sunday afternoon

 the yarn store, purl soho, offered a free embroidery workshop for mothers on mother's day. chanda sewed with me for a little bit before running off to her modern dance rehearsal at 2 pm. 

 i was still there sewing when she returned two and a half hours later. 

 the store was busy with shoppers, but there weren't as many embroidery participants as i thought there would be. those of us who did show up talked with alini, the retail marketer whose idea it was to have the event, about other local yarn stores, knitting patterns and instagram.

 when chanda returned, we sat for another hour working on our projects.

 i've actually finished the middle flower. i'll have to take a pic tomorrow. i'd like to finish them, frame them and hang them somewhere in the apartment.

 we met a very hungry and cold greg at oaxaca on greenwich avenue. he had been waiting for us in the new park on seventh avenue and a chilly breeze had come up (and it had rained while we were in the store).

 the three taco combo with barbacoa (beef), pollo mole, and camaron (shrimp).

i'm so happy to have longer days and to be eating in the daylight . . 

we stopped at minerva's on the way back home to pick up two small bags of sample dry cat food that the pet store beasty feast had given kendall, and that minerva had eschewed.

cooler weather

the weather has been very cool after the heat wave we had. unusually cool! today i walked into soho to meet the mother of morgana's ballet teacher. her younger daughter is getting married and she has commissioned me to make a shawl for her to wear to the wedding to match a beautiful grey/silver dress she has. we found the perfect yarn at purl soho: alchemy's haiku in silver. i only have four weeks to do this. yes, i'm quite worried. i can only do this if i knit non-stop, and i have never done that before . . but then of course i've never been commissioned to make a shawl before. i need a lot of persistence and will. i'm rolling my eyes here, and shaking my head . . i think i just won't accept the money until it's done . . or maybe i should accept the money and that would help me knit more productively . . 

visiting with christine

it was an incredibly beautiful and warm day. janet and i took christine to the chocolate bar, where we sat and talked and knitted for a little while. then janet ran off to get her boys off to wayfinders, and i took christine home to pick up morgana and chanda. we decided it would be nice to take christine to see the high line and then to purl soho.

these are a few flower pictures from the high line. as you can see, it was very spring-like and summery up there! the bees were buzzing, the sun was shining . . and the purple flowers were blooming.

the cattail seed heads were fully out,

and the leaves have turned color, but with the warm air, it feels very odd.

we had a nice walk through the village to soho and to purl. it's such a pretty store . . a little pricey . . but pretty! there was some koigu on sale, and christine picked up a skein, which i added to. i thought she might like to make the chevron scarf from last minute knitted gifts. hopefully, i'll get the instructions to her before she leaves thursday afternoon.

of course chanda sniffed out some lollipops they had by the cash register. they looked so delectable that i couldn't resist either.

aren't they pretty? i think this flavor was raspberry. i had lemon, and christine had orange.

m and c and i had to rush off to music lessons. luckily, we made it in plenty of time for morgana to get a little practicing in before her 2:30 lesson.

chanda's lesson begins 30 minutes after morgana's. this is very good, as she practices for that half hour in the practice room before her teacher arrives.

a busy tuesday

i was up early today to get the girls ready for planting before going for my vision therapy appointment. we stopped at garber hardware to get peat moss, but they only had a colossal size bag, so we stopped at my friend janet's to see if she had peat moss. she also had a colossal size bag! it was resting quietly on the floor of her basement. she even had a handy dandy pail beside it that we could use.


we are very late in our planting and i didn't have anything planned, so we took a friend's recommendation and used the wildflower mat that was sitting in the bin at our apartment's site one complex. we followed the directions exactly . . which meant that we weren't instructed to cover it. we were told to dig 2 inches down and spread peat moss, and then press the mat in and water liberally. it felt odd not to cover it . . but oh well. it rained afterwards, so it's had plenty of water. we hope to have lots of beautiful wildflowers attracting butterflies, bees and hummingbirds.

while i went to my eye appointment, the girls finished writing up their chemistry report on the chemical reactions in the mouth (m also wrote one up on starch identification) (we used janice vancleave's chemistry for every kid). c practiced her violin and then watched little women. m read her book (i believe a beverly clearly ramona book). after my eye appointment i had tea with janet and carol at west 11th street cafe while it POURED outside. we hadn't had rain like that in over a month. it was very cozy in the cafe and we had a good time talking about our teenagers and pre-teenagers, along with the state of the gulf coast these days.


after lunch and the rain, we hiked to purl on broome street so m could finally use a gift card she had gotten for her birthday in 2009. it was a very difficult decision and took her an hour . . but she decided to buy the bag filled with beautiful scrap yarn over the lovely flannel fabric (nightgown project) and the beautiful vintage floral fabric (victorian dress for our next historic lesson time). she is combining this package of scrap fabric with other scrap pieces at home. she plans to make a quilt for her bed. i'll have to take a pic of the pieces tomorrow.

i couldn't resist a few photos of the knitting swatches. i love the lawn green next to the camouflage swatch!

while waiting for m to make up her mind, i went a little crazy on the mohair shots.