Preparing for Taos or WooHoo! Fiber Mania

I am making lists, reviewing my potential projects and watching the weather for packing tips for the Taos Wool Festival this weekend.

As you can see, Loopy is getting ready for the trip as well. He helped me make my Ravelry badge for the meetups they have planned for midday both Saturday and Sunday. Since I did not have a regular badge and no time to get one, I created my own.

Now my big project is to decide what to take with me to knit for the weekend. I plan to spend all day at the festival Saturday and figure that I will need knit breaks throughout the day. Will be taking lots of pictures and hope to be able to blog from Taos. Watch for it here.

Pedro has been helping in his usual way, inspecting my gear bags, choosing which needles have to be included, verifing what yarn to wind, and reviewing my travel folder with my reservation confirmations and maps to LYS and my breakfast stop in La Veta.


I hope everyone has fun plans for this weekend!

Air Show Mystery Solved

Thanks to my super genius of a brother, aka The Evil Elf, the planes I blogged about last week have been identified. And I quote: "The plane in front is a KC-135 refueling aircraft and the one in back is a C-17 Globemaster III Cargo Aircraft. The front plane is not really small. It is a modified 707 airframe and has been in service since 1957."

I guess that means my guess was right about what they were doing up there. They were practicing their refueling manuevers.

Click on the picture for lots more information on this particular aircraft.

Local Leaf Peeping

Autumn! This is my favorite time of year. There is cooler weather and lots of color. Here in Colorado most of our color is yellow, as in aspens. Sometimes in odd places with the right mix of minerals you will find some "flamers" as I call them. This is where the aspens are more orange than yellow. It is less seen so very special when you do.

Usually my folks and I try to take a "fall trip" that incorporates looking for fall color and seeing somewhere new in Colorado. This year we will not be doing that. They are busy with siding and steps and a variety of other scurry-about projects that must be completed before the snow flies.

This year I just found some color in my own backyard. I hope you are enjoying your autumn revery before Old Man Winter arrives.

WOW! Ravelympics Final Stats

I am so glad that I participated in such an event of grand scale. The stats from the Ravelympics 2008 Summer Extravaganza are impressive. Here are the numbers that they posted regarding the event that so many of us participated in during the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

They calculated that there were 6764 finished objects (FOs). There were 56 countries represented and over 2 million yards of yarn used. Out of the lot, only 104 projects were frogged.

That is an amazing amount of fiber crafts for a scant 17 days. Way to Go!!

Mountain Oktoberfest

Today I met the folks in Woodland Park for the annual Oktoberfest. Saw some interesting sights including these two young boys in their authentic costume (they were part of a dance group that performed). For my knitter friends, look at the sock combo the one on the left is wearing.

Mom and I could not decide why he had ankle socks and then a legging option versus the knee highs the other boy is wearing. Let me know what you think.

The weather was cool with an occasional mountain sprinkle. I noticed that the leaves are just getting ready to turn whereas the leaves in the city are already turning rapidly. This is an unusual case. Again, the only thing I can think of is we had that long, hot spell with no rain and that might be a factor.

We sampled a bratwurst and beer, watched the dancers, listened to music and checked out the vendors. Met a really nice gal that makes sterling silver jewelry and does home parties. She does the home party a little different than most I have heard about. She offers either she brings jewelry for you to see and buy or she will come and offer you a workshop to learn to make your own. What a fun idea. If anyone is interested in her home parties let me know and I will pass on her information. She will come to Colorado Springs for a minimum of four and the Denver area for a minimum of 10.

The highlight of the dancing was the whip crackers. I had not seen that done before. I'll bet the Evil Elf has seen it in Germany. So here is a picture of the authentically clad whip cracker.

I hope everyone is finding fun fall adventures! I am off to Taos next week for the Wool Festival and hope to blog from there.

Impromtu Air Show

When you live sandwiched between several military installations you never know what you might get to see. This afternoon was no exception. Pedro and I were outside enjoying the cooling autumn like weather and a very large noise came from overhead. I started eye-ing the sky and there they were. Two large Air Force planes flew over, the larger one following the smaller one very closely. It was several passes over us before I could figure out what they were doing. From these best-I-could-take pictures, what do you think they are doing?

Any ideas? Both planes had 4 engines, one looked to be at least a big cargo plane.

The only thing I could come up with was re-fueling practice runs.

Pedro was so excited he spent his time exploring the neighbor's stairway.

The Great Daze of September

I have discovered that there are some fun things to celebrate in the month of September. On the 9th it is Wonderful Weirdos Day and the day the hot dog was invented back in 1884. Next up is Bold is Beautiful Day on the 13th and then we can celebrate National Cheeseburger Day on the 18th.

Coming up sooner than we think is the First Day of Autumn on the 22nd. I, for one, am enjoying the last of "leftover summer" days and will welcome the change in season and temperature. From my vantage point I am already seeing leaves changing and suspect that we are in for an early and, possibly, harsh winter.

On September 23rd we can celebrate Apple Cider Day and play a game of checkers to celebrate a day set aside just for that pasttime. If you are feeling amourous, send your loved one a note on September 26th for Love Note Day. Mine will be addressed to Mr. Pedro, the Pirate Prince of my heart.

For the last Sunday of the month you can look for neighborly pursuits to celebrate National Good Neighbor Day.

Whatever your plans for this month, I hope you pursue them with gusto!

Etsy Shop Opening!

Pedro has been helping me all weekend get my Etsy shop open. He has assisted in the creation of fun, fantastic DPN holders and my packaging labels. He is exhausted from his hard work and is sleeping at the moment.

I opened the shop with DPN protectors/holders that add fun and visual humor to the job of keeping all those stitches on the needles. I currently have monkeys, Halloween characters, and will be adding pirates, devil duck and devil duck pirates. I plan to get cactuses, safari animals and others as I find them to work with.

My goal was to offer fun items to knitters that will make great gifts for yourself or your knitting buddies. I find a lack in this area when I go into the LYS'.

I also put some on consignment at Knitter's Kove if anyone local is interested in checking it out.

Please let me know your thoughts on the shop and any helpful hints will be appreciated.