More Bazaar Knitting

 Knitting for the upcoming bazaars continues.

This week I'm focusing on creating Christmas gnomes.  I'm sure I'll share photos when I actually get a few finished.

The making is going slowly because the house selling ordeal continues.  No acceptable offers yet but interest in the house remains high and it feels like we have to leave the house almost daily for showings.  And yes, I am aware that I shouldn't be complaining.... but .... I'm starting to complain..., pretty loudly.  

Meanwhile...

Quack, quack, quack.

Hayden's duck feet worked well.  She went to a local trunk-or-treat event this past weekend and had a blast.  She remembers being a ladybug last year but she doesn't remember getting candy.  She is Quite excited about the Halloween candy this year!

Sunday Supper - Carrot Cake Smoothie

 

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

Okay, I'll admit, I'm not too sure about today's recipe.  Food Lion lists carrot cake smoothies as a healthy meal, and I'm sure they are.  My eye doctor would be thrilled with them since she wants me eating orange and yellow foods every day.  I have the feeling these smoothies are either delicious or disgusting.  I can't wait to try one and find out for myself.

A pretty exciting life

I'm leading a pretty exciting life these days.  

I got a new reusable Starbucks cup and it came with an awesome, striped straw.

I reordered business cards and they came in this cool, colorful box.

Because we put our house on the market, we replaced the random rolls of toilet paper that were sitting around the house with real tissues.  I feel fancy and grown up now.

I spent the majority of this past week weaving in ends in preparation for next month's Christmas bazaar.  There's only a little less than three weeks before the first one I signed up for and I'm starting to panic just a teeny tiny bit.

I started a new hemmed brim hat.  The yarn looks so much better in person. In person, it's a very pale, grayish olive green.

And while this was totally unplanned but I happened to realize the bag was in the background, if you want a little more excitement in your life, get yourself some Creative Snacks Co. Drizzled Granola Bites.  They are so good! And they come in several different flavors (my personal favorite is the lemon blueberry. Yum!!)  And slightly more healthy than snacking on candy corn.  Look for them in your local grocery store.  My store keeps them on the cereal aisle.

What's your exciting life been like this week?

Sunday Supper - Ground Beef & Tortellini Skillet

 

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

My husband will call today's recipe for Ground Beef & Tortellini "homemade Hamburger Helper" but who cares.  It sounds tasty and it's cheap and super fast to make.  The recipe calls for ten minutes of prep time and another ten to cook.  But as far as I can tell, the only prepping needed is locating a pan and grabbing the ingredients from the fridge.  My kind of meal!

On the needles

First, we finally have a house full of pumpkins and candy corn.  I just Love autumn!

I am so happy to have cooler temperatures and pumpkins.  My jeans, sweaters and boots have been dug out of storage and we've even turned on the heat.  I love fall!

I'm still frantically knitting for this season's Christmas bazaars.  The first one is on November 12th so I have some time but unfortunately, work takes up a lot of my time.  And then there's the whole house selling thing.  Cleaning up all my crafty mess, putting it all away, leaving the house for an hour or so, then coming home and getting it all back out again takes up a surprising amount of time.  I shouldn't complain.  Having lots of interest in the house is much better than having no interest.  Amazingly, according to Zillow, the listing has had 2,268 views in 13 days.  Thankfully not all those people have come to see the house, although it does feel like I've dumped the trash cans and mopped the floors that many times.  😄

At the moment, I'm focusing on knitting fur headbands.  They were extremely popular at Winterfest last year so I decided to make them again this year.  They don't look like much until you put them on  but they are super comfortable, soft and warm.

I wore one pretty much the entire time I was working Winterfest last year.

What have you been knitting?

Sunday Supper - Cheesy Chicken & Asparagus Pasta

 

Today's Cheesy Chicken Asparagus Pasta is another popular Food Lion recipe.  It sounds healthy, easy to make and budget friendly.

  

The Birds!

 I've been doing a little more knitting this week but still not as much as I'd have liked. 

I'm almost ready to start decreasing on this hat.  Only a few more rows to go.

Wow, that's orange!  Hayden is going to be a duck for Halloween so I'm knitting her duck feet to go over her shoes.  I don't have a pattern and they didn't flare out and 'web' as much as I'd hoped they would, but they do fit over her shoes perfectly.  Now I only have the challenge of making the second one match the first. Hope my notes are better than I think they are.

I've also knit 40 billion chapstick holders for the upcoming fall/Christmas bazaars I'm doing.  

But the real reason I haven't gotten much knitting done...

