Molly Bee's Attic

What a great weekend! I started it off by meeting Mrs. SABLE at Victor Allen's on Saturday morning for knitting and coffee. She is as wonderful as her blog suggests and her newest sweater project is even more gorgeous in person if that's possible. Laurie from Pickin' and Throwin' and Linda from Mousey Blog were there as well and delightful. It always amazes me when you meet strangers and you all have so much in common (she typed, humming 'It's a Small World' ). Delightful conversation, good coffee and I got the major part of the foot done on my purple sock. Mr. Bee and I went to see the film 'Smokin' Aces' in the afternoon. Jeremy Piven was in it so Mr. Bee was contractually obligated to take me. It's in our wedding vows. Gratuitous gore aside (seriously, you'll want to cover your head with your jacket for aproximately 5 minutes when you see the guy with the chainsaw come in) it was pretty good. Jeremy was amazing (of course) and there w...

Here is a photo of my newly finished socks. And one of the cuff detail although it's a little blurry. This is my new current fav pattern. It's a little taller than an anklet, a little more fitted than my normal basic sock pattern and the little lace panel makes it interesting. I love the yarn too-Cherry Tree Hill. Only about 1/2 the price of the Celestial Sock Yarn that I love and only a little lesser in quality. It's a pretty good compromise. Plus when you wash them they get sooooo soft! Now I'm starting a purple pair out of some WildeFoot that I found at Lakeside Fibers. Sock hoarding. I know. It's an illness. Mr. Bee and I are gleefully planning our 'Aroostook County Maine Sat-adee Night Bean Suppah', Deah. Here is the invitation that went out to our friends: The date for the official 'Aroostook County Maine Sat-a-dee Night Bean Suppah' will be February 24th. To make it as authentic as possible we will be eatin' at 5PM (shahp, Deah) so plan o...

Wee doggies hate getting up in the morning... Especially when they are all snuggly warm in the covers... But the thing they really hate is static cling head! Poor Wee Doggie! Didn't get any quilting done last night but got some more of Grammie's sweater sleeve done. I'll have to ask Mum to remeasure Grammie from the underarm down to get the sleeve length before I go much further. The original measurement was from the shoulder but the sweater is a raglan sleeve so I'd better be a little more sure. Tonight is grocery night. Other than that our plan is to avoid the State Of The Union speech at all costs. We have our own opinions as to the state of the union....

I am a party pooper. I went to Knit Night at 5:30 on Friday and then called Mr. Bee at 8:30 and begged him to come get me. I couldn’t run with the big dogs so I had to get off the porch. Finished a pair of socks and did three rounds on a new pair then lost the will to remain conscious. It was VERY warm in there and I didn’t have coffee-both of which contributed to a drowsiness that was just this side of embarrassing. So Mr. Bee and Wee Doggie came down, picked me up, took me home and tucked me in. No staying up with the big kids for Molly Bee! Got up wicked early on Saturday to go to Waukesha for a Geocaching Event. Went with friends of ours and their 2 ½ year old son, Geoboy. He was ADORABLE. It was cold and he had so many layers on that he walked like a penguin. He has his own little pint-sized walking stick. It was all just toooooooo cute! We only managed 4 caches. When you have short legs and are dressed in 40 pounds of clothes and boots you don’t make good time. I’m talking about ...

I made the yummiest Apple Crisp (click for recipe) on Sunday. I got the recipe from a free Kraft recipe magazine that comes on the mail and is also online. The topping was made with Nilla Wafers and oatmeal. It was soooo good warm from the oven and wasn’t bad warmed over in the micro-just not as crunchy as fresh. There are a lot of keepers among the recipes in this month’s issue. I especially like making meatloaf in muffin cups so you can freeze them for a quick meal some other day rather than eat meatloafy leftovers all week! BossMan is in San Diego this week and has called me twice complaining about the accommodations at his $200/night hotel. I listened for a while and then finally I asked him what the weather was like there…65°-70° and sunny as it turns out. (It’s ALWAYS 65°-70° in San Diego!) I told him that we got snow yesterday and that today was 5° with a wind chill of -5° to -10°. Made his room look a whole lot better instantly. I aim to please! Call me anytime! Grammy’...

Finally some snow! There is a Winter Storm Warning and we are supposed to get 4"-6" tonight-the first significant snowfall in two months. It was a lush, green Christmas around here this year! Tonight's extravaganza is supposed to come laced with ice and sleet, which I am not too crazy about, but hey, beggers can't be choosers. Christmas? Were we speaking about Christmas? Oh yes we were, Oh Mighty Queen of the Segue! Here is a photo of Wee Doggie. He spent Christmas afternoon safely tucked between my freshly minted socks so he wouldn't get trampled in the commotion or get accidently tossed in the discarded wrapping bin. I love Socketta yarn! Almost as much as I love Wee Doggie!

