Coming Together

A lot of things were going on this week, but I still managed to get a few rounds of knitting in. It doesn't look much different from last week, but I thought you might like to see how the front steek degreases are coming along. 

It's a little messy right in the middle of the steek, because I'm changing colors there every few rounds, but you should be able to see how the motifs are bending in toward the steek. When the steek is cut, the motifs will straighten out and it will produce a V-neck.

We had another Madroña Pop-up meeting (actually a party) this week. Remember the mushroom soup I made a couple of weeks ago? Almost everyone made the soup this week. We compared the wines we paired with the soup, and talked about how the wine affected the taste of the soup.

I finished adding the stories to the new book, then went through and changed all the quotation marks from the straight type to the curly or smart type. I had to do the same thing with the apostrophes. I hope I got them all. My editors will find them if there are any left. I still need to go through the knitted items that show up in the stories and get the links to the patterns for them.

The weather cleared up about midweek, so we walked Thursday through the woods and the neighborhood around the "Senior Center," Friday we did the Larkspur Trail and on Saturday we went to Good Dog Trail, so the pups could have some off-leash time. 

They knew where we were going and cried (with joy) the whole way, especially Dusty.

There were lots of good smells, at least in their opinion; I couldn't tell.

By the time we made it down to the Deschutes River for a drink, we were regretting not bringing water along. The river proved the dogs with plenty of water, though.

After I took those photos, I wanted to restart the Walk for a Dog app, but I just got this screen:

I hadn't put in my passcode. It wasn't an emergency, but I was stuck for about 15 minutes of the hike not knowing whether the app was working or not. I'm going to have to call Apple and see what happened in case it happens again. When I got it going again, I saw that there was a gap in the record of the hike, so it turned out to be more than 3 miles, but probably not much.

The dogs were relaxed after we got home. That's always nice.

We got our Ballots out of our mailbox on Tuesday. They could have been there for a couple of days, because we usually get our mail on our way back from our walks, so it took a special trip. I already knew how I was going to vote on several candidates and issues, so that was easy. I've been filling it in as I research the other items left on my ballot. I only have two to go.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bend Bulletin this week in support of my preferred candidate for U.S. District Representative. My topic was the poll I was sucked into responding to because it seemed like a regular poll, not a request for money. The candidate posted it on her Facebook Page.

We went out to look at the Northern Lights (aurora borealis), but we had too much ambient light. I took several photos anyway, with timed exposure and without. They didn't show anything, just night sky. The next day, I tried adjusting the exposure and saturation and ended up with something you can barely see.

This one showed a little more. I don't know if it shows up on your screen, but I can see it.

Johan is on a baseball team now. They took some great photos. I think this looks like the baseball cards we used to get with a thin slab of bubble gum. Remember those?

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah or Classic Tales Retold, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still working on the Oregon Cardigan.

What's on my loom: Still in its corner under the windows, not warped, but dusted, at least.

What's on my sewing machine: Still waiting for the next project.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: The dolls are doing their homework, and Jolena asks Mariah for help to study for a spelling test in The Spelling Test, this reedited story from The Doll's Storybook, which came out in August, 2019.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to After Death by Dean Koontz. Also still reading Elfen Königin by Holly Black, translated from English.

What's in my wine glass: Madroña's El Tinto again. A case of it arrived just as we were getting ready for the Pop-up party.

What's my tip of the week: Coffee will stain the carafe if it's left to dry. I pour the coffee into a bottle with a lid (a jar would work) and store the coffee in the fridge when it cools off. If I rinse the carafe right away, it doesn't need washing as often.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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Challenged!

Sandy wasn't the biggest troublemaker in my life this past week for a change.