My sister took her grandkids to the Richmond Metro Zoo and invited me to tag along.

I never pass up a chance to go to the zoo.  We saw the penguins,

And of course we fed the giraffes.

The wolves were awesome!  I had never seen live wolves before and was surprised how big they are.  I expected them to be large dog - labrador, german shepherd... size but they were much, much larger.

The black one is a "baby" and looks like a Hellhound.  The others seemed mostly indifferent to the visitors' presence but that black one looked like he'd like to eat us all alive.

 

The camels are always fun to see and thankfully they were in a good mood.  No spitting this time.

 

But my favorite was the birds.  I didn't think anything could surpass my love of feeding the giraffes but those birds....  I didn't want to go into their habitat. I had no idea I have a slight bird phobia.  I mean,  I'm fine with sitting on the deck watching the birds in the yard.  I'm cool with birds in pet stores.  But the idea of going into that giant cage with a zillion birds flying around... Yikes!  But I white knuckled it and went in.   And I'm SO glad I did.  After I got over my initial anxiety wig-out, I had a blast.  The birds landed all over me, and yes, they pecked me a little but the experience was worth the tiny bit of pain. At one point, I had three on my head, several on my back, one on my shoulder pecking at my cheek, three on my arm and another crawling up my jacket sleeve.  So much fun!

Oh, and let's not forget the pygmy hippo.  He was singing to us.

I can't wait to go back!

Sunday Supper - Slow Cooker Crab Dip

 

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

Today's recipe is for slow cooker crab dip.  I won't be able to eat it (I'm Horribly allergic to seafood) but we play the Cowboys today, our team is pitiful this year (they may as well have Hayden and I playing on the team,) my husband has been working extra hard lately and he loves crab dip so... Slow Cooker Crab Dip.  Maybe it will bring us good luck on the field today.  

Not Knitting

There's been a lot going on over the last two weeks and I haven't been knitting much.  Or blogging for that matter.  

Last Monday was pretty traumatic.  My daughter was in an accident and totaled her car.  She's okay now but I was pretty worried about her for a few days.  The airbags deployed and the side one smacked her on the side of her head and she lost her hearing in that ear for several days, plus she was sore from both the airbags and the seatbelt doing their jobs.  It could of have been so, so much worse.  

And now that Sarah doesn't have a car.... I'm driving her all over the place instead of sitting at home knitting.  

The same day as Sarah's wreck, I started an online class geared to improve my Etsy shop.  I'm enjoying the class and even though I've had my shop for over ten years, the class is pointing out a few things I've been doing wrong, or not doing at all.  The downside is it's time consuming and I can't knit and type at the same time.  I need a talk to text program for my computer like on my phone.  Except I'd need it to actually understand what I'm saying. 

We are also preparing to sell our house and lots of extra time has been spent either cleaning and/or doing/fixing things the realtor has requested or vacating the house for the realtor to do what ever realtors do before they put the for sale sign up in the yard.  

And now, we're spending our time preparing for hurricane Ian.  As this post goes live, we should be getting the first bands of rain from the storm.  We aren't expecting much wind but we are supposed to get an awful lot of rain and for days on end.  Thankfully we haven't had much rain lately and the river is pretty low.  We definitely do not need another Gaston.  

One good thing about the coming storm is I have the weekend off from work.  I was supposed to be going to the Montpelier Sheep Dog Trials and Fiber Festival this weekend but it's been canceled due to all the expected rain.  I'm pretty disappointed I won't be going but my debit card is pretty happy.  Specially since Sarah is still happily crocheting and talking about learning to knit.  She's already raided my yarn stash mutliple times.  It could have been a Very expensive weekend!  And now, instead of spending ALL my money, I can stay home, hunker down and knit, knit, knit while consuming my weight in hurricane snacks and booze.  

Anyway, I haven't been knitting much.  But I have had lots of Hayden time and that's always a good thing. 

Hayden is obsessed with my tripod.  She thinks it's a telescope.

We had family firepit night to celebrate official fall and a sudden welcome drop in temperatures.  Hayden was helping me get the firepit set up and decided to read to the fire.  She's definitely spent some time at the library's story time because she was showing the pictures to the firepit and everything.  Cutest thing ever!

She had fun roasting marshmallows but she wasn't impressed with s'mores.  How can someone not like s'mores??

And she's learning to write her name.  Well, she's learning to write an "H" but she does know the letters in her name.  Mostly.  She thinks the 'y' is "y and z."  Also the cutest thing!

Hopefully Ian will be kind to us and I won't miss any more blog posts.  My prayers go out to all the Floridians out there.  

