I just can’t seem to have a contest with only one winner, so I picked three names from the hat. Plus there were so many entries, how wonderful! Thank you to everyone who entered!!

WINNER # 1: DANIELLE! You have won some very nice wool yarn to make yourself (or someone else) a scarf, hat or a pair of mittens! Please send me your snail mail address (see email below) so I can get your prize out to you.

WINNER # 2: CRYSTAL! You have won also won very nice yarn, but not necessarily for a winter accessory! Please send me your snail mail address (see email below) so I can get your prize out to you.

WINNER # 3: KITTEN WITH A WHIPLASH! You have won something knitting related – could be yarn, could be something else. Please send me your snail mail address (see email below) so I can get your prize out to you.

My snail mail address: midwestknitgirl AT gmail DOT com

CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU ALL!!

I have not fallen off the face of the earth, I promise. Life has just been a crazy, stressful, wild ride but we’re on an upswing, finally! For an update on all that go to the cancer blog.

Because of all that craziness I missed posting a contest in October for my blogoversary, instead, though it’s a few days late I’m posting it now but I’m sure you won’t mind. Who doesn’t like a contest?

CONTEST RULES

Contest open between 11/02/2009 – 11/08/2009 (midnight CST)

1. Leave a comment on this post – say anything you like, say hello, tell me how your day is, whatever. Just leave any comment and you will be entered into the contest.
2. Entries accepted from anywhere, not just U.S.A.
   
3. Only one comment/entry per person.

The winner will be drawn and announced via my next post on

Tuesday, November 9th.

PRIZE

Yarn! What else from Chez Midwest Knit Girl?

The prize will be enough very good quality wool or wool blend yarn from my stash, to make a winter accessory. Such as a pair of mittens, a hat, or a scarf.

The color and specific type of yarn you will receive will be up to me but as I am a yarn snob, rest assured you will like what I send you.

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE!

]]> http://knitgirl63.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/blogoversary-contest/feed/ 23 knitgirl63 http://knitgirl63.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/who-authorized-the-snow/ http://knitgirl63.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/who-authorized-the-snow/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:12:00 +0000 knitgirl63 http://knitgirl63.wordpress.com/?p=899 ]]>

I woke up to this today, good thing I mowed the yard yesterday!

I’m addicted. Seriously addicted. To making string pieced blocks for quilting projects. How in the world did this happen? Yowza!

I’m going to make my mom a chemo quilt to keep her warm during her treatments, I’m calling it the Happy Crazy Smile quilt. I’ll be making 24 – 12″ blocks that will be cut into various sizes. This is the first 12″ block done (click to go to flickr for larger sizes of all pictures):

I made these blocks for the swaps I mentioned in the previous post. The first 2 sets of 6 start out as 7″x7″ but have since been cut to 6 1/2″x 6 1/2″. The pink one at the bottom is 12 1/2″ x 12 1/2″.

As for my other sewing: Here are a couple of the sets of coasters I tried to sell at the craft fair. Yes, there’s a safety pin in the corners, it’s just to keep the sets together in the travel bag. Each set has a different fabric on the back, that way you have two ways of displaying them.

I went to a couple of craft/art fairs in the last month or so and picked up a few things:

A set of 4 placemats, about 16 x 16, blue/white gingham on back. They’re very similar in look to the old fashioned oil cloth fabric.

A serving bowl and chip/dip bowl by Adama Sow, perfect for a party. Didn’t notice until I got home, they coordinate with the place mats!

An acorn pin for a certain someone, made from clay. Very cool.

Another gift for someone, it’s made from fused glass.

A hanging for our south window in the living room, also fused glass. About 13″x 13″. Sorry for the towel but we haven’t hung it up yet.

I also purchased a pretty sun catcher and a tote bag. The tote bag is made from the same ‘fabric’ as the place mats but not in a fruit pattern. The bag is reversible, silver/gray inside, gray floral print on black on the outside. I’ll get those pictures here this week. I forgot to take pictures because I already hung up the sun catcher and have been using the bag for school.

Okay, I’m hungry and need to do homework. I’ll be putting an update about my mom at the cancer blog tonight or tomorrow. She’s doing well. I’m not surprised. That’s my mom.

I heart fall. I do, I do, I do. The wind, the cloudy skies (and often bright and sunny ones), the smell of wet leaves. I know I’m probably odd that way but it works for me – so there. Unfortunately, the hubster prefers summer or at least more sunshine than I do. Can’t win them all from Mother Nature!

I had no idea it had been so long since my last post. What has been going on, you ask?

