Tag Archives: Knitting

thanksgiving, some links, & a finished object

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Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because you get all the gratitude, joy, and time with family without a lot of the extra nonsense and pressure to conspicuously consume. You just eat and watch football, and when everyone goes home you have some extra time to put up the holiday decorations and take naps! What can be better than that?

Brandon & I started the day with the Detroit Turkey Trot, which is sponsored by the Parade Company and runs along the Detroit Thanksgiving Parade route. It was clear and cold and despite my initial reluctance to roll out of bed, I was so glad that I let Brandon convince me. The vibe is fun and excited, with folks camped out on the streets before the parade, slapping high fives to the runners and calling, “Happy Thanksgiving!”  We’d initially planned on doing the Drumstick Double (which would be the 10k and the 5k) but it cut it short to the 10k so we could get home a little earlier to prep for dinner. It’s a fast course, mostly downhill for the last half, and we had a tailwind, so I was pretty happy with our time.

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I heard there are around 18,000 participants for the Detroit Turkey Trot.

My parents drove down from northern Michigan to spend the day with us and meet their grandkitten Pot Roast. My mom makes the best pumpkin pie, and Miss L baked her famous cheese rolls for us. Brandon carved and my dad introduced him to the delicacy of the turkey neck, heart, and gizzard. (Barf.) Although Miss L did classically Thanksgiving-themed placecard drawings, I went with a more Scandinavian-themed table setting this year, which I always really like.

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We spent the rest of the weekend getting the house decorated for the holidays, and I watched some new-to-me YouTube knitting vlogs (Fiber Tales from Denmark!) while I finished up my Garment House hot water bottle cover. (Raveled. And it was purely a to-be-used knit, so I didn’t bother with gauge, switched to a slightly larger circular from dpn’s halfway through, and ran out of the stashed Cleckheaton Mohair that I was holding with a plain Lion’s Brand worsted. So it’s wonky but since it will spend most of its life tucked at the bottom of a bed, I’m not stressed.) Brandon’s cousin came over to help install the replacement dishwasher for my old Bosch, and Miss L started her Advent Calendar!

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Harry Potter Funko Pop! Advent Calendar 2019!

Sadly, my car “Finn” did not want to start when the long weekend was over, so it’s been a Monday with a tow truck and working from the car dealership. I was dreading the outcome – new starter? new alternator? new CAR?!? But needing a new battery was the best (and likely most inexpensive) outcome so I am now ready to face the rest of the week with a working car AND a new dishwasher!

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He felt like all the rest of us on a Monday morning after a long weekend…

I got creative with leftovers over the weekend and apparently I was not alone – Brandon texted me that all of the guys he works with brought turkey pot pies today for their lunch.  🙂

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I hope my American friends had a lovely holiday and all of my overseas friends had an equally lovely weekend. To close, I wanted to share a couple of links for anyone who is as Moomin-mad as I am. Finland is definitely on my bucket list!

What the Moomins can tell us about climate change

My search for the real Moominland

Sunday.

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A rare session of lunchtime knitting at the Matthei Botanical Gardens conservatory last week.

Turkey Tom is safely in our fridge defrosting and our new Turkey Trot shirts are neatly folded – BOTH waiting for their debut on Thanksgiving Day. Brandon, Miss L & I spent a nice Sunday working around the house – Miss L is becoming quite a little baker, after we’ve rabidly consumed most seasons of Great British Baking Show on Netflix, and when she puts her hair up in a messy bun, I know she’s about to produce something yummy- and a lot of dishes to boot. I love her cheese buns but the dishes are no joke. My Bosch, which I think was purchased when Lily was a baby, finally died and although I would have hoped to have gotten a few more years out of a Bosch, we bit the bullet and found a new Maytag on sale at Home Despot. To be delivered later this week and although my credit card is smoking hot after holiday shopping and will definitely need a post-holiday break, a dishwasher is kind of a big makes-my-life-a-lot-easier appliance that I don’t like going without. So it goes. In addition to getting the dishwasher sorted out, Brandon has spent a lot of time in the house doing renovations – building shelves in our spare room and hall closet, cleaning the basement and garage, unpacking his study, rearranging our belongings in the house, and hanging art. Wwe finally finished up a few projects today that gave us a working spare bedroom and much-needed storage space, and had some time after L went to her dad’s for a three mile run in the to-be-valued November sunshine.

Brandon is carving out a knitting corner for me in the upstairs bedroom, and I look forward to the day soon when I’ll have a painted shelf for my stash and knitting books and an old comfy armchair. Sarge has pretty much claimed the spare room bed for himself, as you can see in this shot of the knitting nook in-progress.

