Another knitted scarf

I made another scarf similar to the one I made from the Cha Cha yarn.  The main difference is the price of the yarn - the Cha Cha yarn is quite expensive and this new yarn is very reasonable.  I found it at Joann's fabrics and it is made by Red Heart.  It is called Boutique Sashay yarn - it is a variegated yarn and only takes one package to make a scarf and it is only $5.00 a package.  The Red Heart web site has patterns and a video of how to knit with this yarn.  The pattern for the scarf is extremely easy - you cast on six or ten and then just knit every stitch over and over until you run out of yarn. Six stitches makes a longer scarf.   The yarn is not as easy to work with as the Cha Cha yarn - it twists more and if your hands are not well moisturized  it clings to your hands and is very annoying.  But since you can buy five packages of the Sashay for the price of one Cha Cha - I can live with the annoyances.   The final result is a fabulous scarf that I loved wearing.

January activity

What do we do in Kansas in January?  Well we just go riding around in light weight jackets and enjoy the mild weather and beautiful sunshine.

Exploration Place

This afternoon I took the girls to Exploration Place.  When I started babysitting last fall I got a grandparent membership - Dennis and I can go and take all the grandkids.  It has paid for itself many times over!  It is great to be able to just go for a couple of hours and leave and never feel like you have wasted your money by not staying longer.  There are many areas to go to so they don't get bored with the same area.   

Fishing Game - moves in circles and the kids "fish" for them with magnets

Izzy always wants to see the spiders and then jumps back two feet from the display when she actually sees them.  Of course then she says she wants one as a pet.   Lily really enjoyed seeing the snakes today - she had her finger against the glass attempting to pet one.  Audrey of course loves the castle area best.

   We had a good time and when we get ready to leave I always do the same thing I did with my own kids - I say "we are leaving in a few minutes - if you don't get upset we will come back next week"  So far - it has always worked.  On the way home they told me the areas they want to go to next time.  Of course sometimes "next week" is farther off than a week - but their idea of time is pretty flexible. 

Sunsets are beautiful in Kansas!

January 19th had a beautiful sunset so I grabbed my camera and went to the back yard - these are the results..  

Adventures in Kansas

We have always enjoyed taking day trips throughout Kansas - we would take the kids to various towns and go to the local museums and act like tourists.  Cheap and fun and educational at the same time.  Of course that was 30 years ago and we figure some of these towns may have changed since then.  After our trip to Maxwell and Quivera we talked about how fun that would be to start doing these day trips again.  I baby sit the girls each morning Monday - Thursday but after Thursday morning I am free until Monday.   We talked about different towns we will want to go to and then I found this book on Amazon.  83,000 Square Miles No Lines, No Waiting.  It was written a number of years ago by an Eagle reporter and is out of print but I found a used copy.   I think our first trip will be to Medicine Lodge.  If anyone has ideas for a good day trip, be glad to hear them.

Hats! I love to make hats!

I realize this is not the best picture of the girls  - they took it very seriously that I wanted them to model the hats I knitted.   Lily's hat has a tiger on it, Audrey's hat is the head of a My Little Pony character and Izzy's has skulls on it.  The project started with Izzy's - the pattern is very popular in the knitting community.  I had never made anything with different colors stranded through the project.  It was such fun!  I would hold the brown in one hand and the pink in the other hand at the same time and knit back and forth pulling in the right color.  I also had never knitted from a chart so that made it a challenge too.  The pony hat did not come out as well as I had hoped but I had a dickens of a time finding a pattern.  The one I found was too big so I cut it down to just the head and it was still a little too big but she likes it and that is what counts. 

Hats are probably my favorite thing to make - there are so many different types and they do not take long to make.  I like to have one in a bag to grab if we go somewhere just so I have something to make in the car.  I have made a number of helmet liners to send to soldiers.  They are more difficult to make than a regular hat and must be made with 100% wool and in certain colors approved by the military.   I also made a couple of orange ones for Jimmy and Dennis to wear deer hunting.  They say they are very warm. 

One more pictures from today

I loved this building west of Hutch - Never saw a silo built like this.

Road picture from today

This road leading to Quivira is 4th street out of Hutch - there is a stretch of the road lined with trees and I would love to go back in the spring and fall and take pictures from the same spot - wouldn't that be fabulous! 

