Catching Up

Sorry, I have been away but my grandmother passed away. I will miss her and she was my last living grandparent but she has been really sick and her doctors told us that she was dying in March so we have been prepared for a while. Still, it is sad and I miss her.
Now for the catching up:

The Suri Dreams project [AKA: The Broken Muppet Lace Shawl] is moving along. I am doing okay with the yarn but I did learn that I never want to make a mistake with this yarn again! I had to rip back about six rows because of a pattern shift caused by my repeating the same pattern row twice. I guess that is what I getting for knitting and watching Psych on DVD at the same time. After fighting with the yarn because all of its fuzzy little tendrils were clinging to each other [in a couple spots, I very briefly contemplated scissors] I vowed to pay better attention and started to re-knit only to discover that I needed to rip back one more row. Oh how the knitting fates laughed at me! So after some more fighting, I finally got back to the proper spot and corrected the error. So, hopefully the Broken Muppet and I can be friends again and play nicely. I will try to post some pictures tomorrow.

I haven't worked on the other 1, 2, 3 Easy Lace Scarf because I have been busy with other things namely learning how to can tomato juice. Okay, so it wasn't really hard but I hadn't ever done it before and didn't feel like getting a book from the library and all of the necessary equipment so I asked my mom to show me how. It turned into a nice family affair with my mom and dad both involved in the process. We ended up canning 40 pints [11 on the 5th and 29 on the 8th] and there will probably be more before the summer is over as there are more tomatoes to come. Maybe we will switch it up and try some tomato soup or (in a completely different direction) maybe I'll luck in to some beets and mom will show me how to pickle them. Does it make me incredibly simple-minded that my favorite part of canning is the "pop" or "ping" sound that the lids make when the canning jar seals? It makes me smile every time that I hear it and if several pop at once it makes me want to do a little dance. Here are a couple of canning pictures but feel free to ignore them as they are mostly for my entertainment.