The Giving Flower

My secret of the Stole is finished after 8 weeks of clues!! It blocked out beautifully and is much longer than I had expected. I used white, 100% washable merino-700m/100 gr bought at Wollkontor. As always with anything that gets finished here at this house of horrors the giving flower, I have lots of pictures to try to show you her all her glory.
(click for big)

She started with two triangles containing lots of x’s and designs that look a lot like beetles to me:

The middle section has what looks like cat paws:

And the end has some sword-like things that have, what I like to think, are flowers on the ends:

We haven’t been told the theme yet which means another week of waiting to find out what it all really means. I’m not clever enough right now to try to make any kind of guess, so I’ll leave that to the others.

This was so much fun to knit. DK, thanks so much for the great pattern and the fun surprises each week!! If only I had more time I would be knitting lots more of these-I can only knit one at a time. We’ll see what comes next.

I’ll leave you with one last picture which was taken by Alida:

Oh one last thing! I would like to wear this or another stole to our Christmas party at work this year, but I have no idea how to wear it or what to wear it with. Does anyone have any good suggestions??

I would like to wish everyone who is celebrating Thanksgiving today a yummy day full of thanks, family and love. Our turkey is now all gone, so I’ll show you some of the books we’ve been reading to learn all about Thanksgiving and why we eat turkey on every 4th Thursday in November.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

I forgot to take pictures!

I was soo busy cooking and getting things ready for everyone yesterday that I forgot to take pictures of our Thanksgiving. Yep, we celebrated yesterday. This year I decided I need more time to get things ready for Christmas so I pushed Thanksgiving ahead a week, that’s an ex-pat bonus-I can do what I want.

Here’s a picture of the apple pie Alida and I baked Friday night. Well, I guess I should say what’s left of it.

Hungry? We also had cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, glazed carrots, cheesy cauliflower with mushrooms, corn soufflé, stuffing and of course a huge 6.5 kilo turkey. Miriam, Andreas and Hannah came to help us eat it all. It was really nice to finally see them again, it’s so sad that everyone’s so busy lately that no one has time to get together anymore. I do love the fact that when I say I’m cooking, they come running.

After everyone was well fed and on their way home, I put in a movie and finished my secret of the stole clue 7.

I really liked this clue-it looks a bit like flowers. Just one more hint and she’s done.

I’ve been knitting other things but they are going very slowly thanks to all our time being used to plan a house. No, we haven’t bought a house or anything like that, we’re just trying to do everything we can to build one. We’re still not sure when we’ll be building, but we are pretty sure that’s what we want to do.

Until there is more news on the house front, I’ll show you my peacock feathers shawl progress.

No, there has not been that much progress but I have been working on her. She went into a bit of hibernation because the yarn and the redwood needles were just too dark for my tired eyes at night which meant she was set aside for other less demanding projects. Last week I bought an Addi lace knitting needle in the hopes that it would be easier on my eyes. We’ll see how she progresses now.

I’m off to eat some turkey and pumpkin pie-don’t you love left-over turkey?? Yum!!

Did I get you with that title?

Alida and I spent the morning making these: (thanks, Tamina!!)

(click for big-there are more but those are a surprise for later)

These are shells and beads strung on thin black wire. The sea, I love the sea. Beads, Alida loves beads. We had fun.

Yes, we are looking at houses. Either we find a good bank to rob, a rich relative to knock off or we find someone who has a bit of cash that they really don’t know what to do with so that we can get a little place of our own. Until then, we’re busy looking at all the cute, little, expensive houses we could build and calculating what we have to do to get one. We were out all day yesterday looking at some more, so there is no secret of the stole clue finished yet and if I don’t get away from this computer soon, it won’t get done this weekend either.

mom-needs-a-brain tidbit: I put 16-hour lipstick on every morning before I leave the house. This stuff is great-you don’t have to put any more on the whole day, you just need to remember to use the moisturizer stick because your lips tend to feel dry. The one drawback to this stuff is that the only way to get it off is with some kind of makeup remover. The other day I was driving to work and had a piece of gum in my mouth. I went to blow a bubble but the gum didn’t go out into a bubble, instead it fell and stuck to my lips. Because I don’t stock makeup remover at work, I spent a good 15 minutes trying to scrape off the gum, which was plastered to my lipstick and wasn’t going anywhere, and the top layer of skin on my lips. The entire time I was imagining the 7th grade laughing their little puberty-ridden heads off at this old lady’s white lips. The moral of the story; don’t chew gum while wearing 16-hour lipstick unless you want gum stuck on your lips for 16 hours too!