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It wasn’t a very relaxing weekend, but it was very productive, and very rewarding to see his belongings mesh with ours in this house. He has a great aesthetic and a talent for knowing what looks good, and his touch and his things have made me love our space even more. We are definitely not a couple that goes to Pottery Barn and buys a matching living room set and Home Goods art and has a carefully curated furniture storeroom. We’re much more of a mismatched, whimsical decorating style, things collected and handed down, things  meaningful and interesting and a little shabby. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I’m looking forward to a nice break later this week, catching up on some of my favorite vlogs (Ina Knits and By the Lakeside on YouTube), magazines (loving Midwest Living), knitting (still working on the hot-water bottle cover, Log Cabin blanket and the Isabel Kraemer Pink Memories sweater), television (Crown Season 3 and of course more Great British Baking Show), spending time with family, running the Detroit Turkey Trot on Thursday along the route of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and going ice skating at Campus Martius on Black Friday now that the Christmas tree is lit.

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Ina Knits on YouTube and a few rows of my Log Cabin blanket.

 

irons in the fire

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I feel like I have a lot of irons in the fire right now and I’m not really sure where to start with updates. (Or whether any of it is even remotely interesting to anyone except me.)

We went to see the Red Wings at home against the Maple Leafs last weekend…and sat right next to the Fox Sports broadcasting booth, which pleased Miss L to no end.

I’m knitting a lot and have finished objects!

I’ve turned out a few of these little pumpkins as harvest gifts for near and dear. Raveled and you can find me there at sixtenpine – it’s a quick and satisfying little pattern by Jan Lewis, Autumn Pumpkins. Meanwhile, knitting on my sweater has ground to a halt, and doesn’t look like it will resume in the short term, as my daughter has requested a new hat and fingerless mitts to match. For some reason she became deeply attached to the pink flat hat I knitted for the Women’s March a couple of years ago – I don’t think she wears it as a political statement, more because she likes the fit and the feel – but I have a vague feeling that at some point someone is going to say something to her about it and while I’d love to go nine rounds with anyone who would dare, the responsible parenting choice is probably a new flat hat for her in a less political color.

In running news, I’m slogging towards the November 2 half marathon in Savannah and have one 10-miler and one 11.5-miler into the bank. I have one more 10 or 11-miler planned for this week, and then what will be will be. I will be glad when the half and the Drumstick Double are done and I will no longer have to schedule 2-3 hour runs every weekend (and the corresponding exhaustion and soreness).

I’m reading lots and have some good reads to share at next month’s Show Us Your Books linkup…

And we’re continuing our inexorable march through the 20 Days of Halloween, with some pretty cool recent watches. Update to come in a separate post. (Lots of Margot Kidder, oddly enough.)

This weekend we’re headed “Up North” to do some leaf peeping, pie eating, hiking, and sleeping. Hopefully the fall colors are making a more brilliant display than they are down here right now!

Hope your October thus far is chilly, spooky, pumpkin-scented, and cozy!

apparatus room + spring break

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Last weekend, B & I had an official date night. We drove downtown and hit Warby Parker for some spectacle shopping (we both found pairs that we like) and then got a drink at the Buhl Bar. Buhl Bar is NOT a dive bar – it is a small, intimate corner bar that apparently was private for awhile and has only been open to the public for a few years.

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It was a blustery evening, but we shared an umbrella and walked down to the Apparatus Room for our reservation. Apparatus Room is on the ground floor of the Detroit Foundation Hotel, which used to be the Detroit Fire Department headquarters and still retains emblems of its past. Big red doors swing open in airy arched doorways; there is a chic post-industrial feel, brick and even fire poles, and art by local artists. There’s also a podcast loft, which we heard about from Karen and Georgia during their My Favorite Murder visit to the Fox Theater a few weeks ago.

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The chef has a 2 Michelin star rating and the food was wonderful. I had the miso eggplant and two glasses of buttery, beautiful pinot noir; B had scallops and we split the Brussels sprouts. It was a delicious evening and we can’t wait to go back. We capped off our date night at home under blankets watching the Motley Crue tell-all on Netflix, which we also thoroughly enjoyed in an entirely different way than our classy Detroit evening.

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In other news, it’s Spring Break week for Miss L so I am trying to wrap some things up at work and then take off up north for a few days with my folks. It’s not exactly the warm tropical destination that most people seek out for their Spring Break, but we never considered doing anything else. Miss L loves her grandparents, it’s the height of relaxation, and having a few days to sleep, knit, read, and maybe do some running, hiking, and shopping is perfect. And I do love a cold winter beach.

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the “killing commendatore” socks matched the cover of the book i was reading

So far this year, I finished one pair of socks, and they went so fast that I immediately cast on for another pair for my mom, thinking that I could get them done in a few weeks and then start the sweater that I’m planning. (My first sweater!)  The second pair, however, have taken forever, and then I ran out of yarn (!!! – the problem with using stash yarn that looks like enough but is just a bit short). So I went to my fave yarn store for a similar colorway and decided to just do the toes in the new colorway (which meant I had to rip back the toe in the sock I’d finished already).
Hopefully I can wrap these up this week and cast on for my new project – yes, the sweater. MTC and happy Spring Breaking.