Two Steps Forward and One Step Back

One forward step — the vest is coming along slowly. I'm knitting the fronts and back all in one piece so the rows are very long. Less seaming up in the end which is all to the good. In the picture you can see the pattern in Vogue Knitting that inspired me but I'm not following it. My strange yarn doesn't match the gauge anyway being somewhat finer than the super chunky yarn in the pattern. Behind the piece on the Denise needles you can see the two cones of yarn I'm using together. In the lower picture, you can see the 5 fine wool singles that make up each of the two yarns. They're similar but not the same and there are interesting slubs of yellow and green in both. It doesn't feel too wonderful right off the cone but it does soften up after washing and blocking. This is meant to be an outerwear sweater anyway, so it won't be contacting my skin much. However it is a bit of a challenge to knit without missing one (or more) of the singles in a stitch somewhere. I've fixed a few of these glitches so far. I don't have to make any critical decisions patternwise until I get to the underarms so I'm just knitting on.

A second forward step is that part of my kitchen is finally looking better:

It took a couple of days to get all those spice jars and things cleaned off. I do like the spicy turmeric yellow colour behind the items. The light green on the jar lids and in the old print actually coordinates with the light green tiles around the kitchen sink. I collected the print of a mysterious tower by a tropical lake (OK, I read fantasy) from an antique sale when I was about 15. The Indian brass tray I got from another sale when I was 18. The basket is nice for serving dinner rolls but its main function is hiding a couple of old pipes that stick out of the wall. The two tiles would be good for serving cheese or something but in reality they never get taken off the wall.

Below is the next area to get the "treatment" — the nook. You're only seeing half of it since it's really almost 1/3 of our total kitchen area.

That horrible louvered window is a holdover from when we first moved into this house. We had the other 3 taken out and replaced but we thought we would eventually make this one into a door. Didn't happen but I still want a larger window here. The louvers are a big PITA — drafty and cold in the winter and bug flyways in the summer. We always tape shrink plastic over the window by November and we can't screen it in so we can open it when it warms up because of the way it works. I want a large bay window with room for plants but I'm not sure we can afford it right now. Meanwhile we're carrying on as if that yukky one is going to stay. For now maybe.

I know shouldn't complain since they give me lots of storage space but it took me almost 3 hours just to give the insides of those cupboards one single coat of primer. Yeesh. That was yesterday. Right now I should be giving it a touch-up second coat but I'm blogging instead! I washed most of the walls and I'm waiting for them to dry first...right...sure...

I'll go with one last nice image: my tomatoes. Aren't they pretty? The red ones are little Juliette cherry tomatoes. They're shaped more like paste tomatoes but they're only about 1-1/2" long or so. Yummy! And prolific. And the yellow ones are Taxi. It's hard to tell when they're ripe because the colour change is very subtle but they get almost orange when overripe. A nicely ripe one often will have a little pink in the heart but you don't see that until you cut into it. Some Taxis are quite big and they taste as good as only home-grown tomatoes can. My regular red tomatoes are kind of a write-off this year. They're Oregon Spring and they usually do quite well but not this year. They're all misshapen and cat-faced. (Yes, that's a real technical term! Look it up.) Luckily I didn't plant very many of them. These ones just came out of the garden. Don't they make a nice dining table centrepiece?