strawberry pie and a quilted table runner

Joining Taryn today at Wooly Moss Roots blog for Gratitude Sunday:

Feeling grateful today and this week for:
:: extra time spent with my daughter. She went to a day camp this week close to work and I was able to have her stay with me until her camp started and then walk her over. At the end of the day I walked back over and picked her up, then finished my work while listening to her tales of the day.

:: arthritis in my back. An odd thing to be grateful for to be sure but it's flare-up was the catalyst to a long awaited change in my weekdays. I manage the receiving end of things at an outdoor store and have been feeling the need for a change for awhile. Efforts to find a job elsewhere have come to nothing. It was the arthritis in my back that forced me to go to my employer and rework my responsibilities so that I no longer deal with the heavy lifting and only work 2 days a week. A blessing to be sure.

:: hope for new beginnings.

:: a safe trip to and from delivering The Boy to Scout camp.

:: strawberry pie cooling in the kitchen

:: finishing the quilted table runner I started last week. I made it out of scraps from my stash and it looks awesome. Now I'm all fired up to make something else.

:: getting the needles and therefore the gauge right on the new pair of socks I'm knitting. Love love love the colour.

:: waking up this morning and going through my day not feeling exhausted and counting the hours until bedtime. It is so nice to feel rested for once.
Wishing you a peaceful, productive week. Knit on zen mother!

Knittin' and Road-Trippin'

Today was road-trip day. We had to take the boy up to Scout camp at the Haliburton Scout Reserve which is a bum-numbing 700 km round trip. The scenery is beautiful once you get off the main highway but 80kms of nothing but trees and rocks loses it's novelty after awhile.

The Scout troop he belongs to is so well-organized (at least from this parent's point of view) and the leaders are great at, well, leading these kids. While my husband went off to talk to the leaders I got a chance to watch how my Aspergian interacts with kids other than his usual friends. He does alright I must say and seems to fit in pretty well, joking and talking to the kids and looking relaxed and happy. I think he'll have a good time.
The trip back was quiet-just my husband and me and no one nattering on in the backseat. That kid can talk! We stopped for ice cream at the Thornton Ice Cream Parlour. I don't know too many ice cream parlours around and this is one I remember stopping at when I was a kid. It's in a tiny little place called, appropriately enough, Thornton.
We stopped again for an early poutine dinner at a little place tucked in a nook on a tiny street in Orangeville. You've got to love french fries drowning in gravy with cheese curds!
 It's nice to drive in peace and quiet and stop when you want to or just keep going.

For car knitting I brought along a big ball of possibly alpaca wool that my friend picked up for me in Peru. There was a bit of a language barrier when she bought it so she's not 100% sure it's alpaca. It's not hairy like alpaca usually is but it feels lovely and smells like natural fibres as opposed to acrylic.
I have Betsy Lee McCarthy's book Knit Socks! and I decided to give her Diamonds and Cables pattern a go with this possibly-alpaca wool and a pair of US 2/ 2.75mm dpns. I hate hate hate knitting a gauge swatch and instead just grab the needles I think will work and start knitting. If I like the tension I'm getting I keep going, if not I rip it out and start again with new needles. This is how I roll. I tell myself this method takes just as long as knitting a gauge swatch and if I guess right I'm ahead of the game and have a bunch of sock knitted instead of a useless piece of square knitting. So having said all that and knowing that many of you are cringing and getting all knotty in the stomach at my brazen ways I knit the ribbing and started on the pattern and figured out the needles were way too big for this fine wool. And of course I hadn't brought along other needles, I was feeling so confident.
The pride before the fall.
But fear not!! There is a knitting store in Haliburton where I picked up not new needles but a whole new ball of sock wool! My logic might be slightly skewed but keep in mind I'd been looking at rocks and trees for 100kms by then and it was 29C outside and our car is not air conditioned.

Isn't that a great colour??

The wool is from Nova yarns. It's called Nova Value Collection Sock Print and is 75% superwash wool and 25% nylon.

And this is the new sock I knitted. I think the needles are still too big and I'm going to rip it out again and try once more with 2.5mm dpns and see if that tightens things up. 

Once I get the needles and tension thing all sorted out I'll be ready for next Saturday when we do this all over again to pick him up. Maybe I'll have a whole pair done to show you after 9 hours in the car and 700kms! Knit on zen mother!

