Ragdoll Designs

MadMay Stitch markers

2011-05-10T08:21:00.002-05:00

100_0041, originally uploaded by grauvoglb.

Donating 10 pairs of stitch markers as Mad May prizes!

2011 Blizzard

2011-02-03T12:08:00.001-06:00

DSCN2093, originally uploaded by grauvoglb.

To say we have a lot of snow would be a big understatement!

Finally got my act together on Etsy

2010-11-16T11:29:00.000-06:00

I finally managed to get it together and post some new items on Ragdoll Designs! Take a look, the row counters work great.

What was I thinking!?!

2010-05-22T20:42:00.006-05:00

So... I fell in love with the Tulip Sock pattern, in the Think Outside the Sox book. Thing is it's made with 8 colors, which would amount to a $180 pair of socks. Not happening. But then I thought, well, if I had 5 friends (had to do some math on that) that wanted to make them we could share the yarn. Hmmm.... where to find 5 like minded friends to share yarn? Ah but of course, Ravelry! So a few posts later, I'm receiving boxes from the Loopy Ewe with 12 skeins of Dream in Color Smooshy to divide up for my 5 new friends.

The last 3 boxes arrived this morning - so I spent the day making center pull skeins out of them, in preparation for dividing them up 6 ways.

Here is the bag with all the orders...

... and the basket to put the skeins in....

... and then I start winding...

...and winding..

.... and winding..

... and winding....

.... until 12 skeins were in cakes!

Over twice as many as the average but still only 16.

2010-05-14T11:29:00.000-05:00

The Big Read (http://www.neabigread.org/) said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list. So ... copy this list, remove my yeses and nos, and add your comments (favorable or otherwise) about the ones you have read. Don't forget to include a total.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen – No
2 The Lord of the Rings - No
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - No - Tried, but didn't make it.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – No
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - YES
6 The Bible –YES
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - No
8 1984 - George Orwell - No
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - No
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - No
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - No
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – YES
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Complete works - No
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - No
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - No
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - No
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - No
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- No
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - No
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens- No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - No
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - No - started it 4 times
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - No
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - No
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - YES - isn't this part of the Chronicles of Narnia - I'll take the extra point though, because it was like 5 books
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - YES
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – No - but I think I'll put this one on the list
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - No
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - YES
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - No
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - No
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - No
52 Dune - Frank Herbert- No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - No
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - YES
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – YES
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - YES
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - No
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - YES
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - No
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - No
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - No
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - No
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byatt- No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -YES
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No - well the good parts ;)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - YES
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe – YES
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - YES
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - No
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – YES
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - No
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No

2nd month Cookie A. Kal entry

2009-08-18T08:43:00.003-05:00

I finished my Summer Sox by Cookie A.. I knit Rick last month and won a prize in the KAL on Ravelery. So without further ado, here's Summer Sox.....

What next?

2009-08-14T07:44:00.003-05:00

Things are crazy here - both my sister and nephew are sick. The nephew had 3 ER visits before a wonderful doctor in Milwaukee (an hour and a half away) figured out what was wrong. The older nephew, his brother, was a trooper through the entire thing.

2009 Franklin Street Fiber Festival

2009-07-27T07:41:00.000-05:00

The 2009 FFF was a huge success. We had 14 attendee from WI and IL. The girls at mom's knitting groups are still talking about it. Everyone participated in the Finished Objects show and contest. Iona was the big winner - winning in 2 categories. Bev won best color for her Monkey socks. Debbie won best crochet for her gorgeous sweater... and I won Best in Show for Molly's blanket.

Invitations are going out....

2009-06-29T08:51:00.004-05:00

2009 Franklin Street Knitting Awards

2009-02-19T10:55:00.004-06:00

2008 Franklin Street Knitting Awards, originally uploaded by grauvoglb.

This Saturday will be the 2009 Franklin Street Knitting Awards. The contest will be held at mom's, on... you guessed it, Franklin Street, we are expecting knitting entries from both the Waupun and Fox Lake metro areas.

There are a number of categories - including Best New Knitter for my nephew and Best Washcloth for Debbie (mom's best friend).

The contest came about after I realized that the contest I was planning on entering this weekend, at my local knitting store, was limiting entries to yarn purchased at their store (which is fair), but my bestest new project, is made with Wollmeise.

Look for photos next week......

It's been a long, long time....

2009-02-17T16:13:00.002-06:00

So what's new - well.... I've been putzing around. I opened an etsy shop ragdolldesigns.etsy.com a few months ago for my jewelry - but met with little success. I know I should put up the stitch markers I've been making, but maybe next month.

In addition, I'm playing around with a cafepress shop - http://www.cafepress.com/RagdollDesign yes, I know one has an 's' and one doesn't - designs was taken on cafepress. I have one shirt design up there - it's a Knitter's glossary of fun knitting terms.

