I Made A Little Sewing Happen

I resolved on Leap Day to knit one Seamen's Church Institute Christmas at Sea cowl out of stash yarn a month and also sew three ditty bags for them a month out of stash fabric for the rest of the year.  Well, I will confess that I got the cowls knitted for March, April, and May but I didn't get any ditty bags sewn in March and then on April Fool's Day, well, we all know what I did that day so sewing was out of the question--until yesterday.

I had a fine time sorting through my stash to find "manly" fabrics and settled on a couple of upholstery remnants and a bit of animal print.  It's a simple pattern that they ask you to use so that all the bags are the same size, and you use shoestrings for drawstrings which I think is brilliant because what's more frustrating than breaking a shoestring when you're at sea?  I can't imagine.



It was nice outside this morning.  The alliums are blooming in the garden and the bleeding hearts are just finishing up around the fountain.  The poppy buds are big and fuzzy and should start opening any day now.

















As far as knitting goes, I faced facts and frogged (ribbit! ribbit!) the Autumn Cumulus sock and began again, this time making the next size smaller and having the designer's stitch-picking-up directions at hand.  I still had to watch the "woman in the grass with chickens and cicadas in the background" how-to video to do Judy's Magic cast on but I enjoy her so much I didn't mind one bit.  I have got to search YouTube to see if she's made other videos.  She slays me with her Missouri accent, her casual "it's only knitting" attitude, and the chicken walking through the shot.  I got through the toe-top scallop in jig time and segued right into the toe-bottom scallop.  Man, it's so much easier to knit on US 1 bamboo needles.  The metal ones killed my hands.

June 1--Steve Uzzell

The semi charged
out of the fog bank,
roared down the narrow snow-packed road
squeezed between tall drifts,
hunched over like an Indy driver
on May 31st.
~~~~~

It's already June.  Can you believe it?  Pretty soon school will be out (not that that affects our lives) but school being out is the real start of summer, don't you think?  Actually in my (antiquated) mind school's supposed to be out for Memorial Day weekend and then start up again the day after Labor Day, which is why I never got to take cookies for my birthday when I was in school because my dumb birthday had to be September 1 which on some years was Labor Day but was never a school day so I never got to play Lady Bountiful and share cookies with the class.  Not that it bothers me anymore, you understand, it was so long ago.
--Barbara