Gratitude Sunday on Monday July 7th

Joining Taryn today at Wooly Moss Roots blog for Gratitude Sunday:
Feeling grateful today for:
-strawberry-rhubarb jam

-Warm July weather, not stifling hot weather
-belated birthday celebrations for a certain 13 year old boy

-lunch under the maple tree
-sleeping until I'm done
-playing in the dirt, weeding and sneaking in 2 more perennials before the afore-mentioned stifling hot weather arrives.
-a long-awaited change in my day to day schedule. A little less working and a little more time to pursue my own interests.
What about you? What are you grateful for this Monday?

Green Tea Raglan and The Kazidin Method

Joining Ginny today at Small Things blog for Yarnalong:

Knitting away at the Green Tea Raglan. Not sure how this is going to go but I sure am enjoying it right now.
What I'm reading: The Kazidin Method for Parenting your Defiant Child. Parenting in this house has always been a challenge, what with the OCD from my husband and the K-man's Asperger's Disorder. Our daughter has always been what I defined as spirited and high-energy. We are still in the process of assessing her for something else, but it's slow-going. In the meantime we're dealing with some challenging behaviour that is making me want to pull out my hair.
I have read a truckload of parenting books on Autism Spectrum Disorder and general parenting books and at one point threw my hands up and said "No more!". However dealing with several melt-downs a day from a 10 year old had me scrambling for all my resources-library, internet, other parents. In my search I kept coming across this book: The Kazidin Method for Parenting your Defiant Child so I'm giving it a go. I find all parenting books boil down to the same concepts presented in different ways-love your child, spend good quality time with them, praise them for the good stuff, feed them well and make sure they get enough sleep. This one does not disappoint and so far (I'm on chapter 3) he takes the praising bent. I've been using it with good results over the last day or so.
It's not the most exciting read but it has to be done. The chick-lit can wait another week or two :)

This is the wool I'm using to knit up the Green Tea Raglan. It looks great in moss stitch.

My neighbours moved away today, probably because of the crazy lady next door chucking wool on bushes and taking pictures.

And rocks.
What about you? What are you knitting and reading?

Canada Day-rainbows, reading, water and knitting.

This is where I was this weekend. We found ourselves with the Canada Day long weekend off so we headed up to the cottage for a few days. The weather was hot and sunny and I think we spent most our time either in the lake or eating. 

I also spent a fair amount of time here staring out at the lake or the kids. Both equally interesting for different reasons.

I finished We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickenson-Rich on the weekend and found a couple of other books lurking on our bookshelves that I began. Underneath the old book is one by Sharon Butala, a woman who finds herself in the middle of the prairie of south-western Saskatchewan on a ranch with her new husband and not much required of her. I've only read about 2 or 3 chapters but it sounds like it's about her observations of nature and her place in it. As a family, our happy place is our cottage and I find myself drawn to all these stories about people living the simple life surrounded by one form or nature of another. It was hard to leave the book behind when it was time to go home but when one has to carry everything in and out of the cottage on one's back these choices have to made.
The wool is the scratchy dutch wool that I've been trying to find a pattern for. I realized there was no way I had enough to knit what I had in mind for the Herne rustic recipe pattern sweater and as we drove towards the cottage on Saturday morning I desperately scrolled through all the knitting patterns stored on my ipod Touch and stumbled across the Green Tea Raglan. It's a very simple, moss-stitched sweater intended for summery bamboo wool but I think made a bit bigger would be good as a vest-affair over a long-sleeved t-shirt. It may have been desperation at the prospect of 3 days without a knitting project that made me even begin this or maybe my love for anything moss-stitched, I don't know. I'm an eternal optimist though and my vision may just work. This might explain why I have 3 sweaters laying around my house that just don't work for one reason or another. Patient I am not.

We had a big thunderstorm during dinner on Sunday night and when it was all over, there was the obligatory rainbow.

On Monday we left, sadly, and drove as far as my parents who are sort of half way between the cottage and home. They live near Lake Rosseau in Muskoka. We promised the kids a swim after dinner and here is the beach on Lake Rosseau. It's a very different kind of cottaging, this Muskoka cottaging. There were lots of big boats and teenagers hanging out on the docks. Tourists everywhere. But the beach was nice and it was a great way to wrap up a busy day. This morning we left right after breakfast and drove through more rain to get home.
So, happy Canada Day to the Canadians and happy July 1st to everyone else.