Thanksgiving is Coming!

They say time flies, and boy does it. I'm not sure what happened to the month of November, since we're almost at the end of it already. Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I'm excited to have the day with Matt. Of course, he is scheduled to have wrist surgery on Wednesday, so it'll be even more a day of rest than usual. :)

Thanksgiving 2018, with the Hoffmans

A few weeks ago my workplace had to go into quarantine. It lasted 11 1/2 days, and I tried to get as much done as possible! In addition to reading (I'm still six books behind on my Goodreads book challenge) and knitting (woo woo lace alpaca scarf weather!) I also finished up three special order malas that had been particularly challenging. I love putting together the special orders, gathering beads to match the person, arranging them, and then hand-knotting them with the person in mind. Sometimes it is simple to put together the right combination, and sometimes it takes a lot of time and thinking to get it just right. They are an interesting challenge, and one I hope I can continue working on and perfecting as time goes by.

Matt and I have both been struggling to get out and exercise regularly, but we are hoping to get out and get a nice hike in today.

I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday this week!

Snowy Weather

 Hello!

It's been a while. My weekends have been full of Japanese homework, knitting, garden cleanup, and flower bed creation. Now the ground is covered in a foot (at least!) of snow, we have a weekend off from homework, and I am between knitting projects as of right this moment!

I pulled out the leather working supplies and started making my leather tags for the knitting - they are pretty cool! But it was a day full of learning lessons about all the little intricacies - how wet should the leather be? How far apart should the stamps be? Should they go the same direction or upside down? Which of my scraps work for the stamping? Should I buy the heat gun so I can burn the suede style leathers since they won't stamp?? There were also lessons learned on how large the holes need to be in the leather so that I can actually get the needle through, (bigger than I expect they should be) and how to keep the label straight on the knitting while I stitch it (lesson still being learned...) But, overall, I'm pleased with the project. It has been years in the making, and finally seeing the labels on my hats and scarves is very satisfying. 

The knitting projects always come in waves for me - I wanted to work on my colorwork mittens, so I have yarn set aside to make about four different pairs. Of course I didn't swatch my new yarn, assuming it would work since it is sport weight, and while the mittens will fit a variety of hands, they look very silly - long and thin. So...now I have to decide how to proceed - do I rework the pattern to fit my yarn or do I find yarn to fit my pattern? I also have two different colorwork patterns that I want to test out, and one is quite a bit smaller than the other - so that raises even more questions. What it really means though, is that I am doing a lot of thinking about knitting and a lot of charting, and a lot of math, but not actually a lot of knitting. 

With the holidays coming up, I have several custom order malas to be working on, so I'll need to get my thoughts and materials gathered for that. Yesterday I worked on my Etsy listings for the jewelry shop, I have jars of jewelry sitting on the coffee table staring at me: earrings and bracelets and necklaces that have yet to be photographed or listed. 

We shoveled three times yesterday and once on Thursday - so we are fully into snow season! Matt and I are hoping to get out in it today, put on our long johns and go enjoy the sunshine and the blinding white snow. Hope you all have a lovely week!

Sunny Sunday

 Some weeks I have no idea where the time went. This is one of those! Most weeks when I sit down to write these I have to pick and choose from all the things I've done with my time, and then there are some weeks where I stare at the screen and think, "Gosh, what did I do this week?" The fires in the West (and still smoldering on the other side of the Bridgers) meant that our air quality has been pretty rough all week, so my energy levels were pretty low. Yesterday we had rain, and it has brought our area back down to a green/yellow dot, so hopefully we can get out and do more now! Friday I had the day off and worked in the backyard, clearing the deck so our landlord can paint, and then working on clearing bulbs and sod from my back flower bed. Yesterday I ordered new bulbs to plant, and picked up some bricks for the edging :) 

Pink Snow Crocus

As far as knitting and jewelry making is concerned, I had zero output for the week. But I did manage to organize my jewelry photos, so I know what needs to be photographed and how. 

