A jumble of stuff

Wow it’s been busy here, the end of summer is approaching and I always feel a little frantic at this point.  I want to spend as much time with my nieces and nephew as possible before they go back to school.  They participate in so many activities and carry such a load of schoolwork and then work on top of it, I feel like I barely get any time with them   We had dinner with them all last night and went to the beach with my nephew on Monday and shopping with him at Target yesterday–he plays so nicely with DD, I feel like she is going to be missing her friend next week when he returns to school…Our new favorite game to play is guitar hero on playstation–totally rad and awesome, dude!  And they have 80’s music–the stuff I grew up on–can you say hair metal bands?  Funny, I still love listening to it…

I’ve been on a cleaning binge around here and freecycled a TON of stuff!!  I got rid of a bag of Plymouth Encore yarns and some various others to a very nice new knitter that I hope joins our local knitting group.  She’s such a newbie and so nice, I felt compelled to look for any gadgets and patterns that I no longer wanted and she ended up with a nice large bag of knitterly stuff.  And I felt great about it!  And, this cleared more room on my shelves to provide for better visualization of the stash–of most importance!  I also parted with, gulp, a large assortment of scrapbooking magazines.  This was very hard for me–I don’t know why.  I subscribed to so many and I never got to look through them and I never go back to those that I did, so I don’t know why I feel bad or why I kept them, but I would say about 100 magazines along with an old craft tote have also left the premises.  I feel good about it,  I really do, I actually have a path to my closet now.  I also organized stuff to bring to my MOMS club benefit garage sale and stowed some things away for my parent’s garage sale next year.  Watch out, hubby, your closet is next!!  HA ha ha!

On the creative front, I finally redid my mom’s double stranded Swarovski bracelet, one strand says MOM and the other says NANA, I replaced the claps with a heart-shaped toggle that we found in San Juan, of all places, and she can put it on and off better now.  I also added some “owl eyes”, double strand spacers, to stabilize the two strands better.  I am much pleased with the results.  I also made a gaggle of stitch markers for my KVVS pal–DD helped to pick out the colors for me–hope she likes purple a lot!  LOL   I even got to spend some time with my fellow knitters this past Tuesday at B&N–I brought with me the beaded scarf, frogged it and restarted it.  I know this is premature in saying this, but since I have been doing pretty well at WW and have lost close to 15 pounds now (!!!!!), I’m hesitant to continue on the first and only cardigan I have ever started to knit for myself.  I started it last year and have been plugging away at it whenever I can, I would say it’s about 6 or 8 inches high at this point, but it’s the entire circumference of the cardigan, remember, the Cabin Fever pattern is knit in one piece to the arm holes and then splits apart.  Would you stop and wait and see and later frog what you did and start over?  That would so bite to have to frog it all, but if it’s too big it would look silly.  I guess I should stick to knitting accessories for myself for now….

And since I eluded to it, today was weigh in day at WW and I lost another 2.4 pounds bringing the grand total to 14.8!!  Yippee!!  Several of my pants are already feeling too big and I have a belt for those I can try to make last longer.  I’m quite proud and hope this week will be another banner one–despite Labor Day picnics….I better get to the beach again–I think all that walking on the sand and carrying tons of stuff back and forth to get to the perfect beach spot really helped me this past week…and it doesn’t hurt my tan, either

My package went out today to my KVVS pal, and my pal said my package went out yesterday.  Watch for pics soon….