• I finished knitting the lace scarf with the yarn I received from Gimmesanity and will be blocking it this week. It’s so pretty!
• I started a pair of socks this weekend with the yarn I received from Yarny Old Kim.
• I made 156 cloth coasters for an arts and crafts fair and sold….drum roll please…ZERO! However, I gave two sets to a friend of my hubster’s, one for him and one for his parents. His mother loved them and said “It was the wrong crowd to sell them to because these are priced just right and they’re really cute.” That made me feel better because she’s been to and sold items at a ton of places. Another friend said perhaps beer cozies would have been better for them to which I added, why not sell cut off tshirts to let that old muffin top hang out along with the beer cozies? Haa! If nothing else, people will be getting coasters as stocking stuffers for a few years to come. I may also try to sell them at a consignment shop or at my etsy store. No big deal.
• I’ve really been getting into sewing. Don’t tell my knitting needles but it’s really been fun and I think I’m addicted to a new technique! I’m in a swap on swap-bot.com to exchange string pieced quilt blocks using shades of pink (October is breast cancer awareness month which is when this one will be swapped, hence the color choice of pink). The finished size is 12.5 x 12.5 which when you create your quilt or whatever you’ll make with it, it will be 12 x 12, and you have to make two of them as you have two partners. I made three. I loved the fabrics I picked so much I wanted one of them! Those will get mailed out next week.
• I’m also in another swap on swap-bot.com to make more string pieced quilt blocks but in a much smaller size (finished mailing size 6.5 x 6.5 to be used as a final size of 6 x 6). The beauty of this swap is that there isn’t a specific color theme so you can go crazy with your fabric scraps and not have to buy any fabric at all. For the bigger one I did in pink I did have to buy fabric. But I bought fat quarters, five of them, spent $10 and got three blocks out of all that fabric. In fact I know I could get one more in that size out of it so really – $2.50 per quilt block in that big of a size? Deal of the century!
• Fall semester started Aug 26th so I’ve been in school four days a week. Afternoons, really, except for Tuesday’s when it’s pretty much all day. I am still enjoying it though am also still annoyed at the young ones who play on facebook or IM their friends when the instructor is lecturing. I’m just so big on respect and this is just plain rude. But one of my very good friends is a middle school teacher pointed out that this is a whole different culture today then we were in school. Simply no comparison between having a blackberry or cell phone versus paper and pencil and a push button land line.
• I’m behind on photos of things so my next post will be just that, photos.

Later, ya’ll.

I received my order from Knit Picks today. I haven’t bought any knitting related stuff in a long time but I justified the order for that very reason. Haa! I bought:

p.s. I think I’m going to take a little nap and then do some sewing.

I am so tickled. Especially since the last 48 hours or so haven’t been much fun for us (see cancer blog link). Yarny Old Kim sent me a gift – just because! – and it’s so pretty and so beautiful I almost don’t want to tell you because you may become jealous. But I will.

She sent me a gorgeous skein of Pagewood Farm, Hand Dyed Sock Yarn “Alyeska”, the colorway is called Mardi Gras (Mardi Gras is number 12, scroll down the page to see the picture). Talk about a happy skein with fun colors!! She also included a single-use thingy of Soak (it’s purple and scented, called A Scent for Celebration). The card was a hoot…it has a picture of three urinals on the front and on the inside is a personal message from her  but the back of the card has its name which is “Urine My Thoughts”. Yes, Kim and I both have an odd sense of humor.

Thank you a billion times over for such a lovely surprise, Kim. It’s making everything else that much easier to get through. You ROCK!

SCHOOL

You know you’re a dork as an adult when you’re excited to start school. Even more excited to buy your school supplies! And you’re not even a teacher, you’re a student.

Today is my first day of school for fall semester. I’m enrolled in three courses – Medical Office Procedures, Medical Terminology & Disease I, Word 2007. I’ve got all my books, I’ve got my bus schedule figured out for each day and I have a Go To College bus pass. Talk about the deal of the century. It’s $84 for 5 months (today through Dec 31) for public transportation. You can take the bus, the light rail, doesn’t matter. There’s no limit on how many rides you take. It’s almost better than my school supplies because I can use it to go to the mall for shopping (shhh….) or to the library to study. But I’m sure I’ll be doing more studying than shopping.

I can already tell that the medical terminology course will be a great challenge and not just for the course itself. I’ll probably lose weight just carrying the book – it weighs 6# 6 oz. Isn’t that the size of a baby?? Hey, I just realized that it weighs the same as my laptop so I COULD lose weight or at least create muscles with one in each hand. The book has 1030 pages and is larger than a normal sized book, probably 10 x 11. Yikes.

FAMILY

We had a family event this weekend at my mom’s. Her husband’s birthday was last week and so it was an awesome reason for everyone to get together. It had been a long time since I’d seen many of my cousins (seeing their updates on facebook isn’t quite the same as seeing them, you know, tough to hug an image online) and aunts and uncles. I hadn’t even seen my little brother since Mother’s Day or my sister for that matter. Oh, my godchild was there too and I hadn’t seen her in 3 years. She’s so grown up now being all of 20 years old…when did that happen?? Who said she could grow up? Stop the madness!

