Presents, Knitting and Drywall (with tomatoes!)

Sabrina went a'fibering, and she sent me presents! :-) (the return address on the box said "Fiber Enabler Apprentice")

Look at the pretties! There's a big hank of sock yarn singles from Sandy's Palette . This is the prettiest purple, with a shading of a coppery color through it.

5 , count 'em, 5 skeins of Blue Sky Alpaca in the most gorgeous shade of teal (yes, I know it looks blue...)

and some beautifully dyed silk hankies, also from Sandy's Palette. :-)
The sock yarn seems to have a mind of its own, because it jumped out of the hank, wound itself into a center-pull ball, and started wrapping itself onto size 1 circulars. Ribbing ensued....
I'm toodling around with my own sock pattern, and I think it's working so far. :-)


The sock yarn is distracting me from the project at hand, which is a coat in Wool of the Andes for the December KnitPicks catalog. This is 25" of stockinette, with only 10" to go until the back is done. Thrilling, yes? :-)
This was my latest project - coming soon to a catalog near you! These were in Swish DK, which is a very, very soft yarn and very nice to work with. Speaking of catalogs, the new one isn't out yet, but the pictures of the Mimbres and the Ruth Jacket are up on the KnitPicks website. The Mimbres is here and the Ruth Jacket is here. The jacket picture on the website is very dark and rather hard to see, but the catalog picture is not - it shows the detail very well (I've seen the catalog shot, but I can't show you until it's actually been mailed).


The Kitchen Project
or

The Guy Who Owned My House Before Me Was A Raging Idiot
(not for the faint of heart)

We are constantly finding things in this house that were put together wrong, repaired wrong, or just plain old wrong. Luckily I'm married to a drywall finisher.I have a very, very small kitchen. Kevin built me a nice, sturdy cabinet to put pots and poans into so I could get them off of the counter. Before setting the cabinet, I decided to tear off the ugly wallpaper that has been in the kitchen since we moved.


As I'm tearing the paper away, I'm noticing that the wall seems damp under the window. As it turns out, it was. The windowsill leaks. The moron previous owner didn't fix the leaky window. Instead, he plugged the outlet under the window with drywall mud, threw up some new drywall, and WALLPAPERED OVER IT!

This is what I found under the wallpaper:

Say it with me.... EWWWWWWWWWW.

This is what was behind the wall:
I don't know if you can see it, but the entire wall is wet. Ugh. The entire wall under the window is now torn out, and Kevin is going to try this weekend to find out where it's leaking (we found out, when it rained yesterday, that the original place that he suspected was not the right one. sigh...)

I'll leave you with a smile, though...
(actually, it's the bottom of a Black Russian tomato that Mom and Dad grew and brought to us. Since I seem to be 12, though, I'm gonna post it.) :-)