He still finds things to get into, but we got him a toy to challenge his brain. A pet store chain that has a store near us has a special coupon for 25% off our entire purchase, including sale items. We needed some kibble, and with the discount, it was cheaper than we could get anywhere else. The dog puzzle toys were on sale, and the discount applied. We asked a store employee which one we would start with for a puppy too bright for his own good. She suggested the Outward Hound Casino. When we got it home, I discovered that it was a Level 3 puzzle. I was afraid it might be too challenging, and he would give up before it started being fun. I put a Cheerio into each drawer. He could smell it and figured out quickly how to open the drawers. The next time I locked some of the drawers. It slowed him down a bit. (Maybe if I had loaded it with Vitamin D capsules, he would have been faster.)

He's still growing but starting to fill out. On Friday he hit 20 lbs. The checks are coming in from Trupanion to help us with the vet bills related to his "dietary indiscretion" of three weeks ago. Sandy didn't give us too much trouble for the past week.

No, the biggest troublemaker during the past week was my iPhone.

This phone has rendered reliable service for the past nearly six years. Virtually all of the photos in my story blog and books were taken with this phone. I've used it to get Siri to tell me how to get to where I wanted to go. I've used the Walk for a Dog app to record my walks with the pups. I've used it to adjust my hearing aid and to listen to audiobooks and music. It's my calculator, banking branch and phone-call monitor, screening those annoying telemarketer and scam phone calls. I've used it to text photos of what I wanted Charlie to buy at the store.

Now it needs a new battery. It had been trying to tell me for some time, but when I tried to use the Walk for a Dog app during our hike at Timothy Lake last week it lost all battery power and died, after recording only 0.01 mile, even before I took any photos. A hike of nearly four miles didn't register enough distance to qualify for any points, which was disappointing. Not being able to take photos of the boys and the pups playing was an even bigger loss. Fortunately, our daughter-in-law took some photos on the hike and shared them with me. These treasured memories would have been only slowly fading memories without the photos!

(Just a side note about the dogs off-leash. This campground allows them to be off-leash when playing in the water or swimming. They were otherwise leashed up all the time they were outdoors.)

I would happily replace the battery and continue on with the same great phone, except for a couple of things. First of all, I would have to send my phone in to Apple and be without it for a week or drive to Tigard (close to Portland, 169 miles) to get to an authorized dealer who could deal with it. (Simply Mac closed down during the pandemic.) While trying to find someone local who could change the battery for me, I was told that that older phones like my iPhone 7 are vulnerable to hackers, if I do any online banking with it. The person told me she recommended getting a new phone instead. Less important, but still a consideration, the new Spoutible app doesn't work as well with the older phones. I can like and echo a spout I like, but the only spouts I can send are emojis, no text. That's really of minor significance, because I usually use my laptop or iPad anyway, when I have to type anything beyond, "Yep!"

To make a long story even longer, I've ordered an iPhone 14. (Photo from apple.com)

Many thanks to Jennifer at Apple for helping me figure out which phone would work best for me within what I could afford. She spent the time needed to find out what I do with the phone, so she could advise me. The phone should arrive later today. A very nice person at CREDO said they will help me transfer the SIM electronically if I can't figure it out, and an Apple Advisor already had me update the software and back up to the cloud, in case I decided to send it in to them. I will do that again, just to be sure, before making the transfer. 

Also this week, I wrote a new story for #TheDollsStorybook and took the photos with my iPhone 7, which still works, even though I never know how long the battery will hold the charge. I'm going to try to do one story a month for now. I sent off some copies of my most recent book to people who wanted an autographed copy, including two copies to the Wisconsin grands. Their dad was one of my editors and a great help with the poetry. Now that I've mailed two in an envelope, I know how much the postage will be, in case someone orders two.

I'm still working on getting the R-Pod organized. We're going out again with the Oregon grands and their parents next weekend. We're going back to LaPine State Park Campground. Our daughter-in-law has put in a request for a rug to catch the dirt and sand at the entrance to their tent. (Camping in Oregon always seems to come with dirt or sand or both!) I offered her the second of the two smaller rugs I had woven on my loom.

Consistent readers of my blog posts will perhaps remember that I originally made the rugs for the old fifth wheel. There was a lot more floor space in the old trailer.

