Spring Break - Quick Photo Update

Yesterday (California Screamin')...

Today (Splash Mountain)...
We ran into a classmate of Tertia's at Pirates of the Caribbean... Vere Parvus Mundus est.  Parvissimus Mundus!
Tonight... we left the park as fireworks started, and are out of the LA area and staying at a hotel with working internet access. 
Tomorrow... we drive.

March finishes, April Goals

We've been travelling and enjoying Spring Break, so I'm blogging in the cool morning air in Scottsdale.  I'll want to do a travelogue sometime, but pictures aren't available yet.  Here's what I finished in March, and what I want to do in April.

My goals for March:

1. True to my habit, I drew a random #3 from my master list - Bowling Style Knitting Bag.  Not done.
2. Quilt, bind, and give away the Easy Street quilt.  Done.
3. Finish Crumbs quilt top for Cedar Tree auction.  Done.
4. Finish current Steve socks and begin the next sock project, whatever it is. It may be the argyles hibernating from last year. Done, and I'm on the heel of the second argyle.
5. Finish that knit cotton yarn bathmat that I dug out of cold storage this month. Done. 
6. For fun, play with the Scrappy trip-along. I started.  Don't know if I'd consider it done. 

So now, I'll list the goals for April and link up to Judy L's UFO party. 

1. Randomly drew # 8: Easy Street quilt top, which as you can see above, is done.  So I'll make my random goal the one from last month that didn't get done: sewing the bowling-style knitting bag.
2. Finish the argyles, and start a pair of socks for Steve.
3. Finish collecting signatures on the Crumbs auction quilt, quilt it and bind it, and turn it over to the auction.
4. Finish the clean-up of the sewing area.  And then we can think about the next quilt.

I'll keep it somewhat light this month because we're travelling for a few more days still and last month was a little too crazy.  I still have to enter and update all my grades for the 3rd quarter but I'm trying to pretend I'm retired and living the easy life for a few more days still.

Works in Progress. Aren't We All?

Does somebody want to grade Latin for me so I can knit to relieve the stress of grading Latin?  No?  Well, one argyle sock is done and the second cuff has been started.  I'm taking a break from the avalanche of 3rd quarter final exams I have to grade.  It's quite distressing, actually, even though my overall curve is good; someone seemed determined to get into every stanine from 30% on up.  Fortunately there is a strong plurality in the 90th percentile.  Ugh, though, I hate grading when there are so many students.  It's always interesting to see what choices they make, and depressing when they make unwise ones.  So much for 6th grade; let's see how 7th and 8th grades go.

It's the handwork that keeps me sane when the workload gets so intense and I start to worry about how the parents are going to react to Junior getting poor grades because he didn't bother to study the material from the pretest.  Unfortunately, it's times like this when I need it most, and have the least time for it.  I can feel the tightness in the neck and the migraine beginning, and there's very little to be done but push through the pain and hope the majority of kids studied like they were supposed to.  Fortunately Spring Break is soon.

Scrappy Trip Around the World blocks are multiplying.  It's slow, but they're multiplying.  I'm still organizing my scraps and having fun doing it when I get a chance.

A few crumbs and strings blocks that I was playing with as well.

The Crumbs auction quilt is at school, getting signed by everybody as I have a chance to visit classroooms.  All the upper school have signed it and I'm working still on K-2 and 4th grade still.

Design Wall Monday and Stash report

I had a tiny bit of time to play with the Scrappy Trip Around the World over the weekend.  I have a second block started, with some of the 2.5" scraps I've been sorting.  I've been spending a lot of time trying to organize the fabric, but it's not done yet.  I do find it very soothing, though.

Saturday was very crazy busy.  Secundus had a planning meeting for his Mexico service trip; Daniel flew in for Spring break; we had about 15 minutes for him to shower, change, and eat and then we left for the wedding.  Steve and I let the kids stay longer at the wedding reception and we had to duck out early to attend a memorial service for Steve's coworker.  Lots of emotional highs and lows.  I gave pretest quizzes for my final exams on Thursday and there's an obscenely large amount of other end-of-quarter grading still to do, besides all the extra work last week for parent conferences.  But Spring Break is coming!

Remember the shirts that were waiting for Daniel to decide if he wanted?  Well, he says they're "too blah" for him.  Yes, I actually thought that.  But they'll make great backgrounds and blenders!

Smudge showed up for some cuddle time this morning.  I wish he wasn't such a naughty kitty indoors, because he's very affectionate. 


Stash Report

Quilting fabric:

Fabric used this week: 0 yards

Fabric used year to date: 22 yards
Added this week: 4 yards from the 4 shirts Daniel didn't want
Added year to date: 17 yards
Net used for 2013: 5 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: an even 5500 yards.
Yarn added this week: 0 yards
Yarn added year to date: 910 yards
Net used for 2013: 4590 yards

Easy Street Finish!