Sunday Supper - Citrus Orange Chicken

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

Boy, I wish I'd discovered this recipe earlier.  Our local chinese restaurant burned down on July 4th and they haven't reopened yet.  And I really, really miss having Chinese Night.

While this recipe for citrus orange chicken looks slightly more complicated than making a phone call, the cooking time is actually about the same, maybe even less, than having to drive the restaraunt to pick up our order.  And my stove won't care if I'm dressed or still have bed head at 5 p.m.

Enjoy!

Sunday Supper - Loaded Mac & Cheese

Can you improve on basic mac & cheese?  Yes, yes you can!

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

Loaded Mac & Cheese.  Loaded mac & cheese!  My life is complete!

And while this recipe calls for ground beef, I see no reason why other meats couldn't be used.  Or even no meat at all, although ours will definitely have meat.  I mean, 'loaded' does imply loaded!

Enjoy!

On the Needles

 Have I mentioned how much I love fall?

We have pumpkins at the grocery store now and I can't tell you how much that pleases me.

Perhaps even better than pumpkins at the grocery store are the yarn kits I recently found at Hobby Lobby.  They are Sesame Street One Hat Wonders from Lion Brand and the kits have the yarn and a Sesame Street character head to attach in place of a pompom. They had four or five characters available.  I bought three - Cookie Monster, Big Bird and Elmo.  

We've been having some almost-fall weather lately and it was perfect for a trip to our local county fair last weekend with Hayden.  She had a blast.  

I couldn't believe she climbed that giant slide all by herself.

I really couldn't believe she came down by herself.  And despite the 'slide' being more of a free fall, (she looked like she needed a parachute and it scared me to death but...) she climbed off the base hollering, "Again!  Again!"  She's a little dare devil!

I hope you are enjoying your fall weather.  Happy knitting!

Sunday Supper - Skillet Pepperoni Pizza Dip

 

photo courtesy of foodlion.com

Football starts soon and that means game-time appetizers.  This recipe for Skillet Pepperoni Pizza Dip foots the bill perfectly.  And just think of all the varieties you could make.  Don't like pepperoni?  Substitute with sausage.  Or bacon.  Or chicken chunks.  Or go healthy with spinach or mushrooms.  The options are endless.  If you can put it on a regular pizza, you should be able to put it on this too.  Yum!

Enjoy!

Is it Christmas already?

In preparation for the craft shows I'm doing this fall, I knit a thing.

And a few more things.

I had planned to write much more elegantly but life happened today.  I had the day off from work and have the thrill of jury duty later this week so my blog writing time was limited to today.  I'd planned to show you a whole bunch of things I've made recently but I got sidetracked and never got the photos taken.  And well, now I'm just too mentally exhausted to say much.

As many of you know, we live right on the edge of the railroad tracks and right beside a busy crossing.  Sadly, there was a horrific, fatal train vs car wreck practically in our backyard today.  It was just awful.  A horrible, horrible accident that I won't go into details about and it seems to have shut down my brain.  As in, completely shut down.  I can't even tell you how many words I've had to correct already because I'm typing the letters backwards.  Not to make light of PTSD, but I think I have PTSD.

I would like to send out prayers to the victim's family, the train conductor, the passengers on the train (the police told me there were no injuries on the train thanfully) and to the rescue workers and clean up crew.  And if the accident wasn't bad enough, it  began thunder storming a few hours into the investigation/clean up process.

And now, in an attempt to rid my mind of twisted metal, I'm going to go take a hot bubble bath with a bottle of wine and a trashy romance novel to keep me company. 

Ya'll be safe out there, and for the love of all things holy, please, please don't try to out run a train!

Sunday Supper - Roasted Patty Pan Squash

 Have you heard of patty pan squash?

photo courtesy of johnnyseeds.com

I hadn't until recently.  I'm sure I've seen them at farm stands in the fall but just thought they were cute little decorative gourds.  Turns out, they are edible, a good source of potassium, low in carbs and have a bit of fiber and protein.

Anyway, the grocery store I work for has been selling them like crazy and I started asking customers what they planned to do with them. And each customer seems to have their own favorite way of cooking them. So far, I think my favorite seems to be baking the squash, mashing them a little and mixing with cooked sausage.  Sausage makes everything taste better.

Despite my preference for sausage, I found this recipe for roasted patty pan squash from delish.com.  It sounds incredibly easy and it's vegetarian for those of you who don't eat meat.  And if meat prices continue to rise like they have been, we may become vegetarian too.  

Enjoy!