Haven’t had much time to write since I have a new kid! I added to my little family of scientists on Monday. The new kid's name is Rudy and there is much work to do to beat him into submission like I have the rest of my charges. He’s not as strong-willed as some of the others so ‘Mom’ should be able to whip him into shape tuit suite! I have been knitting my Grammie’s cardigan, but it still looks like a misshapen lump on the circular needle so I didn’t bother with a picture. It’s going really fast so far. Almost done the back now. Haven’t been down in the quilt room this week so far. Spent all last evening cleaning out the walk-in closet for the Easter Seals truck that is supposed to come on Thursday. It was like a bad fashion museum in there…huge florals, shoulder pads, lots of rayon…most of it too embarrassing to even give to charity. Now it’s cleaner and we can even see the floor since I cleaned out the old shoe graveyard. I am still my Daddy’s girl-never met a shoe I could sta...

My Mum signed the waver to be included on my blog. This is a picture of her in the sweater I made her for Christmas! Doesn't she have a beautiful face and cheery smile? By the way, she painted the landscape you can see on the wall behind her. Looks and talent. She has it all, my Mum! Off to the Quilt store in Cambridge this morning to pick up fabric for my super secret project. Quilt work sometimes gets all mathy on me and I ALWAYS underestimate how much I will need and am always to stubborn to ask for help at the shop. Thankfully the quilt shop lady knows about my disability and puts a little more aside for me for when I come crawling back shamefaced! Call her an enabler if you will. I just call her my hero. She understands that it's all just number salad to me!

Here is the sweater I knit for my Mum for Christmas! It is the 'Pure and Simple' Top Down Cardigan sweater. It is knit in Cascade Quatro. She kindly sent me several photos since I forgot to take any myself. There were a couple of really nice ones where she was actually wearing the sweater, but she wouldn't give permission to be on my blog. Maybe if I put a grey fuzzy blob or black bar over her face to protect the innocent...I'll have to check.

In the year 2007 I resolve to: Stop making silly resolutions. Get your resolution here.

I ran out of fabric for my super secret project (as usual) and decided to take a stab at a wee foundation pieced mini block. After only an hour and a half of tracing templates, cutting strips, sewing and ironing, flipping and folding I got this little lovely. Isn’t it the cutest thing ever? And absolutely useless! Why? Because even though the instructions repeatedly begged me not to, I still insisted on cutting off the quarter inch seam allowances all around the outside so I can't sew it to anything else. So what have we learned? We have learned that cute, mini-blocks are indeed possible and that we should establish a quilting cut-off (pun intended) time of sometime before 10 p.m. when all available brain cells are still awake and firing! That's right...I perform these experiments so you don't have to....Guess it's back to the old sewing machine!

It’s been so long since I’ve updated, that I don’t know where to start. So much has happened over the holidays that I’d have to write 20 pages to catch up! I guess I’ll just cover knitting content this time around! This is the felted hat I made for friend-Donna. The photo doesn’t show it well, but it’s just a basic brimmed hat, navy blue with blobs of color in it. She had mentioned that she would like one when we saw an example of it at The Ear. She used to have one but she left it on a train in Switzerland. The next picture is of a mitten pattern I test drove, but don’t like it that well. The finger cab is boxy and too big because my Fair Isle is fairly tight. But I did like the afterthought mitten. All in all, I believe that this is destined to be a stag mitten. Maybe I’ll try again and drop a needle size for the finger cap. But not any time soon. I made my Mum a cardigan but forgot to take a photo. She will send one soon so I can post it. I also made Gram a pair of socks but forgot ...

How can a person who got all of her shopping and wrapping and errands for Christmas done before Thanksgiving get to be so frantic the week before the big day??? There is some weird voodoo, fung shui, mystical thing at work here. This week is Christmas Party central-one tonight, one Thursday night, two Friday and then up to Mr. Bee's folks on Saturday. Got the gifties, but forgot about all of the cooking! Whew! My Mum sent this picture of her cute piggies in the God Awful Green Socks I knit and then pawned off….ahem…that is to say… gifted her with …when I was in Maine this summer; thus making me have to pay up since I bet that they would never grace her feet. Note to self: always use ‘inside voice’ when betting around Mum. This is a link to my new favorite thing. http://www.elfyourself.com/ I’ve made one for everyone that I have a photo on my computer for. Tooo funny! Thank you Joey T. for being the first to humiliate yourself! The countdown is on to being able to post more pictures...

I am still alive. I’ve just been working on Christmas stuff that I can’t talk about! There are mostly finished project, roving and yarn bits exploding out of every corner of my house. Suffice to say, it’ll be about three more weeks before I can post pictures! Mr. Bee is counting down the days until he is done with college! He has exactly three, count ‘em three, more classes before he’s done. His last class is the evening of the 14th he has taken the 15th off to celebrate by staying home and doing exactly what he wants to do all day! It’s been 4.5 years of homework, books and teacher’s dirty looks. He’s ready to veg on the couch for a couple of days and he deserves it. I'm am so proud of him. I went with Mrs. M., as her guest, to her quilt guild’s Christmas party a couple of nights ago. The speaker was a wonderful woman named Katie who spoke at length about Underground Railroad quilts. It was a wonderful presentation and she had beautiful quilts. The buffet dinner was yummy and we ...