Iolite and Labradorite Bracelet 

Most of my free time this week was spent practicing Japanese (Matt had his first test on Friday) and reading. I got my hands on an Agatha Christie, and time sort of melted away. I love her books - they are fun little romps most of the time, easy to read, and a nice diversion from life (and smoke!)

はじめまして、よろしく おねがいします。(How do you do, pleased to meet you.)

Hope you all have wonderful weeks and we'll chat next week :)

Fall Weekend

 Hello!

Sorry I haven't posted the last two weeks. We have hit the time of year where I have more work than time! Last weekend we had a pretty nasty fire in the Bridger mountains, and on Monday we had snow fall and a killing temperatures. Matt and I spent all day last Sunday moving plants and picking everything that was even close to ripe. We managed to save the majority of our bucket tomatoes, but a lot of the plants in the raised beds didn't make it. We did manage to make some stuff and do some canning, and we now have about 16 jars of salsa sitting on the shelf! 

With the weather turning cooler, I have been driven to do more knitting. I've made about five hats in the last two weeks, and a pair of mittens! I have a lot more yarn just waiting to be turned into something warm for the winter. I try to keep my crafting area clean - but right now it's a bit of a mess, with yarn recently finished and waiting to be put away and yarn waiting in skeins, the ball winder has been out and in use for a little over a week straight. I figure the knitting fever will slow soon and I can get all my needles and notions and yarns all organized and put away.

 

Since I've been doing so much knitting, I haven't done much for jewelry making, but I have a few things on the back burner. Matt's mom has sent us some findings for jewelry making, and I'm excited to turn those into necklaces and earrings. I have two more commissioned malas to make as well, and I've been turning those over in my mind, what stones and what design I want to use. 

I am taking a day off this coming week and I'm hoping to get some good work done in the garden - I need to trim things back, dig up annual bulbs, and set down some cardboard to prep new beds for next spring. I wish you all luck with your fall efforts, and hope everyone had a lovely Labor Day weekend last weekend :) See you next Sunday!

  

Smokey Times

 Hello!

There are fires in the west, and the smoke has settled in the valley. The last few days our town has been a red or orange dot, and you can feel it in your lungs. This air is unhealthy for at-risk people, and not much fun for folks who aren't at-risk. Matt and I have been trying to keep the windows closed, and we've been riding the Peloton more instead of walking outdoors. The garden doesn't seem to be too bothered - although the light is heavily filtered through the smoke, things are growing and coming ripe! I didn't manage to get half the plans I had for the garden put in place this year, so I wasn't able to plant beets or carrots, but the peppers are going nuts, as are the tomatillos. We've picked a few batches of green beans now, and some of the onions are starting to flower and tip over. My big oxheart tomatoes are also covered in fruit which are slowly turning colors. I picked a German Red Strawberry this week that has to be close to a pound in weight. Huge, huge fruit! 

Our evenings this week were filled with Japanese language homework - hoo boy it goes fast! And I have such a hard time hearing the words. I struggle understanding the English words I hear - so trying to hear and recognize and translate another language is really difficult. Luckily, Matt is really good at that - so between the two of us, with me reading, and him verbally communicating, we should be golden for our next visit to Japan - or Nihon.   :)

I did manage to get out my knitting needles this week! I've been wandering into the yarn room and squishing yarn, thinking, and dreaming. I had a bag of leftover yarns that I had been thinking about turning into another hat and scarf set, so I brought that downstairs and cast on Friday afternoon. :) I also brought some other yarn downstairs, and can't wait to turn that into hats too! It's hat knitting weather. 

Hope you all have a wonderful week, and we'll chat next Sunday!

August Already??

 Hello All!

I am having a hard time believing that it is August already. It feels like this year is just slipping past, soon it will be snowing. Uff dah!

