Mid-April always hit like a whirlwind in these parts.  My mama has her birthday 4 days before me, and my youngest has his birthday 5 days after mine.  So lots of birthday wishes along with those April showers!  This year my mama celebrated a milestone birthday and my youngest became and official teenager!

Me- well I was convinced I was 46 last year and then took the time to do the math and realized I am just now 46 so it felt like a bonus!  I often will take the day off work and have a self-care day.  This year I met up with a friend.  First we hit up a local eatery that seems a bit like a hole in the wall but I like their Vietnamese Pho soup - mmmmm!




Next she joined me to an appointment at a tattoo shop that I had made for my "knitting tattoo" I have been wanting for a while.  Now let me start this story by saying this year my bday fell on Friday the 13th and the artist I made the appointment with did not remember that the shop was doing $20 tattoos on the 13th.  You can imagine my surprise showing up on a Friday at noon and seeing a huge line of folks out the door.  Confirmed that there was a mistake in taking my appointment and knowing there was no way I was hanging out in that energy I decided to walk into one of the oldest studios in my town where I got some of my very early ink back in the 90's.




As luck would have it, they had an opening and the atmosphere was so relaxed and the shop had been remodeled and had this great eclectic mix of flash tattoo art, taxidermy animals, russian nesting dolls and old vintage pictures.  You know the large pictures with the dome glass- just gorgeous and my speed!  My tattoo itself is actually the constellation of Aries, my sun and moon sign.  I like how the 4 stars represent me, my partner, and our two sons.  Aries is a ram which is a sheep, sheep has wool, wool for . . . well you get the picture right?  My subtle knitting tattoo!  Old stars for my sun and moon sign and my soul hobby!


Our next stop was out to the local antique mall and look at treasures surrounded in old dust!  It fills me up to be able to take it all in.  It took all my will power not to buy one of the old vintage portraits like I had just seen at the tattoo parlor!



My evening ended with some chicken wings from another local favorite and dancing the night away with my partner while Old Salt Union played for us at the bar where my partner and I had our wedding party years ago.

All in all my friends it was a great day for this old gal!

We are entering the final stage of our home remodel that we have been doing.  Our basement is done, the new roof went on last month and the last part is transforming our carport into a garage and replacing our front and side doors.  Our contractor let us know that this was going to be getting started on Monday so we spent our Saturday cleaning out and storing the contents of our carport.

I had a little corner shelf were we would toss nature treasures and odd things we would pick up on hikes.  You can image a hodgepodge of little treasures and lots of years worth of dust.  As I was packing them up I came across some goodies I completely forgot about and brought them into the house to clean up.


The first was this beautiful old lantern that my husband picked up off the curb somewhere years ago.  It has been on lots of troll walks and lantern walks in the neighborhood with the boys when they were little.  I cleaned out the leaves and old wax and lots of dust and now this beauty is going to hang out inside.


I also found the old glass chicken waterer that my mama gave me from the family farm.  My hens have a giant watering system so I cleaned this up and I have it on the table for the moment.  It think it makes a great little candy/nut dish!



Last I found these beautiful pieces of old smooth glass.  My husband thinks he found them along the Missouri river at some point and time.  The funny thing is I really wanted to find some "sea glass" when we were in Florida and did not.  Little did I know there was some beautiful unique "river glass" just waiting for me on my dusty old nature shelf!

They all color coordinated with my Vernal Infinity Scarf that is my current WIP!  I love it when my projects, the fun and not so fun all line up just right.  I am off to knit a few more rows!

You may remember the maiden voyage of Knit Your Own Adventure last summer when my husband and I took a two week trip to take our sons to the beach and . . . we hit the early part of hurricane season and decided to head to Colorado mountains midstream.  When we sat in that hotel last summer making the decision to head west I made a promise to the boys to take them to the beach on spring break.  We were able to make good on that promise and we took our fellas to Miramar Beach in Old Destin, Florida.





No big adventures to speak of; just the truest sense of "spring break"!  While the wind made the days slightly cooler- the 70 degree days on the beach beat the weather that was happening back home!  I had not been to the beach in years and this was my first spring break trip ever!  We had a great little place we found via AirBnB right on the beach and found some yummy seafood markets.






I decided on the Nakia's Infinity scarf for my spring break knitting.  This is the scarf that was in the Black Panther movie.  I wound my yarns the night before we left and cast it on in the van.  It was grey and rainy when I cast it on- pretty fitting.  When we hit Alabama and started seeing the red dirt roads we were listening to S-Town pod cast and going right past Bibb County when the color changed to a little orange patch!  By the time we got to the beach I moved to the green blues and stayed there all the way home.




I am about 1/3 of the way through and enjoying the free flow of the pattern and interpreting and changing along the way as I feel.  It is a nice mirror to the free flow of these beach days we had.  It is an opportunity I don't take lightly.  Not everyone is able to take a break/vacation like this.  My husband and I worked hard to be able to swing it ourselves, but I am so glad we did.  I am thankful all around- the fellas not totally getting on each other's nerves, the long walks on the beach, the incredible food, and the abundance of fiber in my life.

Knitting has become part of my activism since the election.  Making something to share messages of activism really speaks to me.  Last year I made several of the Pussyhats, a Welcome blanket, and just recently made a pair of fingerless gloves for the March For Our Lives movement that is happening this upcoming weekend.


In a visual idea of creating a "sea of eyes" during a national dialogue of gun violence in America, the co-creator of the Pussyhat movement had a vision of a new knitted symbol for the march.  I am deeply impressed the youth voice in this movement.  I was able to get a pair of gloves made and just barely in the mail on time!  I will not be able to attend my community sister march but intend to keep the discussion front and center with my own children.