We also have a new baby in the family (congratulations to J&J!), well, not until next February but that means I get to knit little somethings for a baby. Or a lot of little somethings. Just think, sockies, blankets, hats, sweaters, oh the possibilities are endless. And they’re perfect travel-to-school projects, yes?

HUBSTER

The hubster is hanging in there, going to see the oncologist on Wed this week. I can’t be there as I have school but I’ll update the cancer blog once we know what’s going to happen moving forward. For now, he’s doing okay.

p.s. I owe e-mails to a few people and I’ll get to that this week, I promise.

Gosh, where do I start? I know, UP NORTH!

Note – very long and photo intensive post. You can bypass clicking on the photos to make them larger as you go through the post by clicking on this link to the whole collection of the vacation photos. Once there you can choose which set or place we visited to look at. At each picture you’ll see an option called ‘all sizes’. Click there to see larger. Except for a couple of pictures in this post, they’re all pretty small to save space.

The North Shore

Love him but he drives like he’s an old man. He’s only 56 but his thought is, why get there so fast? Let’s take Hwy 61 once we get to Taylors Falls and avoid the freeway. I agree, thinking it would only add maybe a half hour to our first destination in Two Harbors. Baaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa!! I was sooooo wrong. I won’t even tell you how long it took, it’s too painful. So we’ll just jump to the first place we stayed, shall we?

First stop is the Superior Shores Resort located on a great little pebble beach (read: no sand, just pebbles of all different sizes). They have a restaurant on site called Kamloops that we ate dinner at both nights. One of the nights the hubster left his cap at the table, when I went to retrieve it the waiter asked if we should place it on the bear that stands by the register and I can take a picture of it – perfect! (The sign says welcome on one side and go away on the other, as they were closing for the night it said go away.)

There is a really neat area leading to the beach on the property where they have a large collection of decorated rocks. From what we could tell it was people noting events such as a wedding (in fact, look for the rock dated August 1, 2009, near the middle of the picture). We forgot to do this. But I did do some graffiti in Lutsen later in the trip, so not all was lost.

Below are pictures of the shore, a couple of the lighthouse/harbor we visited, the hubster and a out of focus shot of moi.

Except for the little bit of sand you see at the front of the picture below, the shore is all pebbles. Very challenging to walk on!

Cool driftwood:

View of lighthouse from shore

Funky thing on the walkway to the lighthouse

Warning Will Robinson!

Me, playing with the camera. It’s clearly blurry, I know. Ever do one of those art assignments in school where you find a full on shot of someone in a magazine, cut it right down the middle, then you have to draw the other half? I do. But here I just screwed up.

Silver  Bay

Or Sliver Bay as the hubster calls it. Quite a different and unique place to visit. Known for its taconite industry, they even have their own mascot Rocky Taconite.

The first picture is the hubster posing with Rocky – too bad he didn’t have a pick axe at the time, could have mimicked Rocky. The second picture is just Rocky and then the plaque about Rocky and taconite.

If you want to read the plaque you’ll definitely have to click it to get the biggest picture.

Moon shot at the place we stayed for one night, then up to Grand Marais!

Gooseberry Falls

We stopped at Gooseberry Falls on the way to Grand Marais. More photos at flickr if you’re interested. Water is a tad low this year but it was still pretty to see. The hubster sat on a bench and waited for me, unfortunately he didn’t have the energy to walk that far.

I thought these tree roots were crazy!

Grand Marais

What a pretty place – I could stay there forever. Seriously – 71 degree average in August??? With a breeze??? Right up my alley. I took a number of walk abouts into town by myself so the hubster could nap or hang out in his chair, he just didn’t have the energy to go with me. No problem, I know how to shop spend money tour on my own. We were in GM for two nights so I had plenty of time to roam around. I found a couple of t-shirts, some awesome fudge, a neat gift for my friend Sharon (she’s going to need this after her officer’s training is done) and a totally cool wall plaque made from slate. I hung out at the harbor and did some knitting, reading and walking. Much enjoyment was had even by the napping dude.

You’ll definitely have to click on this one to appreciate its beauty. Also, there’s a label on the back of it that describes it and the artist. That’s at my flickr account here. The plaque is about 24″ high x 8″ wide.

The hubster soaking up the sunshine but behind the truck so not affected by my desired breeze.

Awesome moon shot over Lake Superior (if I do say so myself). I wasn’t able to get it reflected on the lake, too many buildings in the way.