This week has been pretty busy with work stuff, and I haven't had much energy when I get home. Plus I have been feeling rundown the last couple of weeks. Too much something, not enough something else, and when I figure that out I'll be top notch again.

 

We are running headlong into harvesting season, and my peppers are already a little hard to keep up with. Today I picked a bowlful of tomatillos, and by this evening we should have some salsa ready to jar and can in our new pressure canner! I've got herbs in the dehydrator, and some tomatoes that have come ripe too, so maybe we'll make some salsa fresca and figure out a yummy Mexican meal to serve it with. Last night we picked enough green beans to make a side dish for our dinner, and topped our cheeseburgers with jalapenos and green onions from the garden. We have chinese five color peppers that are ready, and I can't wait to make some breakfast eggs with them tossed in. 

As far as crafting is concerned, I haven't been able to do much. I'm working on two commissioned Mala necklaces, and made a handful of stretch bracelets this week. I've also finally set up my soldering station upstairs, and I can't wait to try my hand at a new skill. Knitting has been crowding into my brain - especially with Fall knitting magazines coming in, but with the summer heat my knitting plans will stay locked away in my brain for a while.

 

I hope you all have a wonderful week and we'll see you again next weekend :)

Slow Weekend Tidbits

Hello!

It's been a slow week here - taking each day in stride, trying to focus on our health and Matt's surgery recovery. We've been going for walks and riding the Peloton regularly, and adding in some strength training workouts that hurt for days (for me anyway!). It's also been computer heavy on the creative side - with me working on adding all of our jewelry listings. We are up to 44 active listings on the Hide and Hair Gems Etsy account!

Yesterday I went outside to clean up a mess I made two weekends ago, and ended up weeding the raspberry patch/flower patch next to the deck for roughly three hours. It was my first sunburn of the season...and wasn't nearly as bad as they have been in the past. But my raspberry patch looks better than it has in a long time!!

I also worked on a commissioned Mala this week. The beads I used were gorgeous Labradorite 8 and 10 mm round beads. The flash in some of those beads were unbelievable. 

                                               

In addition to spending a ton of time on my phone/the computer for the Etsy listings, I've also still been working on uploading our photos and organizing them into folders in Google Photos. We are trying to consolidate our Japanese honeymoon photos and our wedding photos into one place so we can pick out a couple of pictures to hang on our walls. It's going to be a tough decision I fear. 

Hope you all have a lovely week coming up!

July Tidbits

Hello Everyone!

It's been two whole weeks and I don't have much to report craft-wise. I started taking allergy shots to help combat my allergy issues (turns out I'm really allergic to grass, and regular allergic to pretty much everything else lol) so I've been pretty focused on that. I have to sit for a half hour after each shot - which would be a great time to knit, but my current project is the baby blanket, which is huge and difficult to carry around...so I've been reading! It's been a rough year for reading, and I've only just finished my second book for the year. (They were both children's books too...lol)

Jasper Fforde

I did spend most of last weekend working on a small brick-work project in the backyard. The gate to our backyard has bothered me since we moved in - it was uneven, difficult to mow, and the fence was poorly wrapped, so grass would grow up between the fence pieces and it was not easy to close the gate handle. It's looking pretty good after two weekends of work! The weekend before last I purchased some of my materials, cut the sod, and starting evening out the soil. I was rained out before I got too far, so last weekend I did the bulk of the work - evening out the soil the rest of the way, laying down weed fabric, placing the bricks and the pebbles. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination - but for my first project, I'm pretty pleased. Plus, it's a rental...so there's that. 

A little work still needed.

