Summertime

 Greetings! I'm glad to be back with you. I thought we would start with a garden update before plunging into all the knitting and fiber. I've been gone the last few days so when I went outside to take pictures for my blog I also looked at the garden and snapped a few photos.

This year I planted lots of flowers from seed. Though they did not come up as I would have liked, we still have quite an abundance of flowers that are just beginning to bloom. The zinnias were one of the first flowers to bloom. Zinnias are such a sturdy, cut flower. I like to plant scads of them if at all possible, to use for bouquets and such all summer long.

 The garden is doing well. We didn't plant as great a variety this year as we did last year. But what we do have is doing well indeed. We have 12 butternut squash plants and they are simply loaded with tiny squash! We love to make squash soup in the cold months, and having a good supply of squash on hand will be wonderful. When autumn rolls around I'll have to remember to post our squash soup recipe for you.

 Our tomatoes are flourishing nicely, though they are all still green. We got the garden in later then expected and it is slightly behind. Last year we tried fried green tomatoes and they were surprisingly delicious. 

The soybeans in the field next to us are growing so high, and they are now blooming.

I prefer to have soybeans next to us as opposed to the corn fields. We are not so boxed in with the soybeans.

That is it on the garden update. Now on to fiber!

I've been doing a bit of lace knitting this week. Right now I am in the midst of figuring out a new shawl design. It is past the "frog-it-and-scrap-the-whole-project" stage, which makes me happy. I'm fairly certain that I am on the proper track with this pattern right now. I'm still debating on what to do with the edging though.

Because of my shoulder injury, plying still gives me some grief, though spinning is not as difficult. So my plying projects are piling up right now. The yarn in the back of this picture is all ready to knit with. The two balls in the front still need to be plied. I'll just take my time and do a little here and a little there until they are done. My problem is once I start plying I want to keep at it until the skein is complete.

This single is ready to be wound off into a center-pull ball so I can ply it later. This yarn is part of 5 ounces of alpaca seconds that I purchased at a local alpaca farm earlier this summer. I washed the locks and am working on carding them up a little at a time. I'm considering making a cowl or perhaps another helix scarf out of this yarn.

Speaking of the Helix, here are some updated photos of the my Chocolate Mint Helix!

Currently I've used up all the yarn I had spun for this project. So now I am spinning up my last two ounces as fast as I can because I really want to finish this project. The Helix is such an easy project! It is a repeat of 3 rows the whole time, so it is easily memorized and perfect for take-along knitting. I've been putting it in my purse and taking it to church to work on between services.

I hope you all are having a lovely summer! What projects are you working on? What do you like to knit for easy take-along projects during all the busy summer goings-on? I'd love to hear what you are doing!

Have a blessed day!