Of finished things, cakes, and civil war

First off, Maggie's twilight socks are done and she is proudly wearing them. When I had first finished them I had seriously considered not giving them to her for a few days/weeks, but figured she would catch on sooner rather then later when I was working on something else during knit night.


The pattern is a simple knit 4 rows, knit1 purl3 for 2 rows, repeat. And the cuff is knit1 purl3 for about 2". Totally simple and would have been rather boring otherwise but the yarn was pooling so nicely. There are even some sports were it was doing this cool zigzag effect. I should have my sister pick yarn more often.

On Friday we went to her annual school carnival. It was fun as always. Although this year it was even better for her since she was able to go into the dunk tank, now that she is a 5th grader. Mom and I got bored standing around to wait her turn so we played the silly little games they had for kids (I won a magnifying glass, a whale, a pink fuzzy pen, and a sticky hand) and even got our faces painted to kill some time.

This time I even got to see the "please bring us cakes" flier the school hands out every year so there are enough cakes and other goodies available for the cake walk (like musical chairs but when the music stops and you're on the numbered square they call out you get a ticket to pick a cake or cupcakes, etc.). It made no sense to me and my sister however since not 3 weeks prior to the carnival they had to cancel their bake sale in fear of children getting the swine flu from the home make goodies. So we thought it would be hilarious to make a piggy cake with buggers coming out of it's nose, bags under its eyes and a tissue by its side. We had the cake all backed up and were ready to frost when our mother told us that wouldn't be such a good idea since some people wouldn't find it as funny. So instead we made this.


I would have still preferred the sick piggy.










We also managed to go to the civil war re-enactment that was going on in our park on the weekend. Having never seen on before I was rather surprised that the people go into such depth with the whole thing. There were camps set up with people walking around in period clothing (I loved the dresses the woman were wearing), making fires, yelling orders at under ranking "soldiers" and answering any questions that you could throw at them. I was a little surprised that there were so many knitters among the women there and even two spinners.

Although they were all totally cheating by using pretty non-period yarns; I'm sure getting your hands on aqua colored silk was pretty damn hard in 1861.