 

I worked yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon working on listings for the Hide and Hair Gems Etsy shop. I've been trying to focus on my physical health (which is usually relegated to "if I have time" because I tend to put myself and my needs behind other things I think are more important) so I've been riding the Peloton quite a bit this last week. Yesterday I did a class that was in German on accident - but it was actually kind of fun not really understanding what was going on. I've also been using an inhaler before exercising the last few times and I've never been more sore lol. I guess when you have better lung capabilities, it's easier to actually work your muscles! 😂

The old computer is slowly giving up all of it's treasures, and once it is clear I am going to set up a soldering station for my jewelry. I am super excited to expand what I can create - and am anxious to do so! Hopefully next week I'll have more news to report on that front. Til then - have a great week!

4th of July Weekend

Hello!!

My employer decided to give us Friday off as observed Independence Day, so I have enjoyed a three day weekend! Matt also went back to work this week (he was off for his surgeries, and then the museum was shut down for COVID-19) so I had yesterday all to myself, and I'll have today as well!

Beautiful Bozeman, Montana

I've been plugging away at the brown baby blanket I started back when Matt had his first hip surgery in March. It's slow going, but we are at the point where it takes forty minutes to do two rows, and I have roughly eight rows of pattern left, followed by ten rows of stockinette after, and the three-ish rows of decorative edging. So it'll be some time still. I did stuff some cat toys and got those listed on Etsy last weekend, but I really need to wash another fleece so that I have stuffing for the next round of toys. I was also approached to donate toys to an animal rescue in California - which I am only just now remembering. (It was a wild week mentally.) 

Cat toys!

Friday Matt and I went for a walk, relaxed a bit, made a yummy pizza with ingredients from the garden, and started work on a small landscaping job in the backyard. It's coming along nicely - but the daily rain has kept me from finishing it. 

A friend we made on our walk.

Yesterday I set to work in the laundry room. I've had grand plans for that room for years, with drawings and hours of thought put into it, but during our walk on Friday Matt and I discussed the realities of it - do I move forward anticipating that my plans are achievable? Or do I accept that it has been roughly four years, and that plan is dead? So I headed into the room yesterday morning with that in mind - brought a notebook, pencil, and measuring tape, cataloged the inventory I already had, and made up a list of things I needed to purchase in order to put the room into some kind of order. I set to work with the materials I already had, and then after lunch I ran to the store to purchase my other requirements, and finished up what I could before Matt got home from work. He helped me run some things through the table saw, I did some quick sanding, and after a little less than eight hours of work, I had four new shelves, a hanger for my pizza peel, hooks for our grocery store bags, a freshly cleaned and reorganized fridge top/over the fridge cupboard, and plans for one more big shelf to be installed today. Matt was pretty impressed with my accomplishments - and laughed when I told him I was inspired to do it all so that I could wash a fleece in the garage today (the water to the garage washing machine has to come through the laundry room, and the door to the garage was blocked with a giant stack of stuff that I moved yesterday.) :)

Coming along nicely.

Thursday would have been Grandpa Arneson's 100th birthday. It was a difficult day, but also one filled with happy memories. I hope you all enjoy the coming week, and do something for yourself today - if you are good to yourself, you may just follow in Grandpa's footsteps and live a long and healthy life. 

Grandpa Ross Arneson, and Kirsten

Happy Father's Day!

Hello everyone, and Happy Father's Day!

It's going to be a pretty quiet day around here I think, at the very least it has started off that way :) I missed posting last week, but the day got away from me, and we hadn't done much of any note for the week. I've been working on starting an Etsy shop for the Jewelry, and that has taken up most of my evening time. 

Creatively, I've been working on bracelets and bookmarks. My bag full of partially crocheted cat toy balls have been staring at me...but I should really wash another fleece for stuffing...so they will just have to stare a little longer. 

I'm still working on my photo transfer project as well. I've uploaded all of our photos into google photos so that I have access to all of our pre-cell phone photos that have just been hanging out on the computer upstairs. Matt and I also never compiled our Japan photo albums, so that is another of my long term goals. There are a few walls in this apartment that could use some Matt and Kirsten photography, so hopefully I find gold in my searches. :)

Have a wonderful week and a lovely lazy Sunday. :)

Holiday Weekend Fun

Hello!

