Are you ready for the big shock? Here are some spinning pictures from my house on Saturday night.

Okay, so that’s just me spinning on the Reeves. No big deal there, right? (Notice how the wheel nicely camouflages my double chin. Thanks, Dale.)

But wait. What’s that in the background? WHO is that spinning on the Lendrum? Let’s get closer and see . . .

Do you recognize her yet?

It’s Hannah! And she’s spinning!

I told you it was a shocker.

Yes, indeedy, Saturday night Hannah asked me to show her how to spin. After I got up off the floor, I gladly obliged. Now, I’m a crappy teacher, just ask Wendy. Nevertheless, I managed to get my kid to make yarn.

This is Hannah’s first handspun yarn. I’m thinking of putting it in her baby book, right next to her ultrasound picture.

I couldn’t be prouder.

Can I just tell you? I had a great weekend! Friday night we had dinner with friends (including Sharon, the blogless wonder) and Saturday I spent the day with other friends at a Civil War Swap Meet, which is basically a yard sale of reenacting stuff. Either of those events would have made for a good weekend but . . .

Sunday we went to Spamalot! I have been looking forward to this since last December when I bought the tickets and I was not disappointed in the least. It was fantastic! I have always been a huge fan of The Holy Grail and couldn’t miss the opportunity to see it done on stage. They didn’t leave out much from the movie and actually found ways to improve on some of it. We laughed until we cried. When it ended, I immediately turned to Dale and said, “can we go again?” That’s how much I loved it. Really, if you have the chance, go and see this show!

And, because this is a *cough* knitting blog, I do have a teeny bit of knitting to show you.

This is my second pair of socks for Project Spectrum: March. The yarn is Opal Rainforest in the color Flamingo, picot edge courtesy of Claudia’s great instructions. This was a much longer sock leg Saturday night because I knit on it for most of Saturday while at the Swap Meet. However, on Sunday morning I decided to listen to that niggling little voice that had been telling me since Saturday morning that the leg looked awfully small. As in narrow. So, I checked my gauge and – yikes – realized that it wasn’t going to fit Hannah. RIP. My picot edge looks much better this time, though, so there’s that as a bonus.

Tomorrow spinning photos. You’ll be shocked.

Okay, so I’m late to the party with my letter E post. So late, in fact, that two of my friends beat me to the punch with the same choice for their letter E. Nevertheless, I will show you my embroidery – which is really counted cross stitch.

I used to do counted cross stitch obsessively. Not as obsessively as I now knit, but I always had a project going. I did pillows, and baby bibs and the occasional sweatshirt. But my favorite thing to stitch was a project that could be framed. There are only two that I had framed that still hang in my house.

This is a sampler I did. You’ll note my name was different. But I still have it hung up because it was a crap-load of work, it matches the dining room, and I like it. That’s 22 count Aida, kids.

My kitchen in my old house was black and white, so I had to stitch this up. I just love the way the vegetables and letters go together. Except the letter K. What’s up with a pie for the letter K? And so what if my current kitchen is green? At least my name is still Carole.

Finally, there’s this. This is my one and only, true family heirloom. As you can probably guess, it was not stitched by me but by my great-great-grandmother, on paper no less. Her name was Anna Elizabeth Smith Jones and she actually saw Abraham Lincoln. It hung in my nana’s house when I was a little girl and she used it to teach me the Ten Commandments. After she died, it hung in my mother’s house, and then when she died, it came to me.

In this photo you can see the pencil marks for some of the designs that she didn’t actually complete.

And in this one, sadly, you can see that the paper is deteriorating. I think it’s okay in the frame that it’s in, as my mother and nana had it re-framed back in the 80s, and it’s all acid-free and stuff. But, clearly, it could never be reframed.

I love all my embroidery but this piece is truly a work of art to me.

We’re all memes, all the time here at Carole Knits. I owe this one to Amy. Actually, I asked to be tagged for this. I just seems to fit, you know? Because I am a librarian, after all. And book are just about everywhere in my life.

Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert

I’m tagging other bloggers who have (or are getting) their MLIS degrees: Liz, Cara, Lolly, and Mim. Have at it if you’re willing, ladies.

Oy. I owe memes! I owe so many memes, I’m not sure who I owe them to anymore. But here’s the one that Becky started, nearly a month ago, asking for pictures of the view from my front door.

Can I just say? The view in March is rather pitiful. The grass is brown, there are no leaves on the trees and the garden is just a patch of earth and mud. I didn’t even manage to capture any birds at the bird feeders.

This is the view as I look to the left of my front door. It’s where we have our garden in the summer, as evidenced by that big patch of brown. No, not the brown grass. The brown mud. While it may seem strange to some people to put the garden in the front yard, it’s where we get the most sun. It’s also right outside my kitchen door, making it an old-fashioned (and very convenient) kitchen garden.

