Two, Count 'Em, Two FOs

Unbelievable! I did a lot of knitting during my road trip, and actually have some finished objects to show.

I picked up the yarn for this scarf (a gorgeous 100% bamboo from Alchemy Yarns) on a road trip to California last year, cast it on during our trip to Carson City a couple months back, during which it picked up its moniker of "lettuce wrap scarf" from my seatmate on the flight back, a little boy on his way to New York who loved that particular appetizer at PF Chang's -- so it seems fitting that I finished it in Wisconsin.

I also finished the boring but kinda cute Color Blox Sox from the Six Sox knitalong, with a bare two days left before the new pattern comes out. Phew.

Home

I'm back from La Crosse, WI, a lovely little town at the confluence of the Mississippi & Black rivers. Actually, there are so many waters that come together in this region that it's known as "Seven Rivers": major waterways are the Black, La Crosse, Root, Kickapoo, Trempealeau, and Bad Axe rivers, as well as the Mississippi, an impressively broad channel even this far north. My hotel was right across from Riverfront Park, which was a lovely place to stroll in the mornings before it got too hot. Here I'm looking to the south - the bridge crossing the river here heads west into Minnesota.

La Crosse, in addition to being a charming riverfront town with lots of restaurants and shopping, also boasts a minor-league baseball team -- the La Crosse Loggers, who were in the hunt for a wildcard berth in the Northwoods League playoffs when we caught a game one evening. The Loggers, who are all NCAA athletes (and unpaid in order to retain eligibility,) played sloppy but with a good deal of fire. The Loggers overcame a one-run deficit in the bottom of the ninth when the first baseman crushed it over the right-field wall with a man on third. Quite the exciting finish!

Auf Wiedersehen *

Buh bye for a bit. I'll be offline for a week while I attend a training software class in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Sadly, it also means that I won't be able to make knitting group for at least a couple weeks.

* Ha! And you thought it was going to be a Project Runway reference!

M is for Maze

We visited Powell Gardens the other day, which is a botanical garden east of Kansas City. We took Hunter (Ali was at a sleepover) and our friend's daughter S. The gardens were unexpectedly lovely -- the conservatory is quite a gem -- but the real fun was this year's summer exhibit, a series of eleven mazes. Here we are navigating the rope maze (& looking none too graceful about it, I might add.)

Color Blox Sox

The latest sock pattern in the Six Sox Knitalong is a toe-up, reverse-Dutch-heel written for scrap yarn. Well, I've got plenty of that! ;-) I put together two different fair-isle prints that both had a grey tone, and then added a very dark charcoal heather & it all matched somehow.

The socks themselves are pretty straightforward, but I must say that the pattern is one of the most poorly written that I have seen in several decades of knitting. The author, trying to be chatty but barely managing to be informative, buries the actual pattern under an avalanche of asides & not-very-relevant tips. Eight pages of pattern for one pair of sox, people. I don't know what the group's editors were thinking.