Quivira National Wildlife Refuge

The observation tower here did not move when I took the picture.  :)

There are deer in this picture - play Where's Waldo

We did not see any beavers but believe strongly they are there

Pretty white swan

Beautiful hawk

After visiting Maxwell we drove to the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge west of Hutchinson.  This is a wetland area for birdwatching but we saw numerous deer also.   They are a little hard to see in the picture but they are the browner lumps of brown in the brown grass.  They would also stop and stare at us but if I had opened the car door they would have been gone like the wind.  We saw mostly ducks and geese and plan to return in the spring.  It is a very pretty area but you can tell there hasn't been enough rain.  There are small buildings to sit in and hide from the birds and we saw two places where there was a telescope you could use to bird watch. 

Maxwell Game Preserve

This is the one that blocked the road - huge!

Today we got up at 4 am to help Laura take off for her drive to Milwaukee.  Our intent was to go back to bed after she left but of course we were wide awake and not in the mood to go back to bed.  Instead we drove up to Maxwell Game Preserve to check out the elk and buffalo.  We had never been there and I highly encourage anyone living around here to go as it was amazing.  There must have been 200 elk and they were just as interested in us as we were in them.  They would start heading towards the fence when we pulled up and would stand still and stare at me when I was taking the picture.  These pictures are not pictures of the same herds - there were at least four big herds that we saw.

There were even more buffalo.  I never realized just how huge buffalo are until one walked in front of our car and stood there blocking our way staring at us.  It was more than a little unnerving.  I was pleased with most of my pictures, but the one of the observation tower was blurry - I guess it must have swayed in the wind.  :)  We did not climb up the tower as the weather was not ideal - the cold front didn't hit Wichita until later today but we were far enough north that it was quite chilly.    It was 55 degrees when Laura left at 5:30 but when we got to Maxwell at 9 it was 39 and very windy.  We plan to go back on a warmer day - hopefully a Saturday when they run a tram through the fields.  We did not see any of the albino deer this time and hope to see them on the next visit. 

Laura's new hat

Laura has an assignment starting  Wednesday in Milwaukee where the high on Thursday will be 11 degrees so I decided she needed a new hat.  I have already knitted her two hats but  thought she needed one to cover her ears better.  So Saturday night I looked through my favorite book with hat patterns and found this pattern.  Then I looked through my tiny little stash of yarn and was surprised to find a yarn that was perfect.  The hat was such a fast knit - I was done in about three hours.  I made my first I-cord - that was fun!  Laura loved the hat or at least acted like she did and that is all that really matters.  :)  I hope it keeps her warm!

Zero

Another blog entry this month featured my grandkitty in Texas opening a door so I thought I should give equal time to my other grandkitty.  Jimmy and Maranda got a cat for the girls a few months ago and named it Zero.  It is still a kitten and if I let it live I am sure it will calm down when it gets older.  :)   Of course I am joking, but kittens and puppies while very cute and sweet have way too much energy sometimes.  Zero will often greet me at the door meowing and purring as if she has missed me overnight and other times will attack me as I walk by.  She sleeps on the top of the recliner which is where I sit quite often so sometimes she decides to play with my hair as I am sitting there.  She is getting much calmer but at times still gets in her "I'm going to run as fast as I can and see how far I can jump all over the front room" episodes.  She also missed the stealth part of being a cat - sometimes when she comes down the wooden steps it sounds like a linebacker running down.  The first time that happened I was there in the evening and the girls were asleep and it scared me half to death.  She loves Lily's feeding pump.  She wants to jump on it as the tube is going around and around.  She hasn't done it yet but will paw at it and look like she is going to try to jump on it.  She does a fabulous job of sitting on her hind legs with her front paws up in the air waving around.  I want to get a video of that sometime.    The other day she attacked Audrey's "baby".  I rescued the doll but not before I took this picture.