This is what I see if I look straight ahead while standing on my front stoop. Bird bath, bird feeders, but no birds. Trust me, they are usually there. We get chickadees and cardinals and lots of sparrows. There are goldfinches and tufted titmice and several different varieties of woodpeckers. There’s even an occasional hawk on the hunt. It’s quite entertaining for Mason, really.

Finally, this is my view to the right. As you can see, I live on a corner lot and this is basically main street in my town. I do love my neighbor’s house, it’s such a charming example of New England.

At last, a bit of color. I can’t see this first, tiny crocus from my front door, but I found it when I walked around the corner to go back in the house. Ahhh! Spring!

So, that’s that. My front yard. Hope you enjoyed the scenery!

I have the Monday morning blahs. I’m not really sick but I feel icky. Icky enough to call in sick to work but not icky enough to need actual medical attention. Just a general blech feeling.

Perhaps it’s Oscar letdown. You see, I love the Oscars. The Oscars are, for me, what the Superbowl is for football fans. It all starts when the nominations are announced and there is the mad scramble for Dale and I to see all the nominated pictures. (We failed miserably this year, only seeing 2 out of 5. But, since the two we saw were Brokeback Mountain and Crash, we did apparently see the right two.) The discussion of movies and actors and music all culminates with the excitement of Oscar Day. There’s the pre-game show that’s on E! all afternoon. There’s talk about the nominees and the predictions and the food and the dresses. Here are Casa Carole Knits we have special Oscar night snacks. I put on my high heels and my bling and we make a party of it.

So that’s what yesterday entailed and I had a good time of it. I did think Jon Stewart was dull and that was a disappointment. But overall, I enjoyed the show. My predictions were dead on, which shouldn’t surprise Dale anymore, and yet it does. I kept going back and forth over Brokeback Mountain and Crash but finally decided that Ang Lee would get Best Director and Crash would get Best Picture and I was right. I called George Clooney and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Reese Witherspoon and Rachel Weisz for their various awards.

And now it’s over for another year. And I’m home sick. But wait! I just remembered. I taped the post game show on E. So, there’s knitting and Oscar rehash to look forward to. Things just might be looking up for the rest of my day.

As I’m sure we’re all aware, yesterday was the start of Lolly’s Project Spectrum. When Lolly announced this idea, I decided I would use each month’s color scheme to define my sock knitting for the month. See, um, I sort of have a lot of sock yarn. In a lot of colors. And sometimes I have a really hard time deciding which sock yarn to knit next. So, with Project Spectrum as my guide, I figured I’d able to narrow things down a bit.

Here’s my Ruby Red Socks for the month of March.

Yes, that’s one finished sock because I started these last month. But I will finish them this month and they’ll be finished Red Socks which will cover not only the Red Hot Sizzling Socks knit along but also my PS requirements, too.

Turns out, though, that PS is spilling over into other areas of my life. I’ve been spinning.

That’s the Chocolate Covered Cherries that I bought at SPA from Amy of Spunky Eclectic. Dude, it’s a lot of pink. But there’s enough brown mixed in to make me happy, ya know?

And I started a new shawl.

That’s the wee beginnings of the Seraphim Shawl, beautiful designed by Mim, in Fleece Artist Silk Stream from Redbird Knits. Color: Rosey. It’s silk and wool and I love the way it feels. Kind of nubby and like raw silk but mostly like wool. Good stuff, that. And, she’s having a sale that ends today.

There’s been other red things, too, including a finished Log Cabin quilt. (no, I didn’t take a picture of it last night when Lois and I were working on it. You’ll just have to trust me – it’s really pretty and there’s lots of red!) This will be raffled off at this weekend’s Dale and the Duds dance to benefit Dale’s Boy Scout troop. Anyone going to be in my area and want to have a fun night out with the chance to win a beautiful scrap quilt? Lemme know, cuz I’ve got tickets.

The Buy More Yarn Program continues to astound me. Can I be frank? Some of you people are nuts! I’m happy to keep track of this stuff (must be the librarian in me, right Kat?) but I’m completely out of my league when it comes to keeping up with your yarn purchases. Maybe we need to have a Buy More Spinning Wheels Program. Then I could actually be a contender.

Anyway, enough about me, here’s this month’s scores.

In the lead we have Elspeth with 126. Renata is catching up with 115 and, sadly, Risa has fallen way behind with only 93. Other contenders are Michelle with 90, Dee with 78 and Christine with 77.

So, while Risa and Dave were early leaders, they just haven’t kept up. And some of you are just not taking this seriously at all. Esther? Emmy You guys been shopping or what?

Anyone else have purchases to tell me about? Send an email to cjuliusATcarverplDOTorg and I’ll update your points.