Ta-da!!!  (click on the pic’s to make them bigger)

This is my niece’s cardigan all blocked out.  I’m super excited!  I can’t wait to seam it all up and crochet the border…  Ohh….  I’m all wiggly!!

It’s out of Fisherman’s wool that I hand painted.  I’ll post the pattern when I’m done with it.  : )

See you tomorrow!!

me

I am (sorta) ashamed to admit that I am now addicted to Facebook.  Yes,  I am weak and have fallen for its charms. 

If you are on there and want to be friends (sounds so grade school, doesn’t it? I love it!) look up the email:

girl gone loopy (at) yahoo . com

(no spaces, and the @ sign, yada yada…you know the drill.)  Just add a note that you read my blog…

So…on to knitting news…  I have been working on my scarf for the Internat’l Scarf Exchange 7 and I love it… I have about 35″ done (only about 40 or so more to go!!  Yes, my person wants a long scarf!)  No, I don’t have a photo yet…  Soon…promise!!!

I have also been working diligently on a cardigan for my niece…she’s 18 months old and quite possibly the cutest thing on the planet. (yes, I’m a wee bit biased)  I am using some of my hand-dye and my own pattern…and I will post pictures of that soon, too.  : )

It’s still kinda fun being home all the time… I’m not quite stir crazy yet.  The job hunt continues…everyday.  So far I’ve applied to eight jobs and haven’t heard from four yet, but I had two “no longer available” and two that turned out to be “junk” jobs cleverly masked as real jobs. (which means that they think “admin assistant” equal cold calling for life insurance…) Hmmm…  I think not.   I’m just not the telemarketer type.  I am not at the point yet that I will take ANYTHING that pauses before me.  It’s not even been a week yet. 

Happy Stitches!!!

Me

So, on Tuesday morning I was tossed unceremoniously into the ranks of the unemployed.  It sucks, but it has it’s upside too…  Bad economy, said they…  Whatever.  >shrug<  Fresh start, says me…

I hated the place with a passion undying.  It sucked every bit of fun and love and happiness out of me.  I hated getting up every morning, knowing I had to drive a hour and a half to some place that made me sick to my stomach.  Now, there are people there that I adore.  People whom I will miss greatly.  People with whom I will keep in touch.  There are other people there that I wish some serious toe stubbing on.  All shall remain nameless. 

So, what this means is that I have a new job right now… That job is to find another job!!!  LOL  I have applied at a few places and will keep hunting for more.  Something will come my way.  I have positive thoughts galore.

So, if anyone knows of an opening for a seriously cool, upbeat, slamming good receptionist…in the York, PA or Baltimore, MD area…  Let me know!!!

Winks,

Me

I’m still here…  I’m still crafting…  I’m still (until this moment) not posting.  I’m such a dork.  I have this blog and I really do love it.  I think of it often and always tell myself that I NEED TO BLOG…  Somehow things always get in the way.

So…  Here I am, it’s the beginning of 2009…and what a freezing cold start it’s been!!!  Today, when I got in my car to head to work…my little temp gauge said it was 9 degrees.  NINE DEGREES.  Bloody hell.  Bloody FROZEN hell.

I am not a cold person.  But, I’m also not a hot person, either…  And I like the seasonal changes…  So I tolerate both the hot and the cold weather.  Fall is my fave, followed by Spring, Summer, then Winter…  Tho, I do like winter because I can where all my knitterly goods.  That makes me happy.

So what am I working on???  I’m in the International Scarf Exchange 7right now… I bought some beautiful yarn, Manos Silk Blends in a wonderful blue color, Midnight…but looks sapphire…  I knit about 10″ of a pattern and decided it was too much blue.  So, I ripped it all out and over dyed the yarn with some darker blue, moss green and purple, leaving some of the original blue in there, too.  It’s FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!!! 

But, now I have the dilemma of choosing the right stitch to work with the now variegated yarn…  I have three swatches worked up…(I’ll post pics at some point) and I’m taking them all to my knit group tonight and enlisting their help to choose which one to go with.  One is a solid fabric, slip stitch diagonal ribbing; one is a very open lace, and one is mostly solid semi-lace…  I like them all.

Well, I’m signing off for now.  I need to get back to work!!!

Toodles,

Me

I don’t post about politics, or any other “hot” topic…  But a friend of mine posted this on her blog and I think it’s important enough to “steal” and post here…  So, thank you Leslie for posting this…(hugs and smooches).

Just because she’s a woman…doesn’t mean she’s a good choice… 

Vote with your brain…not your tits…
H. 

A Woman’s Voice

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for “The  Vagina Monologues”, wrote the following about Sarah Palin:  

DRILL, DRILL, DRILL

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares.

I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode  snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks.

I have a particular thing for Polar Bears.

Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person

or touched one…  

Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice.
Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women.

I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them.

It is hard to write about Sarah Palin.

