Not about knitting

My household has been in a bit of upheaval these past few weeks. Right after the holidays my husband had shoulder surgery due to some leftover sports injuries made in his youth. As a result his right arm has been confined to a sling/brace and any activities that require two arms/hands has been prohibited. It is nothing serious and he'll be just fine, it just means a bit more work for me. He can't drive among other things and as a result I have added chauffeuring him around to my list of activities. I'm sure you can imagine how crazy that makes things. Knitting and blogging and such have all taken a bit of the back burner so to speak. I wanted to do a quick check in with everyone but since I don't have much in the way of crafting I thought I would share with you a list of 75 Books Every Woman Should Read: (In bold are the books I have read so far...looks like I have a ways to go :)

The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Earthly Paradise, Colette Autobiography, Robert Phelps
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Property, Valerie Martin
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
The Group, Mary McCarthy
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Three Junes, Julia Glass
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
Spending, Mary Gordon
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Possession, A.S. Byatt

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Slipper Socks part two

In my quest to knit more socks I kind of chickened out on the first pair and just made some more slipper socks. I had some yarn leftover from making my husband some and decided to use them up to make our Jack (my son) a little guys pair.

They were super fast and used up that last bit of yarn I had leftover. Where have these little sock patterns been my whole life :).

Up next I have some self striping yarn (all pinks and purples) and I want to make my daughter a pair of socks. I am going to attempt this pattern for toe-up socks two at one time. I'll let you know how it goes.

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Fingerless Mitts and more

You know how you are supposed to let your car warm up in the morning. Much like most of us need a cup of coffee to get going, cars are supposed to be started and then sit idle for a few minutes so that the oil and other car fluids are warm. At least this is what my father told me growing up and my husband tells me now. Well, I have a hard time getting two little ones in the car with their various accessories, blankies, sippy cups, toys, shoes, jackets, and "must have" babies. Not to mention getting myself loaded up with purse, diaper bag, knitting bag, and now my daughter's preschool bag. So forget about taking the time to warm up the car. We load up and head out. This rather long, dull, uninteresting discussion on car maintenance is really just one long justification for why I knit up some fingerless mitts. It is a preemptive argument if you will for my sister. My family has teased her for years about her love of fingerless mitts and leg warmers. I swore I saw no need for them and would probably never be knitting them up.....I am a liar.

The last few mornings have been the first cold ones to sneak up on me and a big reminder that winter is here. I am fortunate enough that I have a garage I can park in it so there is no need to scrape off snow or morning frost. Up until this year I didn't HAVE to be anywhere, especially in the morning when the weather is less than cooperative. Now I have to be up and out for school, UGH. Anyway, talk about a short story getting longer, I hate driving with a cold steering wheel. I'm already bundled up in a jacket but I can't wear gloves or mittens because I have to buckle/unbuckle car seats and help little people. And I hate having to put on and remove gloves........sooooo.......I broke down and made these fingerless mitts.
The yarn is the same berroco ultra alpaca from the Hannah hat. The pattern was kind of a hodge podge of patterns and I just sized it for my own hand. I took the most inspiration from the Vogue Fall 2008 pink sonata gloves. The only detail I did add was for my thumb.


I bound off about 1/3 of the stitches and then the next row I cast back on for them to create a little opening for my thumb to peak out of (those dang carseats need full functioning hands). Of course now that I have a pair (albeit with a little flip top to keep everything toasty), I want more. I want real fingerless mitts with no top in just about every color.

One last little fun thing to share is this video for all the moms out there. This video is short, sweet, to the point, and funny. If you have the time to take a moment then click here and have a giggle.

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Happy New Year!

Finished Knitting 2008
Originally uploaded by At Home Mommy Knits

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope you all had a lovely holiday (if you celebrate). I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging, work, and you know my general schedule. It was really nice to completely unplug (metaphorically and physically) from the usual day-to-day. I ate way to much and had a lot of really nice quality family time.

After all the gluttony of the holidays I feel energized and ready to tackle the new year. I don't really have an opinion one way or another about resolutions. I have been catching up on my blog reading this morning and realize that some people are for and some against. I think for me after the lazing about of the holidays I feel very goal oriented. I don't do well with self-imposed deadlines. I hate the stress of it and it removes some of the joy for me. I think I'll just categorize any goals or resolutions as intentions. A little more of the middle road :)

Incidentally I created that little mosaic up there to gather all of my finished knits from 2008 together. I just wanted a visual on what I had accomplished thus far. I have some knitting intentions for 2009. I would like to make a lovely lace shawl, more sweaters, and maybe some socks. I am looking into photography classes because so many of the photographs I see on your blogs are beautiful and inspiring and I would love to learn how to capture that beauty in my own world. I am hoping that in 2009 I can take time to pause and really live in the moment. I feel like I do too much rushing around at times.

I want to thank you for stopping by this spot and sharing a moment with me. This blog was started (under pressure from my sister thank goodness she did) with no idea if I would actually continue with it or not. I read on Leslie's blog from one of her earlier posts that she was a secret blogger. I think she wrote about how to tell people that she made things, took pictures of them, and then posted it on the Internet. Her feeling was that people would say, you do what??? why?? That is exactly how I felt when I first started blogging. Now my blog is something I look forward to visiting and I receive as much joy sharing with you my triumphs and failures as I do from reading about yours. Thank you all for letting me in this world and sharing.

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