I just love my job. Just when you think I’ve heard it all, I have a day like yesterday. One of my ‘kids’ came to me and asked for my help. His problem? His computer screen ‘was turned completely upside down’. And you know what? It was! The monitor was upright, but the image? On its head completely! So I poked around and fixed it. Just as I was laughing that weird things like that don’t pop up too often, another ‘kid’ came over and asked for help getting her ‘air pump needle unstuck from her bouncy ball’. No joke. She used exactly those words. She was filling up one of those exercise ball [because the current trend here is to sit on them instead of your chair which amuses me] She finished blowing it up with a bike pump and the needle wouldn’t come out. I fixed that too; two new skills to add to my resume, image uprighting and bouncy ball unsticking. That’s what you get working for scientists. They can split the atom, but they can’t change the toner in the copier….or apparently b...

Apparently the thing on my it WAS a corn (and not a horn!)….results came back benign-thank goodness. Still waiting to hear about Mr. Bee’s. Was more than a little blue this Turkey Day so didn’t do much by way of celebrating. I launched an assault on my messy house on Friday while Mr. Bee was out. How do two people create such a mess!? Put up some outdoor Xmas decorations because it was warm out. I refuse to turn them on until at least the 1st of December though! I’m still not ‘Christmassy’ yet. Although all of my shopping is done which is good! I spent Saturday scouring the countryside for my favorite Celestial Seasoning Holiday tea. Walgreens had them on sale 2/$5 (and one Walgreens had them entered into their computer incorrectly as buy one get one free so it was $2.99 for two!). I got enough to do me for the year if I ration wisely. I may even give a couple of boxes away to special friends….but they have to be VEEEEERRRRYYYY special. No pics but I am working like a fiend on the...

So Mr. Bee goes to Dr. W. today to have a thing removed from HIS arm. Not only did Dr. W. rat me out about me trying to con him into a big bandage for my tiny head boo-boo yesterday; he bandaged Mr. Bee’s arm up like he had broken it at the shoulder or something. He only has three stitches on his forearm and he’s got this groovy ace bandage thing going on all up his arm. I’ve been hosed! I think they are in cahoots. To add insult to injury, Dr. W sent him home with a roll of the ace bandagy stuff 'in case I want to wrap it around my head’. Hardy Har Har! A little late to get a free supper out of it now! Especially since the jig is up! Revenge is mine sayeth Molly Bee! I started a pair of socks at lunch today for my Grammie for Christmas. I got the softest, light, plain, peach Jaarwool. No funky stripes for Grammie. Then I got a skein of Trek in yucky browns, tans and greys-boy colors- to make a pair for my brother. Don’t know if he’ll wear them or not, but he tromps around in the ...

So I had this little ‘thing’ removed from my forehead today. Don’t know what it was. Public opinion varied from, ‘I don’t see anything at all’ to ‘I knew your horns would come in some day’. Dr. W. is having a biopsy done on it and will let me know if it is indeed an actual horn. I hope so. What a proud day that will be. There may be photos involved. So in my ongoing effort to get out of cooking dinner, I tried to bully….eh…that is…gently coax Dr. W. into a turban-esque-whole-head bandage. My plan was to milk this puppy for all it was worth and guilt Mr. Bee in to talking my poor, injured-now-recovering-from-what-must-have-been-major-surgery body out to supper somewhere tonight. Anything that looked less that a full-blown brain surgery was not going to get me even take-out Chinese. But I'm thinking that a bad-WWII-movie-style-bloodied head wrap, possibly accented with a limp, slight cough and a strategically planned swoon or two might do the trick. But he’s a tough cookie that Dr. ...

I took my button class this afternoon. I made10 misshapen ugly-ass lumps and lost aproximately $100 and three hours of my life. Mistake! I have been practicing Celtic Knotwork and made this card for a friend. I've got a long ways to go but I love how intricate they look. Knit night was fabulous on Friday night. I finished one pink sock and got the leg done on the other. I also finished a secret Christmas project so it was productive as well as entertaining. Schooner Fare cancelled on Saturday night. Chuck was ill and couldn't fly so the concert got postponed. I was so excited to go. Guess I'll just have to wait a little longer. Off to start a new secret project. Will try and blog more next week.

Deep Breath. OK, I’ve been thinking about this long enough…I’ve made a decision. I made a top-down v-neck cardigan for myself last spring. Once finished (including sewing on the buttons) I discovered that the button band was way too short. It hauled the front of the sweater up. So I did what any good knitter would do. I stuffed it in a bag and put it in storage. I checked periodically to see if the button band had decided that it had been punished enough in the cold and dark, come to its senses, and grown to the appropriate length. It hadn’t. And I checked a lot! Button bands are wicked stubborn that way. So back into storage it went. All the while this time-honored process was going on, a little voice in my head was planting the seed, “Pssst…if you’re gonna to rip out the button band anyway, why don’tcha frog the whole thing and make the crew neck version from that pattern you got in Maine? You like that version better." [See, that’s the way us arithmetically challenged, folk...