Midwest Fiber & Folk, and Family

These past few weekends have been a tad crazy. Crazy in a good way though.

I’ve been working hard on my OWL for the Harry Potter Knit & Crochet House Cup on Ravelry. Here’s a picture. I have maybe 10 inches left of knitting the lace pattern, and 8 for the cowl neck. The ‘sleeves’ are just an inch or two of ribbing. Yay for drop shoulders! And this needs to be finished by Friday, July 31^st to count. I should be able to make that if I work hard tonight and all day Wednesday.

I was hoping to wear this thing this last weekend…but we’ll get to that in a sec.

Two weekends ago I was at the Midwest Fiber and Folk show in Crystal Lake, IL. I was helping out my friend Bev and her knitted jewelry business Knitter’s Journey. She’s on Ravelry and she has a website showing all of her kits. Here’s a few pictures of the set up. This took more work than you could ever see from the pictures.

See those pretty baskets? Yea…we kinda forgot to pack those in the SUV. And we didn’t realize this until we were already at the show and setting up! Believe me…we couldn’t have all those bags hangin’ out without a basket. So we grabbed some pizza, drove the 2 hours home and then the 2 hours back and got up early to set up the rest of the booth on Friday morning. I think we made good time and got things set up nicely. Needless to say next time I think a checklist will be used to make sure that all things are in the car. ^_^

I picked up some yarn at the show as well as a few of Bev’s kits.

This green yarn is from Frontier Fiber Mill in Indiana. They have their own fiber farm complete with Alpacas and sheep and other sorts of things! This is 400 yds. of worsted Alpaca. It’s sooooo soft! I’m thinking mittens, though it might decide otherwise.

This here is 925 yds. of laceweight wool for $18. Pretty good deal huh? I love it. Sunset colors. This one might have to sit in my stash for a while before I decide what to do with it.

This next yarn boggles my mind. The lady that spins this yarn is blind. BLIND! That means she just feels the yarn. And her tag has Braille on it so that she can tag them herself. I should have gotten a picture of her and her husband. They are such a cute couple and he completely supports her. (She also had a pretty neat calculator that spoke to her so that she could take care of sales.) I’m making the Sylvia Cowl. It’s a light pink thick and thin yarn(ranging from laceweight to a light worsted). I’m really liking how it’s turning out.

Wow lots of pictures!

I left the festival early to go to Festa Italiana at the Milwaukee Summerfest grounds. I felt back for leaving Bev all day Sunday and for her having to pack up alone, but Festa Sunday is a family tradition. We attend church and walk in the procession into the grounds to get in for free. Once that’s finished we promptly walk out of the grounds and eat lunch at the Italian Community Center.

Lunch was a little disappointing. I mean…Italian Community Center…it’s been that for years! I’ve always loved their food, but this year the pasta sauce was terrible. I mean…it was like tomato soup with a little basil in it… I was sad. My German Fiance can make better pasta sauce than that! He actually makes great pasta sauce…so that’s not really fair. I swear he was Italian in a former life.

Other than a disappointing lunch it was a great day. I scored an Italian soccer jersey for $28! The last few years they’ve been rather expensive since Italy won the world cup in 2006. I’m excited for the games next summer. I make a point of watching soccer during at that time. It’s like how I only watching basketball during the College March Madness. I choose when to enjoy certain sports.

That was the end of that weekend. This weekend was an engagement party for Steve and I. Honestly, I was dreading this party. My father wanted to have this party so that people from both sides of the family could meet and socialize before the actual day of the wedding. Sounds like a great idea in theory…but I was scared that it would just be a big segregated party. Thank goodness for Steve’s parents. They really got in there and got to know everyone! I was so grateful that everyone was talking. My father’s brothers and sisters tend to stick to themselves and they were also very good about talking and including everyone. I don’t have pictures of the party…my mom was the paparazzi for that. I’ll have to ask her for some pictures. It was really a lot of fun.

Sunday was our annual Cefalu Family Reunion. Umm….but only half. There are two sides of the Cefalu family. Our side of the family, which is corralled by my cousin Dave for this event, and the other side. We only see the other side at this event every year. Mario is in charge of gathering this side of the family(can’t tell we’re Italian huh?). We missed the reunion last year to celebrate Steve’s Dad’s 60^th birthday, but I guess Mario’s side didn’t show and they did a repeat of that this year. I learned that Mario’s side of the family tends to get into feuds every few years. Not feuds with us, just feuds within themselves. So I guess it might be a few years before we see them again.

It was a good time. A huge softball game with players ranging from age 6 to age mid-forty-something. It was fun to watch. I was playing with the real little guys because of my shins.

Steve and I have started running in the wee hours of the morning. We already woke up at 6 in the morning, but now we have a 5:15 wake up call. It’s been alright getting up, but staying awake the rest of the day was pretty hard last week. This week has been better. My problem now is that my right shin hurts bad enough that I’m limp running…that does not seem like a good thing to me. Today we took a break because it was raining, we slept bad, my leg needs a rest, and we’re a bit lazy. I decided that if my leg feels alright later that we’ll take a walk…if it doesn’t feel better it may be time for me to get it checked out. I’ve already changed shoes, taken a break for a day or two and iced. It doesn’t seem to be getting much better.

This is what I'm busy working on at the moment.

It's much longer...That needs to be finished by tomorrow!! (wow...just realizing that tomorrow is the 29th...crap!)

and then my OWL...which is also a lot farther than this picture. I'll have to do a better update later...but this is what I have to work with at work...

This is a long post…maybe I’ll need to insert pictures here and there to make it more interesting. That really concludes my entry. I need to send some of these pictures to Bev…maybe I can get that finished here at work. We’ll see if I can access the pictures. If not… I’ll add them tonight or tomorrow.

Later this week…how work is screwing us out of money.