This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical.

The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices
is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story – connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America  may never recover.  

But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.   

Unfortunately, this is not a joke.  

In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution.  I take this as a metaphor.
In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes
or gets better or evolves.

She does not believe in global  warming.
The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying  
our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers,  

are all part of God’s plan.   

She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list.

The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered.

The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered.

The oil is here to be taken and plundered.

Iraq is here to be taken and plundered.

As she said herself of the Iraqi war,

“It was a task from God.”

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion.
She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they  have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control.
I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking.
From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently.  

She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference.

This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the  United States .

She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns.
She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle.
She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip.
She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God.

That is of course her right, her private right.

But when God and Guns come together in the public sector,  
when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are  
denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and  
state and the undoing of everything  America  has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I  believe we hold this election in our hands.

This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the US., but of the planet.  

It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever  
uninhabitable for humans.

It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack.

It  will determine whether  we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction.

It  will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or  
whether we build more and more methods of killing.

It will determine whether  America  is a free open tolerant society

or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected

then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC,  

“Drill Drill Drill.”

I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape.  I think of destruction. I think of domination.

I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent.  

I think of pain.

 Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

 Eve Ensler

I’m here, I’m crafting…just not posting.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.  I think it’s that, since we bought the house the computer is no longer in the main living area.  It used to be in the dining room (the only place we had to put it) and now it has it’s own room all the way up on the 3rd floor of the house…  So…I don’t use it as often.  It isn’t just because it’s on the 3rd floor…it’s that in the winter, the 3rd floor is a freezer and in the summer, it’s an oven.  The 3rd floor is also where my “studio” is…needless to say, I haven’t been up here much.  Until lately…it got terribly hot and I got ambitous and put the window units in…. Awww…what a differnce that made!!  I can work up here now without almost passing out because of heat exhaustion!! 

Well…what have I been doing…???  Sewing.  Yup.  Not knitting, not spinning, not even crochet…  I’ve caught the sewn handbag bug and it’s going strong!!!!  I’ve made five handbags, a wristlet and a box-bottom zipper pouch, two other flat zipper pouches and an evening bag…  I also have fabric for about four hundred other bags.  I am starting another bag as soon as I am done with this.  But I told myself, I wasn’t allowed to start it until I posted something…so here I am.

I do have a few knit projects going, tho…for when I’m down stairs watching the evil TV (I’m addicted to “So, You Think You Can Dance?”) (herefter SYTYCD)  What can I say…??  Dance shows/movies are my guilty pleasure (tho, I have never watched an episode of “Dancing with the Stars” for some reason, I don’t know why…)  I think it’s because I can’t dance AT ALL…or as Avery says, “not without a pole”…  Heh.  Men.  >shrug<  But, I digress… 

Knitterly projects are as follows… 
Clapotis:  Brooksfarm Solo in a tan/aqua colorway (they don’t seem to have a pic of this colorway on the site tho).  Fan-freakin-tastic.  I LOVE it.  I am at the halfway point. 

Forest Path Stole:  Jaggerspun Zephyr in Mushroom, which is a soft tan/taupe color.  I am on the third tier, I believe…tho, I haven’t touched it since I started the Clapotis!

Mead scarf: in Tess Designer Yarns…something wool, in Birch Bark colorway (creamy white, gray, taupe…very soft and pretty).

That’s about it on this end…  I will post some photos when I can remember to take the camera downstairs with me!!!  : )

This is so awesome I just had to post!!!!

If you like homespun yarn, go here:   

http://homespunyarnparty.blogspot.com/2008/02/first-ever-homespun-yarn-party-march-30.html

Whoot!!! You all know where I am planning on being!!!!

…it just slips away from you and you don’t even realize how quickly it happens…

I’m still alive, there has been some knitting, some spinning and much house painting!!!

We have painted, so far, the living room, dining room, kitchen, both bathrooms, our bedroom, and the guest room.  We still have to paint the entry way, hall, stairwell, upper hall, Avery’s library, and my “studio” or craft den…  : ) 

The knitting:  I’ve been working on the Forest Path Stole (found in The Best of Interweave Knits: The First Ten Years) (it’s also from a sold-out back issue, I’m not sure which one).  I’m using Jaggerspun Zephyr in “Mushroom” which is a taupey color.  I haven’t taken a picture of it yet, don’t want to jinx it.  But it’s going pretty well…prolly shouldn’t have said that…

The spinning is even less than the knitting, but is also looking good and hasn’t a photo…  Sorry…  : )

Toodles!!

I really am still here…  I’ve been knitting, too.  I even dyed some fiber and spun a little…a wee little.

Pic’s soon…promise.

Hmm…  What might this be??No, no idea….  Really….

 Really??

Well, then…  Let me tell you….

IT’S THE KEY TO MY NEW HOUSE!!!!!!

Yay!