After losing my template once again, I’m back up and running. I seem to lose my blog template more often than normal. I don’t know what happens and when I contact blogger, they give me this nice email about customer service being important and then I never hear from them. So I took my archive and copied it into a text document and made the necessary changes to get the knitting blog back up. How annoying! Then I found out I was moved into the queue on the knitting blogs, so I was knocked out of the knitting blogs ring for a while. I lost my template on Thursday and I was knocked out of the knitting blogs ring on Friday. It’s not my fault that my blog template just disappears. I know the blog looks a bit messed up right now. I will work on fixing that soon!

So I did get some knitting done this weekend. I worked on the sample hat for my class at the park district. I didn’t get the pattern from my friend, Dawn, until the night before my class because I didn’t ask until the day before my class started, so I’m now trying to get the hat knit so that I can take it to class and show the students. What a concept, show the students what they will be making. :) The class went well on Tuesday. I did meet with one of my students on Saturday to get her going again. She was having a bit of a rough time but I was very confident and I think she was too about her knitting after our hour together. I’m anxious to get them started on their hats because they will be working on something that’s real and that they can wear. It’s more than just a weird hotpad-looking item.

Bryan put a few of our wedding photos on his blog – check them out here. We hope to have more up soon. In case, you didn’t see our engagement photos, here’s a page that I put some photos on but didn’t do much with the layout.

The dilemma of what do to about the sickly giraffe I referred to on August 30th has been solved. I decided that I would be brave and just rip out the giraffe and try to fix it by reknitting it. There are a few spots where I wasn’t able to retwist the yarn as I had originally when I was working it in intarsia. I realize now that I should have taken a photo of the before and then one of the after but of course, I think of that now after I’m done. It didn’t take me long to tear it out because I cut it in a few places and just unraveled it down to where I needed to start. To rework the twists at each spot where I changed colors from blue to yellow, I had to have a long strand of yarn just hanging (no bobbins here) so that I could pull it through each time I reached a spot where I would have changed colors. I’m sure most of this doesn’t make sense, but it worked. I had to do some work in getting the loose spots fixed up, but once I did a little bit of sewing and reinforcing with yarn it looked good. There are a few little quirky spots but you have to look for them. Bryan my husband didn’t know what to look for, so if it looks good to him, it’s good enough for me. At first, I thought it would be easy to just tighten a few stitches and then fix some of the really bad spots but that didn’t work. So then my next idea was what I ended up doing. I’m so relieved that’s over. I was a afraid I would finish the blanket and still have to deal with the sickly giraffe. I was afraid that whatever I tried wouldn’t work and I would have to just redo the blanket. I’m so glad that everything worked out! I’m really ready for this blanket to be finished. It’s all that I’ve worked on since April. I haven’t done a lot of knitting in the last year, but I’m making myself work on this blanket so that I can have it done by the baby’s first birthday!

I’m sure with my teaching that I’ll get back into making other things again or at least finishing the many projects that I’ve had in the works for more than a year. I remember several years ago making a pact with myself that I would never have a project that was more than a year old. Well, now I have about 8-10 projects that are more than a year old. I think I even have one that is three years old. How sad! It’s the Glint sweater that I loved so much when I started it. I don’t think I’ll ever wear it now, but Meredith my sister said she would like to have it. I will finish it within the next 20 years, I promise!

I started teaching again last night! My class is at Buffalo Grove Park District. It went really well. I hadn’t taught a regular class for about 14 months. My recent classes have been crash courses in knitting at the library. This felt a lot more relaxed than the library classes. There were a few strugglers but once I got them going, they were fine. One woman in the class already knows how to knit but her husband works on Tuesdays and she just wanted to come to meet other knitters. I told her to bring in a pattern that she’s not sure about making and we’ll work on it in class. I also found out that my next class in November is full with a waiting list! Wow! I’m so excited that my classes are so popular! :)