Naptime for the dude:

Lutsen / Schroeder

On the way down from Grand Marais to Schroeder, where we thought would be our last place to stay for our vacation, we stopped at a couple of hysterical historical markers and relaxed, and took a tram or gondola ride in Lutsen. We also had lunch on the deck outside – this tram was a riot, old, crickety, built only for two normal sized adults. Yes, I did scratch our name inside a heart on the observation deck with my snip-scissors but since the rest of the world has done it as well, no harm, no foul.

Here’s a shot of Lake Superior from the top of the summit at Lutsen, mind you this is just a miniscule part of its shoreline. LS really, truly does look like an ocean. Heck, it’s darn near big enough to be one and half the time you can’t see over to Wisconsin.

Remember the song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? This ocean lake is where it happened, folks. Link to the lyrics if you’re so inclined to read them, I tear up everytime I hear the song. There a lot of stories about LS and you can google or bing Duluth or Lake Superior to read about them. It’s a fascinating lake.

I literally hung the camera out of the gondola window & hoped for the best, not bad, eh?

Note the birch trees, many are damaged due to an ice storm last year.

My grafitti on the observation deck:

Fog in Schroeder at Superior Ridge Resorts

The hubster in shadow standing in one of the buildings under construction where we stayed. We had fog one entire day of the two we were there but we loved it – so quiet. Not even birds! Also, neither of ever saw a squirrel the entire time we were there. Odd, eh?

From Schroeder we headed to Two Harbors for lunch and then planned to head back home. However, on the way I called one of my best friends who just happens to own a little place on Park Point in Duluth (you have to cross the lift bridge to get there) to see if she had come up from the cities or not. Turns out she had so we decided to visit and stay over on Sunday night.

We had so much fun and relaxed so well we just couldn’t leave on Monday so we stayed another night. Oh, before heading for Two Harbors we stopped at the Temperance River. You can click here for those pictures. Below are a few of the pictures from our visit with the best hippie chick on Park Point. Said hippie chick and I have been friends since about 1978 or 1979.

You should know who this is by now.

Sunset on the bay side of Park Point

The Egyptian Hippie Chick

KNITTING MOJO!

Yes. It’s back. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF! I think I had lost temporarily it due to school, cancer stress and all the other goodies crap that happened this summer. But I was looking at the Fall Interweave Knits magazine before we left for vacation and saw a pretty tunic pattern. I knew I wouldn’t make the tunic, would only make me look preggers. But I loved the lace pattern down the center of it.

I am simply knitting the lace pattern as noted in the magazine with 5 seed stitches on either side and a few rows of seed stitch will be at each end. Mind you the photos are NOT blocked and please do not condemn Midwest Knit Girl for sloppy lace knitting as this is actually my first lace project where I’ve done more than 20 rows of knitting without giving up. I knew this had to be the right thing to make because I even laminated the chart (after blowing it up in size on the printer)! I’ve completed about 24 inches of it, unstretched.

Buy One Get One Free (aka BOGO)

You’ve all heard or seen that phrase, right? To me that says if you pay $30 for the first item you get a second item that is equal to or of lesser value for $0 (that’s zero dollars). Try getting this to work with buying new glasses. I went to a well known optical place this past week for an exam and then went back a couple of days later to pick out frames. I was hoping to get someone to go with me to pick them out because I can’t see anything in focus without my glasses if it’s further away then about 3 inches. Unfortunately, I couldn’t sucker con persuade get anyone to go with me – hey, they work, I don’t. I forgive them.

So I decide to be a grown up and do this all by myself. Things seem to be going well, the woman said if you buy one pair of glasses at regular price the second pair is completely free. I figure hey, why not get prescription sunglasses as the second pair? Then I wouldn’t have to wear the little clippy things on my regular glasses. (BTW, I can’t do contacts – though I could when I was younger and loved them – because I need a prism in my lens to help my eyes balance, can’t put a prism in contacts nor can you get bi-focals which I am now cursed blessed with).

I pick out frames for my regular glasses and find a pair for the sunnies. She calculates the price and here’s what the total is = $685 for both pair OR $421 for just (JUST?) the regular pair. How is this BOGO, I ask. Well, it’s not exactly that because you can’t apply your insurance to one pair so you have pay full price for one of the frames as well as full price for the lenses. Huh. Not going to happen. So I said I would only do the regular pair. Well, have I told you about the credit card offer we have, 6 months no payments, no interest? I start to laugh – no offense, miss, but I’m unemployed and my husband is also unemployed, not to mention he’s on permanent disability. Credit card? Not a good risk. Doh. (The ‘Doh’ was to myself. I think.)

BOGO my butt.

Okay, that’s enough for a while. If you made to the end, I applaud you!! And thank you from the bottom of my gray roots.

TTFN!

Watch for a Saturday post on knitting mojo, vacation, and a not so free ‘buy one get one free’ offer rant. The BOGO reference will make sense later, maybe. Yet I should admit it’s still confusing to me and I was there.