We are back for a couple of days before our next adventure. The trip to New England was fabulous. We timed it perfectly for the weather and had a great time seeing family and friends.
First we visited our friends, Roger and Kit, at their cabin on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. This is the lake where On Golden Pond was filmed and it is beautiful! These wonderful people are the very surprised recipients of the Piney Woods quilt. In the photo you can see the appliqued panel in the middle which says, "Camp Penowee". That's the name given to the camp by Kit's grandfather in the early 1900's. It's taken directly from the sign over the door which is made with birch bark strips nailed to a wooden board. Roger was Mark's boss way back about 17 years ago and ever since then we've been visiting them at Squam. The kids have come to see their place as a summer tradition. The quilt was made to honor those wonderful memories and thank them for their hospitality.
While at Squam I got to make the annual trek to Keepsake Quilting and Patternworks in Center Harbor. This mecca for stitchers takes up this whole building and actually has Keepsake Needlearts in it too. If you are ever in the Lakes Region of NH this is the place to go! I made a commitment to my family that I would be gone only 2 hours total including drive time, so I had to be quick. I did come away with several treasures.
At Keepsake Quilting I got some Halloween and Christmas fabric, plus a new book about folk art quilts. I got some books, yarn and needles at Patternworks, including a ball of Mission Falls 1824 wool, Halloween Koigu (color 627) and Rowan Cashsoft Aran (color 8). The 1824 is part of one of the doggie sweaters I'm making (see below) and the Cashsoft has become a One Skein Wonder in the solid blue, though that's a misnomer as I needed 3 balls, bought 2, and had to order over the phone one more ball to finish the ribbing around the edges. The koigu is for socks of course. I also made off with two sock books I had been wanting, Lucy Neatby's Cool Socks, Warm Feet and Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks.
We left Squam and drove directly to Hyannis, MA, on the Cape, to take the high speed ferry to Nantucket. It was a gray and humid day, but the next day dawned bright and sunny, the humidity lessened and we had a flawless 2 days to explore the island. On the first day we rented scooters and had a great time checking out the far flung areas, the beaches and lighthouse. Our last stop was Sheep to Shore which was closed as it was Wednesday. I was glad we were there for another day, but it meant I had to walk from town about a mile to get there. Not too much of a problem. Mark stayed in town with the kids and had lunch and I had a nice walk among the wonderful old houses with roofwalks like this:
Sheep to Shore is a nice little shop with a good yarn selection. I was really looking for something unique. They did have some yarn spun from sheep on the island, which I was planning to get until I spotted the price ($60.00)! Whoa! I ended up with a beautiful skein of cashmere and silk from China of all places and a braided leather purse handle the shop owner said was made by Amish leatherworkers in the midwest.
After two glorious days in Nantucket, it was back to Burlington, MA for a family party to celebrate three of the cousin's September birthdays. It was another beautiful day, though a bit cooler. In the morning I made it out to W. Concord to check out the yarn at Needle Arts of Concord. I managed to get the variegated blue balls of yarn above at a great price. It's Classic Elite's Beatrice. I'm making another OSW for Chloe with it. I bought a skein of Manos to finish another trifold Moebius bowl I'm making and two skeins of Lang Ja Woll cotton sock yarn which come with a matching spool of reiforcing thread!
Here's a photo of the birthday kids, Ryan is 11, Jenna is 10 and Jake is 8. We also got a nice picture of all 10 cousins.
On Sunday which was Ryan's actual birthday we went into Boston to walk part of the Freedom Trail. It was an extra special day because it was the closing events for the city's 375th birthday celebration. We managed to take in the parade and saw some minutemen firing muskets. Man, those are loud in the city as it echoes off the buildings. We also did two geocaches, saw Paul Revere's house and got photos of many of the historical statues with plaster shoes. That was funny and made the whole trail (which was a walk- a four letter word in Chloe's book) all worth it! As it turns out this was a tourism campaign developed by Mayor Menino to encourage people to do more walking. Check out this article which explains it all. Here we have, left to right, Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere with their fancy footwork.
Now that we are back I'm taking care of laundry and mail while finishing some projects which need to be mailed out. Here's the baby sweater for Hana. It's a bit on the short and wide side. It's also a size 2 and will be too big for her now, but hopefully will work next spring. I also finished two doggie sweaters, one of which Scrabble is happy to model. He is such a sweetie. He lets us do anything including, trying on little sweaters with no complaints. I am working to modify the sweater pattern to be worked in the round. It's interested how the Lorna's Laces will look so different depending on whether it's worked flat (top) or in the round (bottom). I'm not sure I like the pooling, but I really want to make this pattern to be worked in the round. I've got two more skeins of the LL to play around with.
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