It is now day two of our Memorial Day Weekend festivities. Yesterday consisted of movie watching, cat toy crocheting, and ice cream eating. It was rainy and cold all day, so we didn't do much. Today we've already cleaned the floors, the bathrooms, and started laundry. It's still raining today, but tomorrow should be pretty and sunny.


Memorial Day weekend is usually the time set aside for planting outdoors here in Montana, but the last couple of years have been tough on that - June 10th 2018 gave us a killing frost, and last spring was cold and dreary right up until the middle of June. This year we might be safe - so I'm thinking about planting some things this afternoon when the rain cuts out.


Matt is getting ready for his second hip surgery in a week and a half, so we've been busy prepping for that. I've got a meal plan written out for about three weeks, with a focus on simple and healthy meals that won't require a ton of prep. I had a meal plan for the first hip as well - but was not prepared for the energy toll required for post-surgery care, and ended up buying some pretty naughty freezer meals a few days in. I'll be making some foods this weekend that I can toss in the freezer for added ease. We bought an air fryer at Christmas-time and that thing has come in super handy! We've got a couple of recipes that can go straight from freezer to air fryer to table in 15 minutes or less.

This was a thinking week for crafting. We've got an order for two mala and earring sets, so we did some research into stones, and the customers, and made up a plan for both. Of course we needed to buy a few supplies, so now we just have to sit on the plans until our beads come in. I'm super excited to put them together though, they are going to be very different from each other, and *hopefully* perfect for each recipient.

I've also been putting work into making cat toy balls, the cat toys are a never ending project since they are our most popular product. Several co-workers and some folks on Etsy purchased most of my colorful cotton balls, so I've been focused on those. I would love to get some mice put together too, but time - it slips away.

We hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend! Being part of a military family means that Memorial Day has always been a pretty important one for us. Dad always plays Taps, and takes part in the services at the cemetery, while Mom always helps the Ladies Auxiliary of the VFW hand out poppies and place flowers on graves. This year has been difficult emotionally given that Grandpa B passed shortly after Memorial Day last year, and COVID-19 has set aside most of the ceremonial plans for the holiday. But we are still celebrating and memorializing as best we can this year, with high hopes for the celebrations next year, and all the years to come after.

Weekend Scraps

I headed back to work this week, and it feels like I almost got more done than I did on my week off. (Probably inaccurate, but it FELT that way...lol)

Our business started back in 1999ish, when Mom and I started making mice cat toys from our scrap yarn. That has really shaped who I am as a knitter, as I always try to utilize as much of the yarn as possible. It's also one of the reasons why I struggle so hard with pompoms - which seem to waste a ton of yarn to make one good pom. In the last few years I have started crocheting cat toys, which allows me to use even non-felting yarn scraps.

Anyway - all this is to set up the fact that I have been thinking about scrap knitting a lot this week. I even made a post on Twitter about it, how sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes the end product turns out even better than I anticipated. Over the last two years I've been making a lot of scarves from Scarfie yarn by Lion Brand, which is a non-felting, easy care yarn. I've been keeping all the little scraps, (and sometimes the big scraps!) left over from those projects in a bag, and this week I pulled out that bag and put together a fringed scarf and a hat.

The hat came out better than I imagined it would, although it is a bit large. The scarf was the fun bit, even if the yarn didn't cooperate the way I wanted it to. (I was doing single rows of thicker yarn throughout, and one of the strands ran out before I got to the end of the row. It turned out ok, but not what I had envisioned.) Usually I leave the fringe long and messy, but this time I wanted a cleaner look, so I YouTube'd some techniques for twisting fringe. I love how it came out :)

I also got some flowers planted this weekend, and am headed out again today with Matt to work in the greenhouse building secondary shelves so there is more room for the baby plants.

Hope you all have a great week and we'll see you next time!