The Porch Postscript

This morning I was thinking about this as we ate breakfast. Our oven igniter went out two weeks ago and we’re waiting on the part, translation I’m unable to bake our weekly loaf of bread. Instead of a loaf this week we’ll be eating flatbread and pita pockets, both of which could be made on the stovetop. I kind of smiled to myself, we’ve been overcoming cooking challenges our entire marriage. Improvise, adapt, overcome is an unofficial slogan of the Marine Corps, and 16 years ago when I married a retired Marine this phrase became a way of life. We’ve lived in four states, owned three homes, and faced countless challenges along the way. Life has given us a lot of lemons, but that never stopped us from figuring out the challenge and moving forward.  When we moved to Missouri, in an ice storm, as newlyweds and took up residency in our first home we had no kitchen appliances. No biggy, we improvised. It was December so a cooler could be put outside our backdoor with groceries until we c...

When I say my first pair of socks, I'm not talking about fancy knitting on double-pointed needles.  There is no toe or heel to construct with this pattern.  It's an easy pattern that creates a basic tube sock.  The pattern comes from  Teach Yourself to Knit the Easy Columbia-Minerva Way publication from 1967.   My mom has made this style of sock for us over the years, we generally wear them as a house slipper of sorts.  She shared the pattern with me ages ago and I am finally getting around to making them. I had some Lion Brand Baby Wool, worsted weight, in my yarn stash and decided it was the perfect yarn to try out this pattern.  I used two skeins to make one pair of socks.  I also followed my mom's suggested adaptation of using the magic loop method for knitting the sock, which eliminates the seam in the finished sock.   Since the yarn I chose was a variegated one, I got some funky striping or maybe we should call it color block...

At the beginning of January, I picked up my knitting needles after a crazy long hiatus.  I finished the project that had been on the needles for literally years and fell back in love with knitting.  Knitting is a very relaxing creative outlet for me and I enjoy easy patterns that finish in small amounts of time, excluding the times when I put them down for ages.   The Stripy Spring Shawl is a fantastic pattern, with little knitting knowledge needed.  If you know the basic knit stitch and how to increase using the knit in front and back of a single stitch, you'll be able to complete this project without fail.  I enjoyed the project so much that I've made two of them.   The first version was created using yarn I purchased in Hawaii in 2016, which is when I cast it onto the needles.  I'd picked it up here and there as we crossed those for years, but pandemic times brought me into the grove of finishing a few projects.  This first version t...