Knit-phobia?

"Be afraid of skydiving. Be afraid of wild boar. Be fearless with knitting." - from At Knit's End by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

This quote is quite amusing to me... does it really need to be said? I've seen this talk of "fearless knitting" a lot in the past year. Maybe it was just last year's buzz-phrase, but it would seem obvious to me that knitting is not frightening. However, I did just read an article about a woman who was walking into her knitting group when she fell and stabbed herself in the heart with a knitting needle, nearly killing her. So maybe the fear is justified.

At any rate, I believe knitting and other crafts to be safe hobbies. So I am not afraid to share with you some of my recent craft failures. In the end the knitting failures are harmless because they can be stuffed into boxes where they're never seen again. House painting failures, on the other hand, are much more painful.

1. Chirstmas card holder
For Christmas, I really wanted to make something to hang on the wall that can hold all those cards that arrive in the mail. I bought some red wire and attempted to knit it into garter stitch. The idea being that it would hang on the wall and the corners of the cards could be pushed into the spaces of the garter stitches. However, it became clear quite quickly that wire is difficult to knit, and making a rectangle big enough to hold just one card would take a week.

So I tried using some gold crochet thread that I had sitting around from a previous failed knitting experience (trying to make fake gold jewelry for a toga costume). The crochet thread is knittable... but it creates such a delicate little fabric that it would take forever to make anything big and then it wouldn't have the strength to hold cards :(

The cards simply sat on a table in a pile all month.

2. Cabled hat with mohair yarn
I bought some gorgeous hand-dyed mohair months ago and have been waiting to come up with the perfect idea for it. I found a great hat pattern. The only problem was that there are cables in the hat pattern. I assumed that cables in mohair would be rather uninteresting... but I didn't realize that they are nearly impossible to knit (stitches dropping everywhere, impossible to see how many stitches are being slipped) and then the cable looks really terrible. So I had to pull that out and find a simpler pattern. That hat turned out great (bottom of this post)!

3. Card holder
Here's another failure turned success. Here's the post (the blue thingy) about the finished product. I want you to know that I actually made this little thing twice. The first time it was totally the wrong size despite my careful calculations and I thought of other little adjustments to its construction that resulted in the near-perfect finished item the second time around. I'm glad the size was so wrong the first time. If it hadn't been, then I would not have re-done it with those adjustments.

4. Pink bathroom
Our bathroom has pink and black tiles surrounding the shower, possibly from 1951. We are not removing those tiles anytime soon, so I thought it would be fun to give the bathroom a retro look. I painted the walls pale pink and bought black & white geometric patterns for the shower curtain, bath mat, etc. That pink is killing me. I tried to buy an even paler pink to sponge over to give the walls some texture... but they were nearly the same pinks. So I got a darker pink and sponged over again. Now it's a 4-year-old girl's dream room. But I'm really tired of painting, so I'll suffer with it for now.

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Fyi, this post was 4 days in the making due to intermittent and irritating network failures. I may need a new modem.

The longest week

This past week may have been the longest week of my life. I'm not sure when I'll be ready to start the next week. Thanks for all of the supportive phone calls, emails, notes, survival gifts, cooking dinner, etc... I really wasn't expecting so much support for taking an exam, but it really helped a lot!

I won't find out about the results of the exam for a couple of weeks. But in the meantime, there is already one good thing to come out of this: a new stove. Yes, that's right. Hubbers has done all of the grocery shopping and most of the cooking for the past two weeks, and suddenly announced that we need a new stove. I've known this for years, but there are so many things we need, it never made the top of the list... until now. He's already done all of his Consumer Reports research and visited every appliance store in town taking meticulous notes about brands, features and prices. Frankly, I'm glad I was too busy taking the comps to accompany him on all that :) Now I just get to say, "Sure, that stove looks good, let's buy it."

Speaking of home improvement...

Next on my list of big ideas for the house is to install solar water heating. We have radiant floor heat, so solar hot water would heat the whole house with far less gas than we're using now. I'm not so excited about photovoltaics, because they are not cost effective. However, heating water with sunlight is much more direct. Sunlight naturally provides heat and light in abundance but not electricity.

This Saturday, I'll be going to the Solar Fiesta to attend a workshop on solar hot water. Hopefully, I'll find out how to buy and install a system that will pay for itself within 5 years. I think that's reasonable, but I'm not sure.

And if I can pull that off, my next environmentally-minded home project will be composting to reduce our amount of trash. I tried composting when we first moved in, but gave it up because it didn't seem to be working. At the State Fair, I saw a brochure on composting that might help this time around.

5 years

On September 15, 2003 we closed on and moved into our house. These pictures were probably taken the next day, as there was no daylight left by the time we got to our house on the 15th. It takes hours and hours to close on a house.
A few days after moving in, while there will still boxes to be unpacked, Troy painted a wall in the office. He didn't like the dark wood paneling, and immediately wanted it painted to a bright, cheerful yellow. We did manage to unpack the rest of the boxes relatively soon after, but we haven't stopped working on the house. Here's a list of some of the work done:

• Painted 5 rooms and outside trim
  
• New flooring in half the house
• New roof
• Repaired wall damaged from leaking roof
  
• New windows
• Repaired and stuccoed retaining wall that holds up the entire property
• Plenty of little electrical repairs
• Renovated one bathroom, and put a new toilet in the other
• Planted 10 trees
• Leveled front yard
• Replaced in-ground sprinklers with in-ground drip
  
• Demolished old shed and put in a new one
• Expanded back patio and replaced broken brick walkway
  

So a house is a lot of work. But I really appreciate not having to pack everything up and move every time I sign a new lease :) Plus, we have more equity in our house than debt... which is pretty cool.