from the desk of katkoe - time suck can be so pretty

Those sweet little wooden tooth picks look so cute and innocent, then wham, you're staying up for hours knitting around and around trying to finish just one more row. Because after all you're soooo close to finished, so close... sweater denial is so much easier to ignore.



Well, I actually finished these beauties at midnight-ish today/yesterday EST (reference: loud a** jammies). The big push to finish came from a Ravelry Group Sock-a-Long featuring the goodness that is WendyKnits.net

The blue socks above where knit using the Lacy Ribs pattern from Wendy's book "Socks from the Toe Up" using some of my hand dyed stash in "Icy".

Love, love, love this pattern for it's 4 row repeat and extra stretchiness. Be sure to get gauge or just go down a foot size, depending on your tolerance for adventure, to compensate for the extra give.

other than that I'm boring, working and doing okay *fingers crossed*

from the desk of katkoe - life in picture form

1. Arts in the Parks: a yearly summer event organized by Arts Place for kidlets. I've been helping out with this as a summer intern. Tons of unique classes for first graders on up.

2. Vintage Hand Spun: from the estate of a very prolific spinner. Going through the bags of hand spun was like going through an old photo album. Each skein listed the farm or venue the wool was from and dated (1979-1983). Very cool.

The natural white skeins were sourced from Ewetopia in Troy, OH and will be available for purchase there very soon.

3. Diet Change can be Funny: I switched to a gluten-free diet a few weeks ago. This is how my double hamburger/only pickle/no bun came to me, 10 points for presentation :)

some form of growth - dinner

Our garden exploded this week. The cucumbers and squash are now well over knee high and starting to flower. The beans and peas are also starting to flower and will be producing soon-ish we hope and the onion sets are suddenly ginormous.

The start of this week also marked the first harvest from the garden, 4 radish and a quart of bib lettuce :)
Since then 8 more radish and a huge bag of greens have been pulled.

Somehow we ended up with one dark purple radish out of the lot of red ones. Never seen a radish this color. I used it when I made butter fried radishes for a late night snack and it tasted the same but dyed the paper plate indigo blue. Mmm blue food.

Forgot my camera last trip to the garden and will hopefully have some photos late this week of the middle garden bed. The bed must have gotten sprinkled with franken-food since each week it seems to pretty much double in size, basically taking over the other two beds which seem to be struggling right now.

Odd but very cool to watch.

a quick garden update - some form of growth

Beans, peas, radishes, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, onions and marigolds all reside nicely in my new square foot style garden.

This guy Mel (http://www.squarefootgardening.com/) really knows how to make your soil and space work to your advantage.

A note about the half empty end box. These photos are a couple of weeks old and we are now using the third box to transplant the spares that grew from the extra seeds we planted (waste not want not).

A special thank you too for my wonderful husband and Father in Law for building the boxes for me. We ended up with three 4 foot x 4 foot boxes (photo above) constructed using 2x6's.

The coolest part about the square foot garden is everything gets it's own square (pumpkins/watermelons need 2 a piece) and neat little rows of veggies (1-16 plants all neatly lined up in a grid). Easy peasy to weed and water.

My favorite seeds to plant have been the radishes for the quick pop of greenery (seriously like 3 days and sprouts appeared ). The beans have been great for their crazy growth rate once they finally shove through the top soil, our indoor bean has sprouted 3 bean pods already.

Aren't they just the cutest?

from the desk of katkoe - ninja style

Sorry to be all 'ninja style' lately. I've been hiding out doing some web work for a great group of local gals who run a webzine called The Family Fun Finder.

The new site will update weekly with news, special deals and blogs geared towards local family fun. (Local for us is North-West Ohio.) The site is still in incubation mode but is so close to finished it's crazy (doing happy dance). The blogs and forums are a great read even if you're not local to Ohio so I'll be sure to give more links once we have the polish applied to the site :)

Busy busy has also involved a lot of production mode for PnY. The local Farmers' Market starts May 30th so I've been squeezing in craft time whenever I can to have a nice stash of goodies to take with me.

Love this time of year though it's crazy crazy for me too. Ah, summer.

from the desk of katkoe - my life according to sheep

Hank the Confuzzled Sheep came to visit my craft room today. He's cute and kinda gullible, just the way I like um'. He says 'bah' btw which I think is "hello" in sheepenese.

Hank even made an appearance on some of the new hand stitched 'mini knitters notes' graph paper notebooks. He's hand drawn in black permanent marker so each notebook is a unique.

Hank also seems to prefer the au-natural look of craft card stock to the fancy stationary grade stuff, though I'm kinda up in the air as to which I like better.

(The bull's eye notebooks where created by stitching fused target bags to some pretty red card stock. )

Most of my new mini notebooks have semi-transparent graph paper in them. I reclaimed this stuff from an office sale a few years back and love the smooth texture of it. The sizes are small-ish so they fit better into project bags, about 4-5" wide by 5-6" tall.

Other than that I'm kinda boring, have a great night everyone :)

from the desk of katkoe / Squeaking one in

Squeaking one in before the end of April, wow the end of April already.

There were several deadlines today both actual and motivational and luckly all were meet :)

Donations to Arts Place, Random Mailing Wednesday surprises, sock club, PnY orders and the long awaited HAP afghan all went for delivery today *woot* Granted part of me is still very paranoid that I missed something or that May will simply devour me with other craziness, though things *should* be okay.

A quick garden update too. I started another round of plants on the 28th, went to check on the little guys today and happy to report the radishes and lettuce are already showing tiny green leaves. *fingers crossed* these sproutlings will survive being transplanted into bigger accommodations similar to photo two. Those are green and sweet red pepper, cauliflower in the purple bin and some poor little tomato plants still hanging on.

We are planning on creating a square foot garden this year. The lumber is bought and assembled with only some more soil being needed in order to get things rolling, well and a moderately dry day here and there... but who's complaining.

Anywho, it's a smidge past midnight and I'm off to sleep. Happy trails everyone.