Calling All Crafters

Calling All Crafters!

What? A craft fair in conjunction with our Fair Trade Fair
When? December 5th from 11:30 -4:00
Who? YOU!! We are renting out booths to crafters of all sorts and people who sell interesting things.
Where? St. John's Lutheran Church - 625 E. Netherwood - Oregon, WI - 608-835-3154

We have approximately 13; 10x10 foot spaces and 6; 10x12 foot spaces available. The 10x10 spaces are against walls, and the 10x12 spaces are free-standing. Both size booths are available for $50. If you require a table, it will be $5, and if you require more than one space, we can arrange a discount for you.


Contact me today to book your booth!!!

Fair Trade Fair and Craft Fair

Where: St. John’s Lutheran Church

625 E. Netherwood, Oregon WI

When: Saturday December 5th

Time: 11:30 AM to 4:00 PM

Handicrafts from around the world available to purchase for Christmas gift giving. All proceeds from Fair Trade Fair items sold go back to World Hunger Relief, so this is an incredibly worthwhile event to help people around the world in need.

Check out www.serrv.org/lwr to see a sample of what will be available for sale.

In conjunction with our Fair Trade Fair, we are also hosting a Craft Fair featuring our local artisans and people who sell interesting things. Proceeds will go to various mission activities throughout the year. Plan to join us for lunch as well! The Guatemala mission group will be selling a lunch of homemade soup, bread, and dessert for only $5.

Support local and worldwide missions by doing your holiday shopping at this one event! How awesome is that!

Useful knitting resouces

I have a number of sites that I consider to be good knitting resources, and here they are, in no particular order:
KnittingHelp.com
Knitty
Ravelry
KnitPicks Community
Learn to Knit at Lion Brand Yarn
Creative Knitting Magazine

Of course, I think the best resource is your Local Yarn Shop. There you will find knitting (and the occasional crocheting) enthusiasts who will gladly answer any questions you have. I have found my LYS, Off the Beaten Path, to be an amazing place. I've made friends with the owner and all the people who work there. They share in my joys as I complete a project and listen as I carp on about life or whatever. Of course, I'm not always as loyal as I could be. Sometimes I buy yarn at the other local yarn shops. This past weekend, I visited Lakeside Fibers and bought some yarn for making a tee shirt.

Caffeine can ease asthma symptoms

My friend, Chris, a fellow asthmatic, swears by drinking coffee when his asthma is acting up, in addition to his regular medicines, of course. Apparently Chris is onto something. A couple of scientists in the UK studied how caffeine affects asthma, and they concluded that, "Caffeine appears to improve airways function modestly in people with asthma for up to four hours." I need all the help I can get, bring on the coffee!

Caffeine for Asthma.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Refracted Moments.

Organized Yarn Closet

I organized my yarn closet this winter. I'm thinking I did this back in January, but I hadn't gotten around to posting the picture until now. Inspired by my local yarn shop's yarn displays, I bought a bunch of black metal cubes at Target. Although they have recommendations on the box, you cal really arrange the cubes in any way you see fit or in any way that will make them fit! The other part of the system is a black metal shelving unit that I think I bought at Menards. I'd used it to store plants at our previous home. I sorted the yarn mostly by color, and the projects are in bags on the black shelving unit. The two yellow suitcases are filled with afghan projects that I inherited. There are other non-yarn things in here too such as my jewelry-making supplies. I like this system because it makes it easy to find what I'm looking for and to see what I've got at a glance.


The second picture is of one of my new toys that I also bought this winter. It's a ball winder and yarn swift. I don't like umbrella swifts, so I got something a bit different. I ordered it on ETSY from a carpenter in IL, and I love it!

The rest of the crafting things you see on and around my drafting table are my scrapbooking/rubber stamping supplies.

Falcoon brushes his teeth

Maine Coon cats are particularly susceptible to gingivitis, so it's good to brush their teeth. I know that in humans, there is a connection between gingivitis and heart disease. My husband's dentist explained this to him when he was diagnosed with gingivitis. He had his special extra-painful deep cleanings and has been flossing 2x daily. He's almost entirely reversed his gingavitis. With the cat, though, I figured we'd just try to prevent it in the first place as much as possible.

I decided to train Falcoon to put up with having his teeth brushed, and I honestly anticipated bloodied hands from the attempt. However, the training went a lot easier than I anticipated, namely because Falcoon had already been brushing his teeth. I just didn't know about it until I caught him using my husband's soniccare toothbrush!!!

One day, I went to Walgreens for something else and saw that they were having a sale of buy one get one free on toothbrushes, so I bought Falcoon his very own toothbrush so he'd stop using my husband's! I did replace Craig's toothbrush btw. We don't use toothpaste, but Falcoon just loves brushing his teeth. He sits on the cat tree, and I hold the toothbrush for him while he brushes it around his mouth. He's a very oral (read bitey) cat anyway, so for him this is just great fun. It's his special game that he gets to play with me. And he gets cleaner teeth in the process!

I finally managed to snap a picture of Falcoon brushing his teeth this morning! At our last checkup, the vet said that his teeth and gums looked very nice.

Green Socks

This is my first pair of lace socks. I'm quite pleased with them. :) I made these from Lanette sock yarn. It's tough to find a good, solid color sock yarn, but this stuff is great, very soft. Also I have been wanting to make a pair of green socks for a long time now but had been having trouble finding a yarn that I liked. I used a pattern from the book, Socks, Socks, Socks that I reviewed over at Universal Book Reviews.

Fair Isle Socks

These are one of the pairs of socks that I am working on currently. My first Fair Isle socks was a pair of slipper socks that I made for my mom for Christmas. They have hearts on the heels. These are a lot tougher though because the pattern is more complex. I'm enjoying making these socks, but they are definitely challenging.

