WIP Wednesday: Am I even still knitting?

It's a good thing that Jenn actually does and writes about gardening, knitting, sewing, photography ... my one and only craft has fallen to the wayside as I have gotten busy crafting another project, with a nine month timeline.

But, there has been some action, and Anna asked for an update, so my WIP in all its glory....



It's been a work-in-progress forever. But, it's a reasonably simple pattern, once I decided I had gotten past "the hard part". Now it actually has sleeve holes, instead of just being draped over my shoulder to give the impression of a sleeve! It's just stockinette for inches and inches now. Bryan is very good about encouraging me to go to knitting, even when I'm tired. And I don't have wine to slow me down anymore, so I should just shoot through this like a rocket ship!

Which project will be completed first? Only time will tell!

Carrots!

I must confess, when it comes to things like gardening, I'm never quite sure whether to post in my 'life' blog or my craft blog. Whenever I consider folding the two together, however, I realize how much I tend to babble on about N. While I love my son and think the sun rises and sets on him, I'm not quite sure that you do too, you know? Do you really need to hear about his Easter egg hunts? I think I have decided, in the meantime, to define gardening as a 'craft' though really it's a hobby. I know that's a strange definition, but from what I can gather from the blogs I read, you crafters are in love with gardening.

So, while peas are still coming from our garden (though the plants are not doing well), a few of the carrots have started showing signs of being ready for eating! Paul and N pulled one from our garden and brought it to me to admire.



When I asked him to take about eight hundred photos of it, N got peeved and chucked the carrot at me.



I guess I kind of deserved that.

We still need to pull a few more carrots from our garden, but that should be soon. Sadly, it is so hot out that Paul is about 95% uninterested in cooking, so I'm thinking I won't get my roasted carrot-avocado salad soon.

In good (?) news, our watermelon plant appears to be overtaking our garden.

I'm Totally Screwing With My Site

Since Blogger decided to update their templates, I decided to update my blog. I'm still not in love with the design, but it's both closer and farther from what I wanted. I feel like I'm losing a lot of the simplicity of my blog, while adding features I want to see (such as the Tweet This bit). We'll see how much I change it over the next couple of weeks/months.

Now, I've only got one link today, so I'll make it count. I've taught numerous people how to knit, and I've converted a hefty portion of my female family and friends to knitterdom. However, I'm a lousy, lousy teacher. I've got no patience for people, no ability to explain clearly (or even speak clearly), and a lack of understanding about how people even make mistakes which I don't normally make. To be fair, I'm usually lousy at learning things from people too. It's why I learn most of my crafts from really clear books.

However, over the course of the last year, two of my 'pupils' have made mistakes in knitting that, if I were a better teacher, probably would never have occurred. The latest instance led my cousin to admit that she had been purling incorrectly for ages. I want her, and all other people who make mistakes at knitting, to feel better about this. One of the knitting blogs I follow, a blog with nearly a thousand followers, recently admitted that she's been doing yarnovers incorrectly forever. I admire this type of post because it's the type the knitting world needs. The one where you read it and go, "Shoot, I've been doing it incorrectly as well. At least I didn't have to discover that in front of a whole class of people."

Maybe if you're making mistakes in your knitting and you fixed those mistakes, you should blog about it. I will definitely try to think of some to add myself, but my first piece of advice is: "Don't hand your lacy baby blanket to your mother to let her count the stitches because she'll drop it all off the needles and then you won't know how to fix it, so you'll just pick it up as best possible and it'll have a giant knotty hole in the middle of all the lacework."

Remember Last Summer

You remember last summer when I posted about how during summers all knitting blogs shut down? At the time, I was doing sewing. This year, I feel like I'm totally overweight and I need to diet, so I don't want to sew garments. However, I am gardening! Sort of. My husband and son are the real gardeners.



The things in our garden that interest me the most are our raspberry plants, our watermelons, our pumpkins, and our peas. Of all of those, only the peas have come about. A few weeks ago, while out in the garden, I noticed that our peas were putting out shoots all over the place.



At that point, I bugged Paul to do what we should have done much much earlier -- put in stuff for them to climb and water them more often. This did some good, but we can clearly do much better next year. We only had two really great plants this year, and at least three plants just didn't make it beyond the early stages.

Today, for the first time, Paul and I (and my cousin and her children) reaped the benefits of Paul's hard work!



We picked pods off the plants and opened and snacked. Delicious and sweet and wonderful. I am thinking I might pick a few to open and saute in some butter and salt, but they barely need it! My cousin's youngest loved them and happily gobbled up all the contents of the pods I opened. When I asked her to smile for the picture, she could barely acknowledge me as she scrabbled for the peas in her mom's hands.

I'm going to mark the peas as a success this year. Check back later to see if I've got an update on our carrots which are looking promising! I've been itching to make Smitten Kitchen's Roasted Carrot and Avocado salad.

What are you guys up to this summer?