My week "off"

So last week Stephen & I were both home. We had tossed around the idea of travelling somewhere, but decided we would use this week to catch up on house stuff, life stuff, etc. The result for me was less time spent knitting or on the computer, but more time spent organizing, gardening, etc. Our office is much more organized, and my craft room really looks good--I have new systems for keeping pattern, projects, needles, yarn, etc. organized. We'll see if I can stick to it.

And the gardening was highly productive. I did some work on what is essentially the kitchen garden (I have flowers mixed in, attempting to make it a "potager garden". I have a long way to go to fully realize this vision....but I'm working on it!), but our big projects were to finally buy and plant a tree (a lovely maple--pretty small now, but it does have decent branches and we could one day actually have shade!) and to do a perennial bed in the back. I'm quite pleased with how things look now--although we need to get the fence in to really satisy me. I have lots of photos:
The vegetable garden
Kitchen Garden

See our new maple tree?
The tree!

Pretty shrubs
Some new flowering shrubs.

The new garden
The new perennial garden (with the meadow of weeds in the background!). I don't think the picture does it justice....right now there are small blooms on many of the plants, soon there should be more flowers and I'll have to post another photo to show off the riot of colours I'm hoping to see. But already we have butterflies and birds and bees buzzing around...yay!

We also attended our first every Strathroy TurkeyFest. We missed out on the big performance events, but we ate turkey legs at our favourite local restaurant and wandered around the vintage cars and the midway. It was amazing how many people there were--downtown is usually pretty dead here, but the streets and parks were packed! And we held a Canada Day weekend BBQ on Saturday, which was a nice chance to visit with friends, family, and neighbours (we're slowly getting to know the new neighbours all around....I had hoped we could get more people to the BBQ, but most were gone to their cottages for the long weekend, I think!).

And there's not much knitting news, but I did dye up my handspun yarns and some BFL top for spinning (still using KoolAid. I plan to get some real dyes in the fall, maybe, to be able to create more subtle colours!):
My own yarns!

And an update on the falling leaves socks....it turns out I didn't do a great job of adapting the chart to top-down knitting. I worked the chart top to bottom instead of bottom to top, but I still did it right to left. Perhaps reversing that would have helped....you can see the difference between the completed, top-down sock, and the current, toe-up sock:
Wow! What a difference!
I think I'll end up frogging sock #1 and re-knitting it toe up, because I much prefer this pattern!

Now I'm off to work out a "schedule" for getting some things done on vacation, and to get some serious knitting done today.

Comments

Anonymous said…
i agree, i like that pattern better. Its funny how a week off work seems to fly by!!! Hope you enjoy the time off :)
Kai said…
you've been very busy! :)

the maple looks lovely and the perenial should be absolutely stunning.

i agree too, i prefer the toe-up version.. :)