Perking the Office

Yay! Craig gave me flowers. I brought them to work so that my cat, Doc, wouldn't eat them or knock them over. Plus, I wanted to look at them while I was at work. The plant in the foreground is a grafted cactus.

Knitting Bags

I was at my friend's place yesterday, and she saw that I was using a zippered bag that curtains come in to store my current sock project. She said that she uses the same thing! I like zippered bags such as those for curtains, pillowcases, and for bigger projects, comforters or blankets. Some other bags that work great are the inexpensive "green" bags that are being sold all over town as a replacement for paper or plastic bags at the grocery store. Of course, I find myself using tote bags as well to store knitting projects. At garage sales, you can find a ton of tote bags really cheap. People go to conferences where they are given these bags they will never use again. I don't personally care what the bags say or where they come from because they make great project bags.

Craig Peterson & Beyond Compare

Pictured to the left is my husband, Craig Peterson. He's the lead developer of a shareware utility called Beyond Compare. Recently, he was interviewed by Successful Software. A couple of months ago, he participated in the Podcast at Delphi.org where he also discussed the development of Beyond Compare version 3.

One of the things they were trying to ascertain in the Successful Software interview is why Beyond Compare succeeded despite the developers ignoring conventional wisdom and making some unusual decisions. I think it is precisely for these reasons that Beyond Compare is so successful. You cannot succeed if you just do what everybody else does. They buck the trends, and it works for them.

2009 knitting goals

I'm not a big one for making New Year's Resolutions. I am also not particularly goal-oriented. It seems to me that often life gets in the way of our goals. "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry," adaptation of a saying by Robert Burns. However, when it comes to knitting, there are some things that I would like to learn, and maybe I'll even learn them this year. So here are three of my knitting goals:

1. Learn to knit socks on circular needles.
2. Learn to spin yarn from roving.
3. Learn to knit cables.

I hope, but I don't know if it's true or not, that knitting socks on circulars will be faster than knitting them on double points. I'm currently knitting a pair of socks from Sandy's Palette merino sock yarn. This is super-soft luxurious sock yarn, but it's taking me simply forever to finish these socks. I started them during our vacation in November.

I suspect that my sweater-knitting has cut into my sock-knitting though. Since November, I have knit two sweaters, and I'm currently working on a third that I just started last week. What I love about knitting is that it finally gives me a good reason to appreciate winter. I can fight back against the cold and knit sweaters! My current sweater is a Neckdown Pullover for Women by Knitting Pure & Simple. It's a raglan. I'm knitting it from Cestari Cranberry Tweed 100% wool.

Do tarantulas spin webs?

I took this picture of this cute little fella at the Desert Springs Preserve when we were in Las Vegas this November. I know most people don't think tarantulas are cute, but they are fuzzy which makes them cute in my opinion.

So I got to wondering if tarantulas spin webs like other spiders do. It turns out, they do, sort of but not for the same purpose as other spiders. They do make silk, but rather than using it to catch bugs, tarantulas use the silk to line their dens. It helps them to detect intruders.

Here is a site with good info on tarantulas.

2008 the bad and the good

I'll readily admit that 2008 was a pretty lousy year. Beyond the national and international economy stuff which admittedly is pretty big and important, my personal life was particularly challenging in 2008. Two really awful things happened. First, my husband's brother, who we all knew wasn't quite right in the head, completely lost it and physically assaulted me Memorial Day weekend. I spent the entire summer recovering from my injuries and undergoing Physical Therapy.

Then in early June, our basement flooded. It really could not have happened at a worse time as I was in no condition to deal with it. How do you pull down drywall, when it's too hard to pull on your own socks? It could have been worse though. Our house did not wash away like some did in Lake Delton. We decided to have a sump pump installed to prevent future floods. I have to wonder just who thought it was a good idea to build a house in southern Wisconsin without a sump pump? This area floods and not infrequently. Having a sump pump installed after the fact is expensive, but it seemed to be worth it. We also hired a construction company to come in and gut the basement. There was mold everywhere and mushrooms growing on the walls. Ick!

So that was the worst of 2008 for me. I am thankful that it was not worse. Although our house flooded, we still have a house. We both still have our jobs as well. Certainly not everybody fared so well in 2008.

All of the negative aside, there were some good things that happened in 2008:

• Barak Obama won the presidential election!!!
• We had a great vacation in November to Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert.
• My parents are in good health.
• My husband and I are both in relatively good health.
  
• Our cat Doc recovered from his enucleation surgery and is doing quite well.
• Sid and Falcoon, our other cats, are happy and healthy.
• I reconnected with an old friend who I sorely missed and got to spend her 30th birthday with her this summer.
• My grandfather had his 90th birthday party in January.
• I had a great time at the Chicago and Milwaukee cat shows hanging out with my sister and other cat folks.
• My sister hosted an awesome Thanksgiving party.
• We hosted an awesome Halloween party (power tools + pumpkins = lots of fun).
• I learned how to knit socks, and I also knit my first sweater.
• I enjoyed working with my church's prayer shawl ministry to knit and crochet shawls for people in our community needing comfort.

Let's just hope that for all the good of 2008, 2009 is a much better year for all of us. I hope that a new administration can be the wind of change that we need to turn some of our problems around.

A New Use for a Seed Spreader

This tip came from my sister who lives in the greater Chicago area. They get a lot of freezing rain down there. You can use a seed spreader to spread salt on your driveway and walkways! All you have to do is dump salt in the main compartment, open it wide up, and start walking. I have to admit that I've never actually used my seed spreader for spreading seeds, but it works like a charm for spreading salt! We had freezing rain last night and into this morning, so there's a good layer of ice on everything.