The Knitting Mama: A Blur

That's what August has been... Today the temperature dropped significantly and I wondered what happened to summer? I had so many plans - I wanted to go to Jetty Island and play on the beach, finish a bunch of knitting projects, take the kids to the zoo a few times, but we ended up doing all kinds of other things instead. I haven't been able to do any blogging for a month and I am writing this at one o'clock in the morning, so here's a somewhat brief recap:

We had a barbecue at our house with a few close friends. Here's a sweet photo of Lisa and I with our baby girls...

I taught my friend Tasha how to knit and she finished her first hat!

Jamie had his 3rd birthday party at the Bellingham Railway Museum. Here he is operating the model trains with Grandpa Jeff!

We wandered through a chalk art festival afterward...

Then took a cute family picture at the park.

Sometime earlier in the month I had learned how to warp my loom...

I need to mention here that this process took hours - not a few hours mind you, we're talking somewhere around 12 hours spread out over a few evenings after the kids went to bed. I'm sure I'll get faster at this, but I was very glad to have been blessed with patience at some point in my life. People seem to always ask me when they see something that I've made "How long did it take you to make it?" I usually have no idea. Many would say I'm a 'process knitter' because I enjoy the process enough not to care how long it takes. Apparently I feel the same way about weaving. Here the loom is completely warped (I love saying that) and I'm beginning to wind it over the back beam:

As you all know, I also enjoy taking pictures of the process... Here, I have been using the weft yarn to weave the sampler project our little class has been assigned - I think it is supposed to be a table runner.

In the photo above, you can see I have ends hanging out which is (as I found out later) the wrong thing to do when you are weaving. Unlike knitting where you usually have ends to weave in at each color change, weaving makes it easier by allowing you to overlap wefts when you change color leaving no ends at all. Over the last few weeks I diligently kept weaving each night until I had a total of about 44 inches, changing the pattern to a section of twill... and then a section with one color weft which made stripes...

... ready to start another short section of twill, and then the final section in the pattern. I have to say that I love seeing, using, giving or keeping the finished product just as well as I enjoy the process. Which is why I was very upset when I found that my sons had done something terribly naughty on the last day of ~~driving each other bonkers~~ playing at home together before school:

They cut my weaving... the little stinkers. And no... they are not allowed to use scissors... or touch my loom for that matter... or play with Legos for as long as Mama is mad about it. Grrrr. I don't know if there's anything I can do to repair this either. I cried in front of them. I called Pat, my instructor in a panic and she said I'd have to wait until she can take a look at it on Sunday evening. Sigh... maybe it will end up being a rather long placemat instead.

In the meantime, Nathan started Kindergarten... (It was so strange to put him on that bus, but he got to school just fine and seemed to have a great time there... at least that's what I gathered from his "Yeah, it was good" when I asked him all about his day.)