I know I've been superquiet on this blog, but it's still alive. I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a great day with your loved ones, where ever you are.

So, it's almost fall, and that means prime knitting season! Been busy working on socks since most of my pairs are getting very worn out. And we've been painting the house from top to bottom, all rooms, so, not much time for spinning. I'll be glad when the painting is done . . .

  On Facebook I was lamenting how sad it was that so many knitters have stopped blogging, as I was going through my blogroll list to prune out the inactive blog. And so I don't have the finger pointing at me as well, I'm resurfacing.

Okay, I've got a couple of posts waiting in ecto. I had to delete one, though, because the ricotta recipe I tried out turned out to be a disaster (must be that over-processed milk, and I don't have a farmer friend who will slip me a gallon or two of raw milk when nobody's looking).

I do have something blog-worthy. From time to time, I express to Hubby a desire for this or that spinning tool. I was complaining to hubby how hard it was to keep the singles from getting twisted together prematurely and how it was a pain in the neck to have to untwist everytime I picked up where I stopped. I showed him a picture of the lazy kate in The Intentional Spinner: A Holistic Approach to Making Yarn by Judith MacKenzie.

So, Hubby looked for a few blocks of wood, took out his router and set up shop on the back of his truck (we have a townhouse-size garage) and went to town. Here's another view, from the side:

I can't wait to try it out!

  I guess it's time for me to come out of hibernation. While I was absent from the blog, I was busy knitting. I'm still in love with EZ's Saddle Shoulder pattern, after knitting a light blue version. I'd been working a blue version, but was stumped as to how the saddle shoulder shaping was supposed to work, and I was using size US 7 needles which made for a rather tight knitting with Crestari wool worsted yarn.. Then came the Winter Olympics, and I needed something to knit during that period, so I decided to use green Crestari wool worsted, but with size US 8 needles. Wow . . . big different - it just flew on my needles like butter and by the end of Olympics I was ready for the saddle shaping. Well, I would have finished by end of Olympics but for a really stupid mistake. Obviously, you can see that I finally figured out the saddle process, after reviewing what other folks had done. So . . . here are the sweaters in all their glory . . .

For several years, we've forgone putting up an Xmas tree, simply because there's just two of us and we don't really spend a lot of time in the living room other than to eat dinner or to do work when we need to spread out stuff on the dining table.

However, this year, we've resolved to at least do one entertaining party, even though we still haven't fixed that irritating damaged ceiling right where the bay window hits the house side at the top (thank you, constructors who went on the cheap and didn't put in flashing to direct the water away from the building). So, we went out and got a small tree that we've put on top of the coffee table hidden behind the sofa. Here's a clue . . . don't get your tree from Lowe or Home Depot, no matter how cheap these are. People throw these around and invariably cause some extent of damage. Instead, find one of those club organizations such as Lions Club and patronize them. The first tree we checked out, we got. And what a find! Tonite we're going to get started decorating it . . .