Good heavens.  It’s been a week and a half.  I’m a delinquent blogger.
According to the thesaurus, you could also say, "behindhand, derelict, disregardful, heedless, inattentive, indifferent, lax, lazy, negligent, regardless, remiss, slack, thoughtless, uncaring, unmindful".
Welll…  thoughtless?  uncaring?  No, no.  Let’s call it "unmotivated" and blame it on the computer class I’ve signed up for, at [...]

Well, apparently it isn’t true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  I learned a new one a couple of days ago.
OK, technically, I’d heard about it a long time ago from Marlene, who once told me that she often knits while working out.  Yeah, I admit I was skeptical — how the [...]

A portion of an email I recently received from a person I went to engineering school with, who found me online –

… remember that you liked to knit.  It was one of your many odd/charming features!

Hmmm.
Well.
He could’ve at least put "charming" first!

Last week, I wrote about some great things I am fortunate to have in my life:  DH, yarn, a specific cat.
This week, I have even more great things to write about:  specifically, Ben and Jerry’s "Birthday Cake" ice cream some really fabulous, generous knitters and blog readers, not to mention family and friends!  My heartfelt [...]

One of the cold hard truths I learned when I quit the engineering job and started setting my own schedule was this:

You can’t get anything done on the days when DH is home.

It was surprising to me — after all, why on earth should it matter if he is upstairs in bed sick with a [...]

Here is what it looks like from my office window and my backyard these days:
 

And here is the yoke to my top-down raglan sweater so far.

With all this snow, and everything being cancelled, you might think I’d have gotten a bit more knitting done, wouldn’t you?
However, there have been extenuating circumstances.  A couple of colds [...]

Oh, boy.  It’s been, like, a week and a half.  What happened to blogging?
Well, I’ll tell you what happened to blogging.  Life happened, that’s what.  That, and as I mentioned recently, knitters wanting knitting lessons have reappeared this fall with a vengeance.  In the past month, my teaching hours each week have been up 50-70% [...]

OK, I know both of you were kind of worried about it, but I believe I have figured out an elegant solution to a looming knitting problem:
What on earth do I take along to knit in New Zealand??
See, it’s a three-week trip (not to mention a loooong flight), so I couldn’t possibly go without taking [...]

Seen in the latest Classic Elite Yarns email newsletter:
 

"Who doesn’t like a good excuse to get out the needles?" 

 
Holy crap — you’re supposed to have an excuse???

Hey, we’re back from our trip to [Sasquatch->] over the Memorial Day Weekend.  And it was an interesting weekend.
(BTW, this post really does include something pretty interesting about sock heels too, although that bit’s way at the end.  Just skip down there if you must.)
Sasquatch is a big 3-day music festival held annually in an [...]

Earlier this year, one of my very good students & friends moved far, far away.  Very sad.  She is living somewhere warm & sunny now, so I’m not even sure what she’s going to knit from now on.
One of the things I like best about this friend — I’ll call her "Karla" –

(hi Karla!  I warned [...]

Over the weekend, I had a touch of  "the depression" *.
Specifically, I had the knitting depression.
I didn’t have a single decent current project, the UFOs were one big pile o’ crap, I hated everything in my hotlist **.

I HAD NOTHING TO KNIT.

If this sounds to you a bit like closet angst (I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR), you [...]

As part of "fun weekend", DH and I went and visited a place on the other side of the river, called "SCRAP".

SCRAP — The School and Community Reuse Action Project – is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our mission is to promote creative reuse and environmentally sustainable behavior by providing educational programs and affordable materials to the [...]

Admittedly, I haven’t written much in the past week (heck, I haven’t written anything).  But, I have an excellent excuse reason.  Actually, several reasons…

#1 reason is, I have a bad Continental knitting habit of using my right index finger to help out on each and every stitch.  I don’t actually need to use it — I can [...]

The other night, I complained mentioned to my loving, caring DH how my feet had been freakin’ FREEZING ALL DAY.
DH was kicked back sideways on the chair-and-a-half, with his legs propped up over the arm of the chair and his feet aloft.  He said smugly in a very meaningful manner,

"YOU should wear hand-knit socks more often."

Well, it was obvious just [...]

The upsurge in the popularity of knitting in the past half-dozen years or so, coupled with the Internet, has been a mixed blessing to me.  Browsing the online knitting world, I am continually reminded that there are all kinds of knitters, many of whom I probably have little or nothing in common with.
It took me a [...]

On Tuesday afternoons, for the past few weeks now, I’ve been helping out my friend Patricia [(namasteknitter)->http://www.namasteknitter.blogspot.com] with an after-school knitting club at her son’s elementary school.
You have to realize that this is a completely foreign world to me. I don’t have kids. I don’t really like kids. I was the baby of my own [...]

Of course, this means I’m in at [Ravelry->].
Actually, I got invited about a week ago, but haven’t had time to go exploring before now. What fun! Lots to do!
Unfortunately for me, someone already has the username “tessknits” – so on Ravelry I’m now known as “tessm”. Maybe we should start a group on Ravelry for [...]

You may have noticed – I like green.
Just about any shade of green really, even the ugly ones – with the possible exception of really light minty green. See, I’m a natural redhead, and it’s something I just can’t help. One of my personal slogans is,
“I never met a green yarn I didn’t like.”
Thus it [...]

So, you may have noticed that in the previous post, I said that my sister was knitting a sweater for her fiance.
YIKES! but what about the famous, infamous Sweater Curse? 
I didn’t know about the Sweater Curse then: I was only 6, after all. The Curse didn’t work on her though, because my sister did get [...]

I can trace my original fascination with knitting back to age 6. That’s when my big sister, Bets, came for her very last Christmas visit home – because she was engaged, and would be married in April. (Bets and I are at either end of a large family – there are 17 years between us).
And [...]

“A year from now, you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
OK, so I’m starting today. Hiya. Welcome to my blog! I intend for this to be a blog about knitting, mainly, with some color commentary about life and whatnot thrown in.

My goals for this blog / website:
 

to disseminate good, accurate, free information [...]