Sew-a-long

I was looking at Stardustshoe's blog, and she is hosting a "pants-a-long" to make some shorts/pants. I'm interested in sewing along with her, as I haven't sewn anything in quite awhile. I have boxes of material from my days of working at JoAnn fabrics that DH would love for me to use up and "de-stash"!! :) I finally got a new memory card for my camera, but am still having trouble with uploading the photos to Blogger. Now I have to put them on Flickr first and it is irritating me to have to do it "the long, hard way". Waaaaaaaah! :)

On the crochet front, I have been working on a "Hello Kitty" purse for my friend's daughter. I have both sides done, just need to put together and finish up.

Cin/Cyn Summer Cloth Crawl

I have been participating in a cloth crawl with my "Cindy Knitters" group on Ravelry. One box is reused and travels from location to location with gifts for each Cindy participant. After much anticipation on my part, the box arrived in Texas today with all the goodies in the photo. The cloths are knitted with 100% linen yarn, I was also spoiled with a skein of Berroco Cotton Twist, Skittles, and a packet of seeds from Jefferson's "Monticello"! Many thanks to my gifting "Angel"- Cindy, aka CPL Rockfish! Also travelling to each location with the box is a map to mark our locations on, and a small notebook to write a note in. Thanks for all the fun so far, Cindy's!

Chickenbetty's Disc-Disc Potholder

I am still having problems loading my photos and even TAKING photos, but managed to take a picture of my newest potholder with my cell phone camera this morning! These pictures aren't good quality, but at least you can see what I have worked on. I found this pattern on Ravelry the other night. I ordered it from ChickenBetty, but it didn't get e-mailed to me till the next day, so I looked at photos and copied it as best I could. By the time the pattern came, I already had the flower side done, so I just followed the pattern for the second side. One person on Ravelry mentioned that she nearly burned herself using it as a potholder, so I inserted hot pad material from the fabric store in between the crocheted discs. It is a little thick, but at least no one should get burned using it. I have also crocheted a couple of other things, but I'm not quite done with them yet. Two are potholders also, and one is a washcloth. Hope to have my camera up and running soon so the photo quality will be better!

July 4, ribbons and bows

I am still having problems with my uploading of photos to blogger from my home computer, and now my digital camera seems to be on the fritz, too. July 4 weekend we went out on the lake in the boat, it was very quiet for a holiday! I think the public ramps haven't been open much this year, so only lake residents have been out and a lot of the residents are older in age (I guess this may be due to the lake being here for a long time). After going out on the lake for a couple of hours, we went to our niece's house and my oldest gs got to pop firecrackers with her children. I have been crocheting small items such as dishcloths, & potholders, but can't seem to get the photos to my blog. Oldest gs and son will be gone this weekend, so I might have more time to concentrate on figuring out the problem. I also have some beautiful hair bows I wanted to take photos of and show. My co-worker makes them to sell, and I bought some for my oldest gs' baby sister and also for my sister's granddaughter who is 3.

Short Vacation

Dolphin watch photo

My 50th birthday is in September, and my brothers & sister and our respective spouses always try to get together for a mini-reunion to celebrate a 50th. I have one brother & his wife who will turn 50 in a couple of years, then we will have to make another excuse to meet for the occasional mini-vacations. This year I chose Rockport, Tx., which is a small town outside of Corpus Christi, Tx. We had a good time seeing everyone and getting to play tourist. Dh and I lived close to Rockport early in our marriage, and it was fun to get to go back. We toured the Corpus Christi Aquarium, went on a Dolphin watch boat tour, rode the ferry over to Mustang Island and had a big day at the beach. Some of us went to see the Lexington, a ship that is now a museum, some went to Fulton Mansion, (another museum), some went to visit Goose Island State Park and some got to fish. We also had time to visit in the evenings, and see folks we hadn't seen in a while. We tried several restaurants and now have a couple of favorites for the next time we visit. I really enjoyed it!! :) I even got to crochet a couple of small things during the trip there and back. It appears I am still having problems getting pictures to download to blogger, so I will be ng on adding a couple of vacation/crochet photos.

Movie Marathon

Oldest GS and I had a Movie Marathon last night after he had a big day playing on the lake with friends and family. We watched "The Witches", "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken", and "Never-ending Story". I had to go to bed at about 12:30 this morning in the middle of "Never-Ending Story", I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore!

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I am having problems with blogger not wanting to upload my photos for the last couple of days and all I can seem to get on here are thumbnail photos. Sorry! The topflappen (small photo just above this paragraph) was finally finished this morning.

Gehaekelte Topflappen

!!!Happy Dance!!!! I finally broke my crochet drought! It actually started as a puzzle..... I found this pattern on Ravelry, written only in GERMAN! It appeared that NO English translation was available.....so I did what any detective would do, and set to work trying to solve the problem. First I cut and pasted the text into a free translation website, then copied the very oddly resulting translation to a word document. Then I modified it with this translation of German crochet terms. After that, I found some information on various people's projects that filled in the rest of the gaps. Once I had a semblence of a pattern, I rewrote it for my own ease of "understanding". As a backup, I have a friend at work who's Mother is from Germany, so if my translation failed, I asked if she might mind translating for me. Happily, it appears that I did fairly well on my own! I plan to finish the final "flower outline" row tomorrow. After this I plan to try to "tweek" my pattern to resemble this lovely version of the topflappen. Unfortunately this person lives in Estonia and HER blog appears to be written in..........RUSSIAN! :)