Nothing else much new, this year's Be My Valentine swap on Ravelry went VERY well. Fewer members, but all packages received by the 14th - Whoooo Hoooo!

Only 16 away on Ravelry - you're killing me

2007-10-28T04:42:00.000-05:00

Katie and I are waiting for our Ravelry invite.....

2007-10-02T14:04:00.000-05:00

http://www.ravelry.com/antsy

Christmas Knitting

2007-09-17T14:18:00.000-05:00

Well it's that time - I've started to put together the Christmas knitting list. I've started the boys Harry Potter socks and am playing with some Jingle Bells angora for some other special people.

LYS in CT

2007-08-23T03:45:00.000-05:00

Well I made it to my LYS in CT (Knitting Central in Westport, www.knittingcentral.com ) - yes I have a local yarn shop in other states. Cynthia is wonderful - and I love the different yarns I find there. I left with some more Lobster Pot cashmere (and had to stop myself from buying 10 skeins of another color).

Knit Night

2007-08-17T08:21:00.000-05:00

Well it looks like Thursday Knit Night at the LYS is over - I showed up early last night only to be told, verbally and then with a sign on the door that Charity Knitting would be 'enforced' (yes, the newsletter did say that was going on that night - but in the past that meant if you wanted to knit the project for charity one of the staffers would be ready to help). Now I've heard it all - when they started to charge $5 (to be used toward a $10 purchase) I smiled and said 'ok' - even though I thought it was silly as I spend hundreds there a year, but ok. Now I'm not welcome to sit and knit unless I knit a Teddy Bear for charity. Don't get me wrong - charity knitting is wonderful - but it's not the same when you must do it or leave.

It's become obvious that the owner does not want us congregating there on Thursday nights... so, off we go. Me and the knitsibs will need to find another place to hang and knit. There's a shop in Franklin Park that has open knit on Thursday's and one in East Dundee that has it on Friday - looks like we'll be cruising open knits until we find a new home.

Yes... I am a bad blogger

2007-07-16T07:17:00.000-05:00

2007 has been harrowing.... for those of you who know me, rest assured I have come out on the other side - Thanks to my fabulous Knitsibs - Holly and Adrienne.

To ensure my sanity I have issued the following directive to my family; "Under no circumstances is anyone allowed to be hospitalized prior to 1/1/08".

With that being said - her are some photos of finished projects....

Adrienne and I showing off our Claptis at Thursday Night Knitting at our LYS - Knitche in Downers Grove ( http://www.knitche.com )

Getting ready to felt Spencer's bed

2007-03-03T08:09:00.000-06:00

Spencer has a yarn fetish - he has ever since he was a baby. So last week, I decided to give him his own felted bed. Once I figured out the mobius rim this went super quick - knitting in the round on size 13. I used Malabrigo in Jewel Blue (from my LYS - Knitche in Downers Grove) to match his eyes. Here it is pre-felted, or as the girls called it Thursday night the "elephant hat".

Spence is itching to take a nap in it so ..... we'll felt it today. and he should be snoozing by tomorrow afternoon

Note to those of you who know Spencer: The dark spot on his shoulder is were the hair is growing back from his boo boo (inflicted by his sister) over the holidays.

January Knitting

2007-01-30T15:20:00.000-06:00

Well January was a challenge.... but I did get some knitting done. Just not for me - I fell in love with Malibrigo Lettuce and knit this felted Lucy Bag for my sister.

It was great therapy for me while tending mom - her knee replacement went well. The gals at Iris in Appleton were fabulous - I stopped several times while coming and going from the hospital. One night, after mom had a bad day they made me tea and sat and chatted. I have a new LYS in WI - www.irisfineyarns.com

Here we go.....

2007-01-14T12:23:00.000-06:00

Let me introduce you to the 'kids'. Spencer Tracey (Spenc to his friends) and Katharine Hepburn (Katie to all) are purebred Ragdolls. Katie is a blue bi-color (right). and Spencer is a seal mitted male (below).

Spencer is my lover boy - he cuddles and loves to be bushed and have his tummy rubbed. Katie on the other hand, is too good for all that, she likes to cuddle when I get into bed, but otherwise has very little use for human (or her brother for that matter). The amazing thing about this is that Spencer was the boy that came home with Katie - when lost my old girl (P.J.), I decided on the Ragdoll breed for their personality, looks and good health. I was looking for a blue bi-color and wanted a boy and girl from the same litter. Katie was the bi-color I selected and Spencer was the only male left.... wow, what luck, I would be lost without my 'lover boy'.

They are 2 and 1/2 now and a daily source of joy and amusement.

So those are the kids.... and I'll get to knitting next time.