This & That

Steve has another doctor's appointment in Montgomery tomorrow. I'm bringing the shawl and the socks to work on - only mindless knitting for me! Last night I talked Jacy into modeling the shawl, still on the needles, for a picture. I've used 1 1/2 skeins of the Lion & Lamb and have one more skein. I think it'll be enough, but the shop owner that sold me the yarn thought I'd need at least 4. Piffle! Four would be a blanket, thank you very much!

(Jacy wants you to know that her hair is wet from the shower, not dirty.) So I'll knit on the shawl tomorrow while in the car and at the doctor's office.

Joan has been knitting purses for the past year. Last summer she knit a lot of scarves and purses to sell. The scarves ended up as gifts, but the purses all sold. Now she's knitting more. Last year I helped her by sewing the linings for the purses, but this summer she's sewing her own linings. Here's the first one she's finished:

She made the little heart pin out of Filo clay and pinned it to the purse. Her lining is fabric with butterflies:

She's made several without linings (I think the lined ones are nicer) and used vintage buttons from the '50's and '60's that she got from the button collection of my grandmother to embellish the purses.

On another note, I always enjoy reading Dy's posts at her weblog. She makes re-doing a house sound like so much fun! It's like a private peek at an HGTV show. (I think I may watch HGTV too much because Marley will walk into the room where I'm knitting and watching a show and exclaim, "Oh! It's 'House Hunters' - my favorite show!") Earlier tonight I was working on Dad's Aran (I'm on row 11 -out of 16- of the cable pattern) and If Walls Could Talk was on. Marley wandered in and was enthralled. I lost track of the show, and started thinking about our house. We don't really need the walls to talk because we know a lot of the history of our home. It was built by Mr. V, who, with his wife, raised his four children in the house. One of his daughters and her husband moved in with Mr. and Mrs. V. when she married. That daughter and her husband were Mr. and Mrs. A. They had their only child in this house, and that only child married and brought her husband here to live. That child, Mrs. T., had no children. She was the last owner of the house, and she died in 2003, at the age of 97. We bought the house from the daughter of her cousin, and she told us a lot about the people who lived here before us.

Before we moved in, the former owners did a great job of cleaning out the place. If we had to be on a show we'd be hard-pressed to make the walls talk. The only things left in this house when we moved in were these Glasbake custard cups and jelly-jar juice glasses:

And in the attic David found this lamp, sans the lampshade, which we bought at Target:

So I'm thinking, "If my the walls of my house could talk, they'd say, 'The people who lived here loved baked custard, were frugal, and liked the Sears early Americana look.' "