Do you want the knitting?

Or do you want the bathroom?

Heck, I don't think I can fit 'em both on one post! How about knitting? It's been an awful long time since I had some knitting on this knitting blog...

First, some of the stuff I finished knitting recently...these were the items I needed to get off my needles before I started the February Lady Sweater from Flint Knits. I almost committed to starting it for the Ravelympics, but I refrained, knowing that for me, the WIP's were getting a little burdensome. I needed to get the second Shetland Triangle Shawl done. What? I never told you about the first one? Really?

All right, you might remember that one of the projects I really wanted to tackle was a lace shawl. After checking out a few, I decided to try my hand at the Shetland Triangle from Wrap Style. It calls for fingering weight yarn, but Brooklyn Tweed did one in more of a worsted/aran weight, and (if you're familiar with his work at all you already know that) it looked amazing. That was my project. So I grabbed a bit of sock yarn I had lying around



and started to try the pattern out, making sure I was getting the idea and all. Wow. It was easy. Really. I never would've guessed that, but the lace sort of flew! I decided that I could definitely handle this project and that it would take me forever to finish in fingering weight, but since I was "able", I might as well order up some nice Dream in Color Classy to make the heavier weight shawl, right? Yum.



Well, while I was waiting for the yarn to come in, Shetland Triangle Obsession took over. Before I knew it, I was pretty close to finished with the shawl, and the "real yarn" wasn't even here yet! I even grabbed some worsted weight yarn I had around to test how the thicker yarn would look...



Yup. Obsessed.



Well, in the end, I ran a bit short on the fingering yarn (which was actually a bit heavier than that, almost sport, maybe) and I finished the first shawl with what I had. It's Regia 6 ply Silk, I think.



And this grubby, wrinkled looking thing transformed into this:









How wild is THAT?! Talk about getting a lot of bang for your buck, right? Awesome.

So once the "real" yarn arrived, I pretty much just jumped right back into the Shetland Triangle and started up. I used Aurora Dusk, I believe is the name, on size US 6 needles. And in order to start the FLS, I finished it up. I still have a few ends to weave in and it needs a bath and some blocking, but this is what I've got:





And I can't wait to see it morph into a beautiful butterfly...

Even after this baby was completed, I stuck to it and finished up the Malabrigo Loafers by Coco Knits. These are from some Malabrigo I picked up on my birthday at WEBS for just this pattern. I love how they turned out. I wasn't sure if I would do the finished detail options, and now that I've finished, I think I will leave them as they are. The penny loafer look is cute, but I sort of dig the plain way, too. And they are only slippers, after all.







With these two projects all set, I was ready to move onto the sweater. I'll show it to you soon. Right now, I want to get some knitting in, I think.

Right to the Heart

Something that always gets me in sad movies is the staged home movie footage. You know the kind. In the movie, a parent passes away and in the midst of the drama and grieving, someone walks in to find the poor little kid watching old camcorder tapes of the parent--happy, smiling, laughing, and doing something incredibly fun. Always with the fun. Last night we watched No Reservations and without fail, the little girl was watching she and her Mom tromping around on the beach, hugging, laughing. It's about the sweetest thing, and it breaks my heart every time.

And it should. But you know what gets me worst than the sympathy for the little girl? This thought: I don't think I have that footage. Really. If something happened to me, truly, I don't think there is a tape like that that the kids can watch and see happy/fun Mom and remember her in the best possible light, running around the beach or laughing. Now I don't want to have to watch and confirm this, but I'm pretty sure that our home movies don't usually have me in them, and if they do, I always sound weird. I am not smiling. Mostly I have that look a lot of us give the camera (or our husbands behind it) that says "get that thing out of my face" or "you know I don't have any makeup on right now". In fact, I dare say that I believe I've trained Brian to essentially keep the lens off of me. And now I'm wondering if that's a good idea.

So here's what I want to know. Do other people have this spontaneous, happy, loving footage of themselves snuggling with their kids, laughing, and seeming like the most perfect, beautiful (and skinny!) parent? Or is it just me?

Perhaps I should loosen up a little and try to be myself in the home movies more. I mean, if I died, how would they ever make a movie about me?

Rule of 85%

What have we gotten ourselves into? Ah, good question. A bathroom remodel. *Sigh*

Brian and I have been meaning to update the bathroom since the day we bought our house, over 7 years ago. It was papered, which I don't really care for, and the biggest challenge was finding time to take all the old paper down and all of that. Plus, we had several rooms to prepare first, like the nursery for Irene--yeah, that's how long ago it was--and painting our room.

Wanting to update the look of the bathroom turned into a real necessity to remodel pretty quickly. The closer we looked at the room, the more problems we found. In the end, now seemed like a good time to dive in. Here's the issue: we only have one bathroom. Uh-huh. That's right. Family of five. And I'm not talking only one full bath, but a half bath downstairs. Oh no, I'm talking just the one. You can imagine that with three smallish children, gutting your only bathroom isn't an easy feat. We needed to do it, and we needed to do it fast. Clearly, sending the kiddos "to visit" someone would work well. It had to be before school started, so we would have more than a weekend. That only gave us a couple of weeks. Time to find a taker...

Enter my In-laws. (Imagine a flourish of Superman-esque music here)

They agreed to take all three kids for a long weekend. For sure we'd need Saturday and Sunday, and I figured realistically we were talking into Monday and Tuesday as well. There was a ton of work. So we left for the beach house Friday night after Brian got home and slept over there so we could head home Saturday morning, first thing. I kind of laughed when Suzanne seemed surprised that we weren't staying for the day, or at least lunch. But seriously, we had a ton to do, plus a two hour drive home to Rhode Island.

Here's what the kiddos had to look forward to for the weekend:



Here's what Brian and I had to look forward to for the weekend:









It looked pretty grim. I'll show you the progress, but I'm happy to say it was worth all the dirt, grime, and hard work. I'm not as happy to explain the title of the post. Yup, you guessed it...we're still only about 85% complete.

Note in the pictures the mildew and mold around the ceiling. The weirdo ceiling that was falling down. The nasty old 70's light without bulb covers. The worn out vanity complete with a hole in the floor we found when we had to move it over. Ah, the site of the door rebuild. (Who puts a folding, accordion-style door in a bathroom?)

Brian truly is very handy, and he can tackle some projects that are pretty impressive. This bathroom was one of those projects. And he did a great job, and working together we accomplished a lot in a very short time. (Ok, it really took 5 days, but that's for another post.) He's super capable and I'm so appreciative that he can do what he does.

That said, somehow, my sweet Brian isn't able to finish a project without serious and continual prodding. He does MOST of it, and then...well, I don't know. Somewhere in the vacinity of 85% through a project, without fail, the work kind of stops. And that's about all I get. Rooms are painted, except for a piece or two of trim. A folding door is replaced, the doorway re-framed, and a new door installed and primed, but the trim doesn't go up around the doorway for maybe a year. (Yes, for those of you who haven't experienced this phenomenon, that means that you could see through the space between the door frame and the wall around the door for an entire year.) Things do eventually get buttoned up, like in the case of the doorway. An impending birthday party of a massive scale motivated Bri to install the door trim. Also, possibly my threats made an impact, too. And no, it's still not painted.

So there you have it. The bathroom is almost done. We worked our arses off for 5 days straight (seriously--like, I didn't even knit!), probably 60-70 hours of work, and then we hit the roadblock phenomenon.

I am remaining hopeful.

Or trying to.