A Lovely Afternoon in the Desert

Dear Blog-

I have pictures for you! This week I brought the camera with me to the market so that you can see what we do on Sundays...

Here are some of my felted bowls that I have been bringing to the Farmer's Market to sell. The two in the foreground and the purple one in the back row are made with Kureyon. It makes a limper felted fabric, but the colors can't be beat. The orange bowls are done in Cascade 220 with some Kureyon scraps used in trimming them. They sold great last week, but nary a one sold this most recent weekend. I'll do some more up as we get closer to the holidays. I think I finally have my pattern for them perfected. The small purple one in the very back is my perfected pattern.


Here is a long view of the market to the right of our table. This is taken first thing in the morning after most of the venders have set up, but before the customers start coming in. When the market gets busier as the day goes on, this little street is full of people. The hotel in the background brings us a lot of customers as well. As you can see, our market days have had absolutely gorgeous weather for the last several weeks, and looks to be even better this coming weekend. And as winter comes in we do get rather nippy in the mornings here, something every knitter loves...


Here I am looking from my parking space right towards our table, with the blue cloth. We have a nice spot, people see us as they are just coming into the market. To the right of us is the bakery (yum!) and to the left of us are the plant people, with their gorgeous flowering plants. We enjoy watching the hummingbirds come in to feed off of their flowers on Sunday mornings.



This is a view of our table all set up for the day. Yup, those blue chairs are where I spend my Sunday mornings knitting and people-watching. Well, one of those blue chairs, anyway. I don't need both. Yet. I do meet a ton of knitters every week just by sitting there and clacking away. It always amazes me how many people actually get ANNOYED with me in hot weather when they see me sitting there knitting. Or if they are from out-of-town they think I must be crazy to be knitting with wool, because in their minds we couldn't possible need anything that warm. As I said, I get the last laugh on winter mornings when they come out in their shorts because they didn't pack for winter weather in the desert. No clouds at night = cooooold mornings!


Speaking of unexpected weather, yesterday morning the heavens opened up and we had a heavy rainstorm complete with moth-ball sized hail! It sounded like someone was beating the house with bats.



And here is the progress on G's vest... I worked away happily on it all Sunday at the market, then yesterday I had to spend my day writing up a pattern for mittens and knitting up a test-mitten for a class I taught this morning. I took G's vest along with me to class today because I knew I could sit there and work on it while my students were working on their mitten cuffs. Well, I took out the vest, and as I was showing it to one of my students I realized that the green yarns are two TOTALLY different tones! The second skein has a lot more brown mixed in with it. You can't see it as well in natural light, but as soon as you look at it under flourescent it leaps out at you. I showed it to G when he came home from work this afternoon, and he doesn't care. So the question is - how much is it going to bother me every time I see him wearing that vest. And I think we already know the answer to that. So once I finish posting here I'll go dig through the rest of the yarn I am using for this vest and see if I don't have enough of this first color to at least finish the back of the vest. If the front is a slightly different tone I can live with that - this is not constructed like a classic garment and the fronts and back don't ever meet, they are held together by side panels, and all the panels are surrounded by the blue borders - it can work...

It looks as though after G's vest is finished I will be knitting up samples and writing patterns for my classes, and doing some Xmas knitting. I don't think I'll have the chance to do any knitting for myself again til after the holidays. I do have a few projects lined up, a cardi from Philosopher's Wool, the Twilight sweater from Interweave, and the Scheherezade stole from Pink Lemon Twist. She writes the most gorgeous lace patterns! And of course I have the yarn all earmarked for those projects. Something to look forward to!

Ok, I suppose I need to go finish washing the dishes. Ugh!