkeeper liked. I STILL have some of those really cool pens. But the big thing is we lucked out and the rain held off until after we got home - YAY *Does a BIG happy dance*!!!!!!!

But I have no down time in between tonight and tomorrow night and Sunday. Tomorrow morning I am heading out at 8:30 AM to get my hair cut, no biggie there. I just have to be back home by 10:30 am at the latest to leave at 11 am to head to Lansing (East Lansing really) for a family picnic with Mike's dad's side of the family. That will be fun seeing as how we will miss the two big events in July that we usually spend with them - the 4th and a b-day. 4th We will be in DeWitt for my Nana's (grandma) 80th b-day celebration and the other one will be Mike's 10 year class reunion weekend. Mine is coming up sometime soon too but I don't think we will attend it. Anyways back to tomorrow's schedule - after the picnic we are stopping at Mike's mom and step (adoptive) dad's house to drop off tools we were loaned to finish the deck. Then it's off to Lugnuts (minor league baseball) game at 7 pm. Home around midnight. I get up around 7:30 am to go to church. Home around 1:30 pm. Little down time here unless I go shopping because I will need a dish for the potluck at 5:45 pm that night!

My plan is to knit in the car on the ride up and around and maybe while I am visiting at the picnic. Keeping food off it will be tricky....

Oh and I am still waiting on the link for the lunch lady talent show skit. Evidently there was some problem with the video format and uploading it to YouTube. So it hasn't been put up there yet. Heck I haven't even seen it yet! But i have been told it look great. We all wore out Lunch Lady shirts to the Hoopla tonight. :D

Becca's Scarf

I'm on to my new project and have some pics of it. It's proving to be a little harder than I hoped but I think blocking it will take care of the twisting and bumping that it is doing. >.< Hopefully! This is what I have done so far. And then two up close shots of the stockinette area that I am working on now. As you cas see when I switch from stockinette to knitting the 5 rows it bumbs that area up once I switch back to stockinette. I'm really liking the sparkly thread in the yarn and how it looks in the scarf so far.









Well now I have to start getting ready for work. If it is not raining that is. I'm not sure if they will need me if it rains today. The joys of being the Half mile lunch lady. :) Plus I should have eaten breakfast by now......oops did I lose track of time on the internet again? ;)

It's done!!!!

So I now have pics of Julia's scarf to post here as I totally finished it. I realized after looking at the picture of the ribbed scarf in Stitch 'n Bitch that I didn't mess up the end it looked the same as theirs did! Yay me! I knit it long enough for her to wrap around her neck once or twice depending on how she wants to wear it. She loves it - can you tell? ;)





Next project is my youngest's scarf. I am using stockinette stitch with a border. I decided to knit a few rows on the bottom, then have a knit border and the stockinette inside. Then I decided to make squares of it and alternate which way the stockinette is facing. Just for the fun of it. We'll see how it turns out. :)

Awwww

Well I thought my oldest daughter was just like me and having allergy problems today.......nope she evidently is sick. She didn't have her teacher call home though and cried at school because her throat hurt so much. Poor kid! So I got them from the bus and she says that she is warm but is feeling cold......uh oh signs of a fever. Sure enough she was at 101.2 (celsius sp?)!!! So I gave her some kids ibuprofin to pop and sent her to lay down. She's complaing that she is still cold. I told her well I could let you get naked and then lay under one blanket or you can stay in your clothes on top of your blankets. She choose to stay dressed. Poor Julia. So it is ramen noodles for her tonight and lots of warm water to help her throat feel better.

It could be worse - I could be a parent of one of the kids I had to punish today at lunch. We had a lunch lady out for a Girl Scout field trip so I was her sub. Normally I don't do the kindergarten but I figured maybe it was time to actually sub for that position since I am subbing for. So my day was like this - I had a code yellow on the playground structure and the child denied having an accident, denied even being wet when it was quite obvious. I then had two other kids go to the bathroom without asking and start crawling under the stalls and locking doors. Argh! What is their deal? I know mine aren't angels but they know better than that and know if they want to do something stupid like that at school in front of me or any other lunch lady they will get time on the wall. It's just been one of those days.

Almost there......

I've been working a lot on Julia's scarf and it is almost done -YAY! I think my next project will be Mike's scarf. I know, I know - another scarf??? But I plan to use the stockinette stitch for his so it will be different. I promise! Then one of the other girls will get the seed stitch. So I only have to figure out what I am going to do for one scarf after that. At least they are all different colors so thay can tell whose scarf is whose when I am all done with them. :)

I got my Ravelry.com invite the other day. Which was actually pretty fast. I was impressed because I'd heard the waiting list for invites was long. Guess they have been getting those invites out a lot faster lately. Its a really neat site to connect with other knitters in your area, state, country or around the world. You can share patterns, borrow patterns and share advice and/or knitting/crocheting stories. I'm still learning my way around the place but I like it so far.