Knitted Scarf

While Stacy was in town at Christmas we hit a couple of the local yarn shops - Odd Ball Yarns at 21st and Woodlawn and my favorite Twist in Delano on Douglas.    While at Twist we saw a delightful new yarn called Cha Cha by Trendsetter.  This yarn is wool, acrylic and Polyamide and made in Italy.  The yarn looks more like a ribbon with an edge along one side.   To knit it you put the needles through the edge and it ruffles as you knit.  You knit every row over and over so it can't get any easier.   I loved working with this yarn and had such fun making a quick and easy scarf.  I think I had it done in a couple of days and it is very pretty.   The only negative about this yarn is the price but I had a 25% off coupon which made it much more reasonable. 

Trailer Time

picture was taken in the fall

Dennis and his Marine flag

two deer in field

Or this could be called the tail of two trailers.  We bought a trailer on Blackwell Lake in Oklahoma in the summer of 2010.  I never liked the place, and we rarely went because of many reasons.  For one it was boring as we didn't know anyone.  Then this fall my friend Jan Mueller told me that her son had his trailer for sale that was in an area south of Winfield.  We had been to the area before to visit Jan and her husband so we went down and fell in love really fast.  It is a nice big trailer, beautiful view and the best part is fabulous neighbors.  As a bonus there is 800 acres for Dennis to hunt on and four ponds to fish in.   We have already had many good times down there around a fire pit or having supper together with others.   We love it and are looking forward to many more good times in the Trailerhood.

Dennis and I went down Friday and Laura followed us so she could see it then she went on to Ponca.  The weather was perfect Friday - I sat outside reading a book and Dennis went off to look for places to hunt deer.   Another nice thing is we get tv stations there so we were able to watch Kstate in the Cotton Bowl Friday night.

Dennis went hunting Friday evening and when he got back I asked if he saw any and he said no - not a one.  I showed them the pictures I took of the two deer that were just down from our trailer while he was gone, so the next night he sat in a lawn chair next to the trailer but the deer didn't show up this time.
 

Zoo in January?

We have been blessed with beautiful weather this month (so far).  (knock on wood)  :)   Yesterday was just perfection in the afternoon - in the 60's with no wind!   We only get about five days like that in Kansas each year so we took advantage of it.  Laura and I took the triplets to the zoo.   We had such a good time as you can see from the pictures.   The girls love the zoo - the family has a membership so they get to go there pretty often.  They knew what they wanted to see - the lion and the tiger.   The lion rolled over while we were watching which thrilled Lily very much.   It was a great day!

Good day, bad day, good day

The first good thing that happened today (other than the fact that I woke up, which is always good) would be that I went to Heritage Hut and bought two packages of yarn.  If you look in my craft closet you will think either that buying yarn always makes me happy or you would think I am crazy to be buying more yarn.  The first is true.  I stopped there because I had a coupon that would be expiring soon and being the thrifty person that I am, I knew I should take advantage of this coupon.  I planned to buy some purple yarn to work on during the K-State basketball games, starting tonight against KU.  They did not have the exact yarn I planned to buy but they had another that was even better.  Oh my the picture really does not do it justice - it has little tiny sparkles in it and it goes from a blue to a purple in a most delightful manner.  I just LOVE it!  I plan to make myself a pair of socks.  Please stop laughing now.  In reality I will probably make myself a sock.  One will get done and the other will not.  I found a wonderful pattern online that looks easy but not boring and that is very important.  I made a resolution to finish all my projects started last  year, but didn't mention anything about starting new ones.  And I certainly didn't resolve to stop buying yarn.  I know myself too well.

Now for the bad news and it really doesn't directly involve us, but Boeing announce that they will be leaving Wichita by the end of 2013.  I just can't believe they are doing this after over 70 years of being here.  They are moving their operations to Oklahoma City and San Antonio.  Our neighbor works there so I feel very bad for him.   I know how the people feel - we thought life was over when Tweco moved and then Dennis lost his job.  But as they say, sometimes God will close one door and open another.  If Dennis had stayed with Tweco he wouldn't have gotten on with the school district where he was able to buy back KPERs points from his Marine service and now he has retired after only seven years and can collect KPERS.  So we actually have more retirement money than we would have, so thanks Tweco.  :)

But the best part of today was that Laura made it here safe and sound from Connecticut.  She will go on to Ponca City on Friday after spending tomorrow with us.  We plan to spend tomorrow afternoon with the girls and Jimmy and Maranda will come for supper.  Now to pray she gets another position soon and a heck of a lot closer than Connecticut!!  That was crazy far away.