When we sold it and bought the R-Pod, the rugs didn't fit as well. The larger one fit in front of the door just fine, but the "hallway" (put in quotes, because calling it a hallway is like calling a VW Bug a limousine), was too narrow for the rug to fit. I trimmed one of the two smaller rugs to fit and bound the raw edges with fabric. I had planned to do the same with the other smaller rug, but now I won't have to.

The trimmed rug fits nicely now.

That's the door to the wet bath on the left, the fridge on the right, and you can just make out the internal vacuum in the lower right-hand corner. You heard me: the internal vacuum. I can plug in the hose where that circle is and reach every corner of the pod, or, if that's too much trouble, I can just sweep everything in the general direction of the internal vacuum, give the little panel next to the hose opening a kick, and swoosh! No more dirt or sand, even in Oregon. At the top of the photo is the area under the bed, with things stowed away for travel: from left, the poo can (if you have minipoos, they will live up to their name), the stool I use to get out of bed or to reach into cabinets, and a plastic storage box with my clothes.I would have had to slide the other rug partway under the bed if I kept it. I plan to weave two more rugs to fit the space in the new R-Pod. Sometimes you have to pick one up and put down another, so having spares is good.

In the old fifth wheel, we had one of those hanging sacks you can stick plastic bags into to reuse later. It was large and bulky, and the colors weren't compatible with the R-Pod, so I copied it and made a smaller version. It's about half as tall as the old one, but just as big around. It took a fat quarter, some elastic and a little cotton rug yarn.

Now I've been working on some toiletries storage pockets for our wet bath. When we bought the pod, we thought this set of three mesh pockets was supposed to be for toiletries. Then we discovered that if you put anything in the middle or lower pockets, the lid to the toilet wouldn't stay up. (In the photo, there's a pair of flip-flops in each of the upper pockets, but that was marginal.) So what's it for? Magazines? Why have a mesh magazine holder in a wet bath? Mesh implies it won't collect water. Magazines would get wet and be hard to read. It's still a puzzle. I thought about cutting off the bottom pocket and tying the bottom corners to the lower fasteners with some kind of waterproof string, but the middle pocket is still too low for the lid to stay open. 

We took down the pocket thing, leaving the four fasteners. (I was inside the wet bath without a wide-angle lens, so only the top two fasteners show, but you can see the top of the lid to the toilet.)

It's too wide to fit on the other wall of the wet bath. We're still trying to figure out a way we can use the thing. In the meantime, I put a tension rod up along the side of the wet bath just above the enclosure and just under the ceiling.

There's 12" from the top of the enclosure to the hand-hold things. (I thought those were supposed to be shelves at first, silly me!) I'm thinking of making some kind of holder for toiletries to hang from that tension rod. I picked up some grey mesh to make it.

I was thinking of having a pocket for the tension rod to go through at the top of the unit, like a curtain. The grey mesh is quite a bit thinner than the set of pockets that came with the trailer, but I think it's strong enough to hold the little airline bottles of shampoo, hand sanitizer, toothpaste, deodorant and other things we would need to store there.

I did get some knitting done during the week. The straight stockinette is moving along, although it isn't as interesting as the stranded colorwork. Time to get back to my audiobook!

Our anniversary was on Friday. We didn't do anything special this year. We've had enough excitement with the new puppy, the R-Pod and camping trips. It's hard to believe it has been 58 years. The anniversary gave me the opportunity to look back on the various things we have done and the adventures we've had. We're still in touch with all of the people in this photo from our wedding except for the young man on the right. 

Choir has started up again, and we sang yesterday. I was a little nervous about losing Christian, our director for the last four years, and his replacement seems so young, but I think it's going to work out fine.

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah, Classic Tales Retold or Our Favorite Verses, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still the Kultainen käki cardigan. Some progress made.

What's on my loom: I didn't make any progress on the placemats.

