"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!"

Hurray!  School starts next week!  Maybe I'll actually manage find the time to post on my blog!

Well, I can't blame it all on being busy, though that's a big part of it.  The weather has been so awful and hot and humid that when we're not running around to tennis camp and Girl Scout service projects and clarinet lessons and whatnot, we collapse in sodden little heaps on the floor in front of the nearest fan.

So what have I done this summer?

I picked up a long-neglected pair of socks, and thought I was doing really well, but set it down one day and promptly forgot all about it.  Love the yarn, though -- Shepherd Sock in "Baltic Sea," alternating strands on every other row so that it absolutely will not flash or pool.

I made a set of puzzle blocks for No.16, to instructions in Christiane Berridge's Victorian Dolls' House Projects.  Mine aren't quite as successful as they might have been, because although I love the Rackham illustrations, the detail in them at this scale tends to get lost.  I tried to pick simpler ones I thought would reduce well, but there it is.  Anne Shirley is just getting started with Rapunzel, it looks like, but she's got a block wrong at the top.

I read Miss Buncle's Book, and chose for my "Knitting with D.E. Stevenson" virtual knitalong, this pretty 1930s jumper from Dee's etsy shop nostalgiarules -- it's perhaps a little more Elizabeth Wade than Barbara Buncle, with the frivolous ties! but I can see her wearing this while lunching with Mr. Abbott.

Laura decided that she wanted to go out for tennis in her upcoming freshman year in high school, so she's been taking lessons at the local tennis center.  She's had really only a month to prepare -- after never having played tennis at all bar lobbing a few balls around with a friend -- so she was a bit dismayed when the high school's tennis camp started and she began to realize how much farther ahead most of the other kids are, but good for her, she's sticking with it.  We had borrowed a racket until she decided whether or not she was really interested, but bought a fairly-new used one on consignment at the tennis center, just at the same time that Grandpa dug out his old rackets from the basement.  Grandpa's basement is tidier than most people's houses, certainly ours, so the rackets are in great shape for being thirty or forty years old, but isn't it interesting to see how much they've changed over the years?!

I took the girls on a tour of the big Goodwill facility in Santa Ana, as part of the Good Turn for Goodwill service project that is new here in Orange County.  It was really amazing -- I had no idea of the sheer scale of it.  What a great opportunity for the girls to see what a service project really can do for their community -- not only how their donations get resold or recycled, but that the people working there, the ones that smiled at us and said hello every time we passed, are some of the ones that Goodwill is actually helping, right there, right now.

Comments

[marylou]

Is it a virtual knit-along because you just pretend to knit? Sweet sweater, must be done on size 1s.

[susan]

Oh yes. Very Elizabeth Wade.

[Sarina]

Hi, Jeanne! Thanks for the comment on my blog. We have been sporadically dropping in on each other for quite a long time now. It looks like you are doing well and have a few fun projects going. Love the socks!