From a knitting perspective this pattern was not the time for me to learn duplicate stitch.  I am interested in learning it more but the embroidery pattern was not working for me on the weight of yarn that I used from my stash.  So I think my eyes look botched as I did a quick satin stitch for the white of the eye.  It does not get much more homespun than my amateur embroidery skills on this project!  One other adjustment I made was to change the color to brown for some diversity from the pattern.

Hoping as a country we can stop, look, listen, and talk about what we can do to change this tide.

I thought I would share some of my finished fiber works and upcoming projects as I spent the day watching big ol' fat snow flakes fall and doing some volunteer knitting teaching with some 4-H'ers.




First I was happy to bind off my Olympic knitting project, the Eureka Cowl.  Cast on during the opening ceremony and bind off during the closing ceremony.  I did a couple adjustments to the pattern including removing the popcorn bobble in the pattern and I also reduced the amount of sections at the end opting for a smaller design.  It was a fun pattern that reminds me that I still want to make a Boneyard Shawl!  This was my first time working with Brooklyn Tweed and I enjoyed the loftiness, earthiness, and color.


I also had the pleasure once more of doing some community art work.  I have been able to work with a group of friends in my community doing large scale art installations for our film fest called True False.  This group dubbed "the fiber mavens" created 4 panels this year using traditional embroidery stitches with upcycled fabric on hardware cloth.  The four images were of microscopic views of a leaf, cracked mud, pebble and a topographic map.  They hung outside one of the venues.  I loved these this year!




For my upcoming projects I have two on the horizon- one is a pair of fingerless mitts for the upcoming March For Our Lives knit along.  This is a vision by the co-creator of the Pussyhat movement.  I will share more in another post on my progress when I get ready to start the eye embroidery but more information can be found here if you are interested.





As I look forward to some spring break knitting, like many other knitters I saw and fell in love with the shawl/scarf from the Black Panther movie.  It has hit the knitting community like wild fire with knitters trying to decipher a pattern and the yarns.  Both the costume designer for the movie and the pattern designer have been really accessible to the knitting community.  The pattern was designed for machine knitting which as far as I can tell quite a bit different from hand knitting.  They also listed out some of the yarns used as well.  The great thing is that what stands out in this scarf is the combination of the yarns, colors, and textures.  Really you can decide on some different stitch patterns you like and roll with that along with some yarns you enjoy.


I am using Noro Silk Garden in colorway #417, Madelinetosh Dandelion in colorway Shire- this is discontinued (I totally guessed on this one based on early tweets and found a shop online that had a skein before it was announced) Madelinetosh Merino Light in colorway Plaid Blanket, and Malabrigo Mechita in colorway Hojas.

Wish me luck as I just let my creative juices lead the way on the stitch patterns.  You can find the pattern here.



And to throw in some wood element I wanted to share that I have added a new font option for the calendars- a fun cursive option.

What are you wrapping up at winter's end?

Ahhhh, they are finally here- the Winter Olympics!  I am a junkie when it comes to the winter games.  I love them!  It is a great time to take shelter and curl up with my crew and wig out on the games with good food and lots of hot cups of beverages.

It does seem as though Christmas is barely out the door and our American commercial senses are overloaded with images of spring.  Valentines Day is snuck in there, but it makes it a bit harder to imagine that we still have several weeks of winter ahead of us before we can awaken our spring selves.

Last week at the first of February, it is a time to celebrate mid-winter.  This year there was also a pretty amazing celestial event of the Super Blue Blood moon happening right on the eve of the mid-winter celebrations.  Since I did not do my best to pay attention I completely missed the lunar eclipse as I did not pay attention to my am vs pm- ugh.  But in my new place of balancing expectations with traditions I rolled with it and ended up doing most of my mid-winter honoring yesterday.

We had all been running at a pretty fast pace this last week and another round of this stubborn head and bronchial cold set in for my husband so we took it easy most of the weekend and canceled plans that had us in large social circles and preparing lots of shared food.

It might have been super bowl Sunday but it was a little hybrid for us.  We got a small snow shower for a couple hours which made me want to hunker down even more.  We still had some wings, guacamole, and tacos; but I also made some oat Bannock bread that I had wanted to make for the first of February.



I used this recipe for an unleavened oat Bannock bread with rosemary.  I really enjoyed it- I did tweak it a bit and replaced the refined sugar with honey and I did not sprinkle sugar on top of the caudle.  In the future I would cut back at least half on the fresh rosemary, but the combination of the hearty rolled oats, oat flour, fresh orange zest, and rosemary was lovely.  I served it with some fresh berries and coffee during the second half of the game last night that we watched in our cozy basement with candles lit.



Where does knitting come into this?  Often the mid-winter celebrations to Brigid/Brigit also involved honoring sheep as this is the time of the year when ewes begin to birth and lactating new milk.  So I looked through my stash and found an awesome earthy Rowan Prelife British Sheep Boucle undyed yarn from my last Fiber Share swap and knit up a little rustic matt for our old magazine/bookshelf.  I used huge needles and knit up this sweet little square to go under the candle.  I might need to grab a bit of sheep milk cheese just for good measure before the next snow comes in this week!

I do love spring but am ready to embrace the last of winter in my home that we worked hard on remodeling.  Plus there is the huge bonus of the Winter Olympics starting this week- I finally decided on my olympic knitting project- now to make final decision on which yarn to use!