Bus time - must go get the monsters.......errr I mean girls, yeah girls thats what I meant to type. ;)

Yay!

So the Adventureland Sunday is all over with and I am happy that it went well but glad it is done. We had a few flubs during first service but it went smooth during second service. I brought Julia's scarf to work on but never got a chance to work on it. We went out to Olga's after service with my mom. Then we came back home and opened Mother's Day/Birthday gifts.

I worked on the scarf some when I got home and it is almost 3/4 done now so any day now I will be freeing up those needles to start another project with. :)

Mother's Day.....

I know I'm a little early but I don;t know if/when I'll be on the conputer tomorrow. So happy early Mother's Day to all mother's out there!

Practice makes.....more errors to correct

Well I said I had to leave for practice earlier at church. The kids church classes are singing their theme song for the year on the big church stage....tomorrow....on Mother's day. No biggie. Now if only when we practice we wouldn't find more problems! I give up. OK so if you look at my profile pic on here I am wearing the younger of the 3 classes shirt that will be on stage tomorrow. The awesome thing about it is that it glows in the dark - so when they drop the lights on us at one point all the shirts will be glowing - SWEET!

So because I am older (read not in middle/high school like some other worship team members) and have proven that I am there to help out with whatever - I was made House Left Manager. Meaning I get to manage the kids whose lines will be entering the stage from House Left - roughly 89 kids total. But the logistics of - are we clapping during this song at this point has been done to death and evidently decided against being used at all after the practice. The kids are grades K - 5.......no one was on beat.

But now I am super tired and just have to get up even earlier tomorrow morning to get there early again for smoothing out anything else. I love my church but can't wait until this whole thing is done and over.

On another note - after our number in the talent show at my kids school one of our lunch ladies decided to post our video on YouTube. So that is predicted to be going up at some point in time this weekend. Oh Joy! In case you have no clue what I was saying - we lunch ladies rewrote the song "Copacabana" to fit a day in our cafeteria with lines about what we do and who we are, etc. Then we made up a dance to go with it and props and trash can hats on lunch trays. Oh yeah we rocked! The audience loved us and evidently we never even got our intro because we came out too early. LOL. oh well.

2 x 2 ribbing

For my next trick......I mean project I went with ribbing for my oldest daughter's scarf. I'm still working on that and have a few other scarves going at the same time - all different stitches. With 3 girls they will all have very different and unique scarves......and I won't have any arguments because they picked the color yarn from my stash! :D And yes I do know that they no longer need the scarves right now. But I figure by the time I finish them they can have them as early Christmas gifts.

I'm not following a pattern on this scarf just the instructions in "Stitch 'n Bitch" on 2 x 2 ribbing. Julia picked out the yarn from our local JoAnn Fabrics. I liked the color and the fact that it automatically stripes when knitting. It is Bernat Handcrafter Cotton Stripes, Medium 4, and 9.8 oz. I think she will get a matching hat with what is left over if I can figure it out and buy the right kind of needles to make it with.








Well off to practice for church today. I'll post more later on that and how it goes. Gotta get in the shower now. Later. :)

Baby blanket

Here are some more pics of that baby blanket. :)

Beginner....

So truthfully knitting is a new past-time for me. I've grown up with many women in my family who knit or crochet and once tried to learn. I think I was around 8 years old when I first asked my Aunt to teach me how to knit. That was back when my mom's side of the family was spending almost all summer days and weekends together around holidays. My Nana (grandma) crochets and even won a few blue ribbons in the county fairs for her table cloths. They are beautiful.

So my aunt taught me and even gave me a pair of needles to keep. I was given free range to scrounge the leftover yarn bin when I was over. But I soon lost interest when I couldn't seem to figure it out. Since then I have tried to teach myself to knit twice since and crochet once. The second time with knitting took - mainly because I got a great book and have a friend who knits as well and has talked me through some things that I couldn't figure out. I bought "Stitch 'n Bitch". Which being much newer and updated than my really old (read 1960's) "Learn how to knit" book from I'm not sure where any more.

I decided to start small and try to learn each stitch one at a time. I actually finished my first project - a baby blanket for one of my long-time friends.



This is 151 stitches and 1.5 skeins of yarn (1 multicolored and .5 of the white). All knit stitched on two straight needles. I was going with what I had at the time and it turned out good I think. I forgot the width and length of it.....might be able to look that up...gimme a minute. Nope deleted that conversation. Oh well - it was a baby blanket and about normal baby blanket size. :) So I mastered knitting, starting a new ball and binding off all with this one piece. Yay me! Perfect for Angie's little boy.