For the past three weeks it has gone like this:  teach knitting class Thursday evening, then
pack up Friday morning and head out for 2-4 day trip, come home, unpack and
deal with “home stuff” (and maybe go to a baseball game or the circus), get
ready for Thursday class – and repeat the cycle!

We had a great time camping with the kids (I knit beside the
campfire).  We enjoyed our get-away to
the Mountain Home Lodge in Leavenworth
(I knit on the deck in the mornings!). 
And we had a good time visiting my parents in Oregon
(I knit in 90+ degree heat on a pavilioned platform built out over the Willamette River ). 
I did get some good car-trip knitting time, too. 

Mostly simple knitting – the kind that travels well.   I knit and knit and knit on the two blankets
I am making for Gwen – and yet they do not seem to be any bigger!  I also finished the skirt for the Joyful
Ferocity (jacket) – which, in itself, is an accomplishment as it is the size of
a stole is knit at 6 stitches to the inch. 
I also completed Gwen’s Sacque – which is kind of like pink
frosting!  (I will post photos soon)

I spent several hours un-knitting and re-knitting the face
of the Hansigurumi owl one afternoon when I discovered that I had attached the
right side of the facial disk askew – and while a cock-eyed owl might be endearing, the fact was that
that there were not enough stitches to make the rest of the head correctly and
it would probably make the whole thing wonky. 
So, our came the stitches for the beak and the neck.  Re-do.

I also ripped back and re-did the sleeve gusset for the
Joyful Ferocity because of a single column of stockinette stitches that made
the right side border obviously wider than the left side border (another “right
side gone wrong” – more than a coincidence?).

Sarah (and Gwen) and I attended the Tacoma Raniers
Stitch-and-Pitch night.  I discovered a
charming yarn shop in Leavenworth:  Wooly Bully Yarns (and bought some gorgeous kettle-dyed
alpaca yarn by Araucania and Rachel Matthews’s highly hilarious Knitorama — oh, knitters, let us never
take ourselves or our Hansigurumi owls too seriously!). 

But many of my July adventures have been of the non-knitting
variety:  hiking, swimming, tube-floating
down the Icicle and Wenatchee Rivers
, blubbering
rather too loudly at the movie Up,
hooting the Mariners to a slump-breaking victory at Safeco Field just the other
night….

And now I have written a rather long-winded blog post – that
would probably have been more welcome as 3 or 4 separate pieces delivered in a
timely fashion throughout the month of July! 
But now we are caught up — and I am ready for quieter days with fewer
adventures (of the non-knitting variety) and more knitting (of the adventurous
variety!).