What's on my needles?

Entries in odd ducks swap (2)

Friday
Nov142008

Swaps and TGIF

First off, I'm so thankful it's finally Friday! I did have this past Tuesday off in honor of Veteran's Day, but the remaining days after just seemed to drag on, literally!

My list for this weekend is:

--Get house clean and ready for Pop's 13th Bday party tomorrow (Sat)
--Order cake (last minute, I know!)
--Get BBQ food, carne asada, chicken, hot links, hot dogs, fresh salad, ingredients for potato salad, chili beans, chips, dip, soda...
--Send out about 8 packages of completed Traveling Scarve's sections (Whew!!) I swear I knitted 2 full scarve's this week. Each section I'm knitting is about 6 x 6, so maybe at least a scarf and 1/2. I'll be happy when these are in the mail.
--Send out my Starbucks & Yarn Swap package, Tea Swap package, Glamour package
--Start stalking my new Christmas 2008 Swap spoilee
--Finish knitting my Pocket square for my Tech Square Afghan
--Forgot, make food for party bright and early Saturday... I'll be consuming many Venti White Mochas for this *-)
--Buy last minute present for my son
--Take my daughter to get a trim before the party
--Go to Green Planet Yarn and buy some Alpaca Tweed yarn at $7.95 a skein! about 200 yds.! I've decided to go with this for my CPH.
--Start CPH 8-)
--Pay bills (uggh!)
--Save the world 8-)

My list is long and I'm probably leaving out a lot of things, but I've got to try and make it happen. It is going to be a turning point for me with my son, who will be 13 years on the 19th of this month. Once he hits that 13, I will officially have 2 teenagers, no more babies, even though they still act like toddlers, well sometimes.

The years are flying by so fast with my kids, my daughter who's 15 right, only has 3 years until she's 18, which is freaking me out, and my son, only 5. I will have 2 adult children by the time I hit my mid-30's. It's been quite an experience raising them, and growing with them as I obviously started young (do the math). I wouldn't recommend starting as young as I did, but in retrospect there are alot of advantages to it, as well as disadvantages. I would repeat it again if I had the choice. It is a harder road to take, but if you can make it through it is definitely worth it. My hubby and I are both looking forward to our mid-30's because we hope and plan to spend alot of time doing traveling, in small fragments, like 2 days here or 3 days there. It's amazing how your born by youself, in a way, you do have your family your Mother at the very least, but as soon as your 18 years old (for most people) your on your own in a world alone working or going to school or just doing what you want. When you have kids you start your own little circle of life and it's just really amazing as the kids grow how you in a sense create this micro-society with it's own culture, habits, you name it. Maybe it's me, I think way to much, but it is a pretty fascinating experience.

In other Swappy news, I'm sad so very sad to say that my "Day of the Dead" Swap I participated in has turned out bad. I've been in more than a few swaps and this is the first I've encountered this. It's upsetting and you'll be upset when I tell you. Basically my "spoilee" who I was spending time getting to know and putting a package together for, has seemed to "fall off of the earth", literally. I had been in constant communication with her since the swap started back in August, and she was so nice, then after our last chit-chat via PM on Ravelry on 10/29/08, it's been total silence. I've gotten no response from email's, PM's, blog comments to her blog, nothing. I sent my DOTD package to her at the end of the swap, got a delivery confirmation of 11/6/08, and there's been absolutely no acknowledgement from her. I've been stalking the DOTD swap thread in "The Odd Ducks" group on Ravelry, and still nothing. I finally sent a note to the Swap organizer, and sadly she magic linked me today to inform me that myself and another member of the swap have something in common, my spoilee is her spoiler, and besides my spoilee just not acknowledging my package sent, there was also no package sent to out to the other member in the swap. My spoilee didn't send her spoilee anything and hasn't responded to anything.

I'm in denial of this, I'm holding out hope that maybe there's a valid reason she's not responded? Could there be people out there that pretend to be nice just to score free stuff? Isn't that a horrible thing to do? Even though this has burned me, I'll still join swaps, and know and hope that not all swappers are like this. This is obviously the ugly side of swapping but the good side outweighs the bad. You get to meet others who share the same love of fibery things as you, you meet friends, you get fun surprises, and overall your heart grows bigger for it.

I'm going to make a suggestion to the swap organizer of DOTD who has admitted that for some reason the DOTD swap has been hit with a good amount of flakes this time, that possibly there's some type of a swap reference check made when people join swaps. Maybe they can give references from other swaps they've joined to account for their swap worthiness, what do you think? I'm kind of for it, but at the same time it's kind of a like a credit check, and I'm usually against those. Because of this turn out, I'm glad it's Friday, and an end to the week I found out I was burned in the DOTD swap.

Enough of that, let's get onto some goodies! If you remember I missed my Skein Lane Retreat 2008 this past October because my Grandfather fell ill and things weren't looking good, thankfully he's healthy now!

Well I got in touch with Carolyn from Skein Lane afterwards and she is just awesome! There was a "Cable Pillow" project for everyone to make at the Retreat, and she offered to send me the pattern, goodies, and yarn for the project to boot! Isn't that awesome!
I got my package yesterday, and the yarn is greeny good, I can't wait to make this project not that I need another project.







Check out these cute "Hand-made" labels!



Carolyn is just so sweet to have sent me this, I'd also like to wish her doggy good luck in getting better. I would go crazy if anything happened to my doggy, so I understand what she's going through. Let's send her good thoughts!

Last, but not least, I have so many Traveling Scarves that I've finished that will go to the post today, but I didn't bother taking any pictures of most of them because I didn't have time, however I did have time to take a snapshot of this scarf. It's owner is "Gramma's" on Ravelry, and it's been flagged as a quick turn around. Gramma provided her own yarn, some red malabrigo and blue malabrigo, it is very pretty!

Here's my contribution to this lovely soft scarf, I give you the "Mock Cable" pattern:



And here's a full view of the entire scarf.. it's so long I could barely fit it in my picture.



That's all folks! TGIF!









Thursday
Aug212008

Dia De Los Muertos "Day of the Dead"

These are depictions of the "Catrinas". The Catrina was made famous by a zinc etching from "La Calavera de la Catrina" by Jose Guadalupe Posada. To find out more click here.
catrinas_dotdswap

I joined a "Day of the Dead" swap on Raverly, and I just got my swap partner, Cheryl. She has a blog http://knitdevotion.blogspot.com , in one of her more recent entries she had pics of her kids in some clothes she made with clothing tattoos (I think that's so cool), here's a peak at them.
clothtattooes
This is a piece of a dress, just look at those tattoos! I love the women with wings on top of the rose, so pretty! I really love the idea of clothing tattoos vs. actual body tattoos. I have wanted one at one time or another, but never thought it was a good idea, for me at least. Cheryl is already turning out to be a great swap partner, she pm'd me right away via Ravelry, and even blogged about me. I just love swap pals like this! I can tell were going to enjoy ourselves with the DOTD swap.

By the way, if you like to swap, there is an Odd Ducks Swap group in Ravelry that holds polls to setup new future swaps to join, plus you can suggest swap ideas, share swap info, a really cool group. Here's a link to the group's blog.