His & Hers FO's

We have both been busy. While we were sitting with my DH's mom in the hospital, we sat side by side and knitted away. My DH's FO is his very first project, a cotton dish cloth. He was challenged by Amy and her daughter R to learn to knit. My FO is a Gedifra Top Soft Jacket. I love it! I had a few problems with the pattern, probably because it was translated from another language and there was one error in the pattern. Nevertheless, I am very happy with the finished product. Our dog Ginger seems pleased, too.

Gilet Sans Manches (Sleeveless Cardigan)

This vest is one of a pair that I made for my granddaughters. The other one is a barn red. I bought the yarn at the Phildar store when we were in France. I bought the pattern book there as well, and I had to have the pattern translated for me. The yarn was called Mure and was very nice to work with. I finished these vests in December and gave them to the girls. I had to get one back because I won a local crafts contest with it and need to take it to the district competition next week. I wish I had a photo of the two girls in their vest to show you. They are just too cute!

What's with the toes?!?!

These socks are knit from Noro Kureyon sock yarn. I loved the colors as soon as I saw the skein at Yarntopia. I carefully studied the pattern of the colorway when I started the first sock and made sure to start the second sock at the same point in the pattern. Everything went swimmingly until yesterday evening when I got to the toe. What the heck! Oh well, I do like the socks. The yarn was a bit scatchy as I knit it, but folks told me that the yarn would "bloom" once washed. Yep, that is what happened. I used my usual top down, short row heel and toe formula. I plan to send them off to Amy for display at Yarntopia for a bit. She wants to show her customers what the yarn looks like when knit up. I hope the surprise ending is okay with them.

Baby llama

Since I had already loaded this photo into my computer to send to Amy, I thought I would post it here. I knit this sweater as a shop sample for Yarntopia. I worked on it a good bit while we were in France, finished it months ago, but have not gotten to wear it yet since it was at Yarntopia. It is cold here today so maybe I can wear it once before the warm weather hits for good.

I am giving you the information about it by memory since I had to give Amy the labels. It is an Elsbeth Lavold (sp.?) pattern called Runnel and is made from her Baby Llama yarn. It feels like slightly fuzzy butter, reeeeeally soft. It looks like cables, but they are really mock cables which was great because I didn't have to carry around a cable needle and do all that fiddling.

The color in the picture looks more orange than it is. I'd say it is more a rust color. Anyway, it was a fun and satifying knit.

Ravelry

I just got invited to join Ravelry. I set up just a little of my profile. I know I haven't posted for a long time, so this should encourage me to get going again. I got discouraged because I could never figure out how to arrange words and multiple pictures to way I wanted them to look. So maybe I'll try brief posts with only one picture each. I have completed a bunch of things since my last post, so I will start out trying to catch up a bit. But since it is way past my bedtime on a Saturday night, I'll see what I can get on here tomorrow after church. Wish me luck. My user name on Ravelry is mapeach.

France, Chapter 2: Who was there

Our tour was lead by Kristeen Griffin-Grimes, a.k.a French Girl. Her husband Phil and son Deva kept us on the road and organized. I don't have good photos of Phil and Deva because they were alway on the move.

Our classes were lead by Annie Modisett, a.k.a. the Knitting Heretic. She's the one in the foreground. She is just about the wittiest teacher I ever had. We laughed almost as much as we knitted. We learned about combination knitting, using a chart for lace, cabling without a cable needle, a super way to bind off, entrelac, and a really nice bobble technique.

We were pleased to meet Miriam Tegels, the World's Fastest Knitter, a la Guinness Book of World records. She is from Holland and is a delightful person. She gave us a demonstration of her technique.

My beautiful daughter Amy was there, of course. I just had to post this photo. It is so lovely, it almost makes me weep. It was taken in Pezenas, which you will learn about in another post.

Amy's business partner Sheryl was there too. This photo was taken in Collioure, a town on the Meditteranean.

Tune in next time for Chapter 3, Where we went.

France, Chapter 1: Where we stayed

We stayed in a lovely bed and breakfast called La Vigneronne. It is in a tiny village called Faugeres and is a working winery as well as a central retail wine cellar for vineyards in the immediate area. See the two little windows at the top? That was our suite. You could leave the window open even though there was no screen because there were no bugs!

The lovely arched entrance in the second picture is to the kitchen area. We never went in there, but lovely things came out. Do you see the building extension coming out below our window in the first photo? That is where we ate breakfast everyday. We would wake up to the sound of someone crunching across the gravel from the kitchen to the table, carrying our croissants, bread, yogurt, cheese, jellies, juice, and COFFEE! We ate dinner 4 times at La Vigneronne and everyone agreed that they were the best meals we had while in France. There were at least 2 different local wines with each dinner, one with the appetizer (I can't spell the French way to say that) and one with the meal. The food was always exquisite and dessert was tres bon. The best dessert I had was fresh figs covered with a vanilla cream sauce which was incredibly delicious.



I will have to post my report of our trip in chapters since Blogger says 5 photos is the limit per post. Tune in again.