What's on my sewing machine: Toiletries pockets for the R-Pod.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: In The Arithmetic Problem, Pippa finds out that sometimes there are better ways to help than the first thing you think of.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende. Just when you think the story is over, it continues on. Well-named, but it's fine that it goes on, because I'm enjoying it.

What's in my wine glass: Shannon Ranch Big Horn Red Blend 2020. Very nice!

What's my tip of the week: You can extend the lifespan of an iPhone battery by following these tips. I'd be willing to bet these same suggestions would work for other brands of phones as well. I did some of these things. Wish now I had done them all, but maybe it's good to have a new phone.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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Time To Wrap

Hannah's Winter Day Dress is finished.

We have lots of snow, so it was easy to do a photo shoot with her in realistic surroundings. The hardest part was finding a place where the snow wasn't up to her waist. She liked this place under a fir tree. Hannah is very photogenic, and her older-girl shape compliments the design...or the design compliments her figure.

The pattern is Camelot by Deb Denair. It buttons down the back and is knit flat. The only seams are on the sleeves. I used Palette in Pool and Fog. 

Hannah is a Götz doll. Dolly is a Madame Alexander, with a cloth body and a little plumper. I tried the dress on her to see if alterations might be needed if someone wanted to make it for a different doll. Here's how it looks on her:

The sleeves are a little long for her, but otherwise it fits, although her figure doesn't show off the lines of the design quite as well. Dolly is a bit slimmer than American Girl dolls, I think, so I suggest going up a needle size if making the dress for an AG doll. 

The dolls who live with me will be losing their clothes at Christmas, so I ordered some "Jeggings," leggings that look like very stylish jeans. The company, that makes and sells the the Jeggings on eBay, Pixies1952, makes them in AG size and Götz, as well as to fit a few other popular dolls. Dolly and Gabi are modeling the AG size.

I really, really don't like having naked dolls standing around in my house. It makes me want to knit or sew them something right away, and then I end up giving the clothes away. I ordered four pairs, so I can send some home with Hannah, too.

I'm ready to pack the dolls away in their boxes so I can wrap them for Christmas. I can't bear thinking of Hannah staring at the inside of her box until December 25th (her eyes don't close), so I'm going to pack her wearing a sleep mask.

Buddy and Dude are almost ready to wrap as well. I just need to tattoo the children's names on their bums, so they don't get mixed up. All four kids are getting dolls this year. Johan is getting this Raggedy Andy, who is on his way to me now.

He's handmade in the US. I found him on Etsy at Roszanna's Dolls. I plan to make him something, maybe a jacket and a scarf. Johan is a little young to dress and undress a doll by himself.

I was reminded recently of the iBand concert I found back in 2010 put on by North Point Community Church. I thought it might be fun to share again.

Here are the apps used (and the names of the performers).

Not much quilting going on right now, but I'm back to pressing and folding my fabrics, in between cleaning house and cooking. I'll try to get a photo of the reorganization effort when there is more to show.

DD's family of four will arrive about December 23rd, assuming the weather holds (they're driving) and DS2's family of four will fly in Christmas Eve. DGD1 is driving from her new home in California on December 26th. The families with little kids will leave New Year's Eve and January 3rd, and later that week we expect DS1, although his plans aren't set yet. 

What's on my needles: Back to the “So-not-my-palette Cardigan” second sleeve is coming along. 

What's on my Featherweight: Waiting for the next project.

What's on my wheel: Still put away for now.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Listening to An Irish Country Christmas by Patrick Taylor. Still reading A Rose Before Dying by Amy Corwin on the Kendall app.

What's in my wine glass: Frontera Merlot by Concha y Toro.

What's my tip of the week: Liquid hand soap often is so thick it clogs the pump. You can avoid this by diluting the soap. I like to fill another bottle about halfway with warm weather. Then I empty about half of the bottle of soap into the bottle with the water. You can just add warm water to the original bottle, but it mixes better if you use a third bottle. If you aren't using it right away, it will mix on its own. I think this wastes less soap, too.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals were harmed during the production of this blog post.