YOP: Week 23

    Oops, looks like three weeks have gone by.  I've been very busy with work, my second job, outside tasks and some knitting, so it's not all bad.  It turns out planting my garden Mother's day was a bad idea.  Very few things actually came up.  I replanted the cucumbers, watermelons, zucchini, eggplant, and beans last weekend.  The lettuce and peas came up pretty decently.  I planted more of those, since I spaced out the peas too far and only one of the three varieties of lettuce grew.  I didn't replant the onions, I'll put pepper plants there if I ever manage to buy some.  The tomatoes are still alive and blooming.  It keeps raining here nearly everyday so if they pollinate and actually bear fruit it'll be a miracle.  I don't thinks it's going to be a good garden year, but oh well.  It's still fun seeing something grow.

    My new second job is going well.  I worked my first 24hour shift yesterday.  I'll be doing that every other Sunday.  I'm also picking up some hours on Wednesdays, for now.  (Until having no days off at all finally drives me completely insane.)

    In knitting news, the handbook for the 2025 Lewis County Fair came out so I've been planning what to enter.  I'm going to enter Enchantress which was my Boo Knits MKAL from October for the shawl category.

There are two scarf categories; one is Winter, the other Dressy.  I'll enter both but not sure which cowls/small shawls I'll shoehorn into those two yet.  

Probably the Nice Stitch Bandana for the Winter Scarf and maybe Get a Shift On! For the Dressy category.  

I finished one of my socks, so if I make the second in time those will go into the sock category.  If not, I'll enter the socks I made for my son.  I made one dishcloth for the 2 dishcloths category.  I need to decide on a pattern for the second cloth.  I'm thinking of sticking to a farm animal theme so I'll probably do a chicken cloth.  Here's the first:

It turned out super cute.  I'll need to block it.  I started a mitten pattern yesterday and didn't get too far into it yet, but I'm not enjoying it so I'm going to frog it and go with a different mitten pattern.  I want to enter the hat category too, so I need to pick out a hat pattern to do.  I want to make sure I go heavy on the cables this years since cables seemed to do better than colorwork did last year.  The judges aren't always the same from year to year though so I'm not going to get too serious about my strategizing.  I haven't thought too much about sewing yet either.  I need to get all my submissions registered by July 9th so I have about a month... I need to get cracking.

    In other knitting news, I made the decision to keep using yarn I had for my second Get a Shift On!  I finished that and have blocked it.  I only have pre-blocking pictures though.   

I need to take pictures of the sock I finished but its currently down-pouring here, big surprise, so its quite dark.  The pattern calls for a short-row toe.  I had never done a short row sock toe before.  It was pretty neat.  As per usual I have second sock syndrome now.  I should just make single socks in similar patterns since I don't give a fig about matching anyway.  Or I need to start doing two-at-a-time.  I'm just really not much of a sock knitter.  One sock a year is plenty for me.  I'm sure more has happened in the last three weeks than what I can remember right now.  But this is plenty long already.  Back to frantic fair knitting.  Until later.  Happy crafting.

-Q