It's finished!  Easy Street has the binding stitched down and the weather cleared up enough this afternoon to hang it over the quilt branch of the sycamore tree.  See those daffodils peeking around from behind the trunk?

I started it way back in November thinking about using up my lime greens, aqua blues and reds.  I started worrying a little that it was too Christmassy, so when I finished the blocks I made sure to use the blue for the outer border.  I even quilted it with blue thread.  I am sending out bright, cheery, spring-like vibes with this quilt.  I mean, it definitely will work for Christmas, but I don't think it's Christmas-only.  It was my first quilt where I consciously tried for a "modern" color scheme.

Easy Street is still up at Bonnie K. Hunter's website, but will be pulled in June to go into her next book.  I've seen a number of stunning different colorways around the web.

It will be a wedding gift for Eliyah and Nathaniel tomorrow.  Eliyah was our babysitter way back when and it is so great to be able to give her a quilt I made.  It is quite heavy, with all the dense piecing in it.  She's probably far too busy to be surfing the web today but just to make sure, I won't link this up to Facebook. 

Argyle Wednesday and Miles of Binding

Not really miles of binding, but closer to 400 inches, or 33.3333 feet.  That's a lot of stitches.  The good news is that I only have one side, or about 100 inches, to go.  Before Saturday.  I want to watch TV and stitch this evening.  Other quilting news: I'm collecting signatures on the Cedar Tree auction quilt.  And I continue to organize my quilting scraps into strips, strings, crumbs, small chunks, foldable sizes, and yardage.

I am ecstatic to announce the return of the Argylefest 2012, which hibernated for more than a year while I knit shawls.  When I unburied it, I discovered that I had developed a hole in the knitting and the only way I could figure to fix it was to rip back about 10 rows.  Which I did, and picked up the stitches and continued.  I have now reached the point where I need to put half the stitches on a holder and work on the heel.  I think I can do this.  It's very different from my favorite method of constructing socks: it's knit flat, with intarsia (which is almost a swear word for some knitters), it will need to have lots of ends sewn in later, it will need to be seamed later, it's knit from the cuff down, and will ultimately require Kitchener stitch on the toes.  But I think I can do this.  I even enjoy the intarsia, as long as the bobbins don't get too tangled:

It is a good thing I practiced intarsia on dishcloths first.  But still, it is fun.  I could see making more of these.  I at least have to make one more... the matching sock!  I am still working on The Colossus Rises by Peter Lerangis.  And a few other books are going to help me with figuring out how to do top-down heels: Sock Knitting Master Class and Socks a la Carte.
I'll be linking up to WIP Wednesday and to Yarn-Along.

Randomday on Tuesday

Any day that begins with a 7:00 am departure time with 6 8th-grade girls in a minivan to attend a choir festival an hour's drive away is randomday by definition.  So I will treat it as such.

When you have 8th-grade girls in your car, all roads lead to Justin Bieber.

Did you know that the Terwilliger curves are hilariously funny?  Me neither.  I think it was the way they pronounced "Terwilliger," but maybe you had to be there.  Oh yes, I was there.  I don't get it.

Tertia stayed home from school today after her epic Awkward Moment yesterday.  She did not throw up again and should be able to return to school tomorrow.  Steve worked from home today so he could keep an eye on her.

One of my knitting friends last night commented that Tertia really provided a valuable service to her classmates, by probably giving them such a negative association with ... you know ... that they will stay away from ... you know ... until they are well past adolescence.  Maybe, but I do feel like we should buy a gallon of Lysol and gift it to her Health teacher.  I am grateful that Tertia does not seem to feel embarrassed at all by her ultimate awkward moment.  I would quite literally have died.

Sometimes it must be an advantage to have Down syndrome.

Tertia knows when Justin Bieber's birthday is.  She still remembers the birthdays of most of her elementary school classmates as well.

It was great to hear the choirs in Newberg.  My second drive to Newberg in 4 days.  Cedar Tree 8th grade choir did very well.  So did the other choirs.  I know the director of the Veritas choir from 15 years ago when we both were in Denver.  We were young moms together.  Now we are very busy, not-so-young moms, deeply involved in the Classical Christian school movement.

Tertia's IEP meeting was today.  Public school teachers are probably paid 8 times what I am plus benefits, but they are stretched very thin these days.  It went about as well as those things go... we heard lots of statistics about what kind of testing and what kind of accommodations and what kind of expectations for next year there are, and decided she should take art for her third elective next year.

"Sped" is apparently no longer an insulting term, just professional abbreviated jargon for Special Education.  Tertia's teacher just got her master's degree in this field.  That's probably good for a pay raise to ten times my salary.  Sigh.

I have parent-teacher conferences later on this week.  And the pretest for the final exam.  And Saturday will be extremely busy, with Daniel coming in, Secundus attending a planning meeting for a missions trip, a wedding at which Steve will be playing piano, and then possibly rushing off to a funeral for a co-worker.  So although it will be Randomday on Saturday, I will probably not be blogging then.  Enjoy your dose of random for the week.