Who Says I Can’t Finish a UFO?

It was well over a year ago when I started Rock Me on the Bias, which was chronicled in the post Motivation Lost and Found, but I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t get a chance to give it a proper photo shoot, though, because of Thanksgiving week and life happening.

Well, it is finally a finished project…no longer a UFO (which means “UnFinished Object” in yarn arts slang).

Here is the finished version of Rock Me on the Bias!

Project: Rock Me on the Bias

Pattern: None used; this was knit corner to corner, casting on 3 stitches and increasing by two stitches on every right side row (working each color until it ran out or I was satisfied with the width of the stripe, then I’d work six rows in white in pattern) until the edge was my desired length. Then I worked six center rows in white with no increasing or decreasing. Then I attached the next color and started decreasing by two stitches on every right side row (adding white stripes when another skein of color would run out) until three stitches remained. I then bound off those stitches and wove in the ends.

Yarn: Red Heart Super Saver in various colors and Soft White

Needles: U.S. #10 1/2 circular needles, 29 inch cable.

What was not seen in those outdoor shots:

1. We’d just had a cold front come through and the outside temperature was around 60 degrees Fahrenheit (kinda chilly for Florida standards), and it ended up dipping into the upper 30s. It was kinda windy, too.
2. Our neighbor was having their septic tank pumped. It was pretty noisy.
3. It smelled like exactly what you’d expect a septic tank being pumped to smell like.

I also finally got to meet my youngest niece, The Bambina, three weeks ago (she is 9 months old as of yesterday). My brother and sister-in-law were supposed to take a short trip to Colorado (without the girls) early last month, but then everybody got sick just days before the trip, so they stayed home. My sister-in-law, A., decided she needed some alone time to herself, so she sent my brother and the girls out of the house and they ended up visiting us. I immediately gave the Bambina Baby Blanket to my brother as soon as they arrived, and they spent about two and a half hours with us catching up and R. eating what was left of our Halloween chocolate. Both R. and The Bambina are very happy girls, with The Bambina being especially cheerful for the most part. In the three years since he became a dad for the first time, my brother has become a great one so far. Being a dad suits him and he’s a natural at it. I wish I could say the same about my own maternal instincts. R. and Bambina seem to get along very well and R. loves being in the Big Sister role. Makes me think back to my childhood, when I was also the Big Sister. J. and I didn’t get along very well as kids, and we argued all the way into our teens. These days we get along very well, and I think that’s due to both maturity and the fact we don’t live under the same roof anymore.

The latest in Books for me: a few weeks ago I got The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys, a historical fiction novel set in 1950s Madrid, during the regime of dictator Francisco Franco. It will be read after I finish The Testaments in my queue. I also redeemed another gift card and got the latest sequel novel from The Tribe, The Tribe: (R)Evolution; a collection of John Steinbeck’s short novels; and The Days of the French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert (which is a narrative history of the French Revolution) for my ebook collection. I finished The Color Purple and am now reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, my first nonfiction read in over a year.

Finally, we’ve decided it is time to bid farewell to our Ninja Coffee Bar after a year and a half. It wasn’t that it made bad coffee, it’s all due to faulty electronics that have frankly made brewing a pot of coffee more difficult than it should be. This particular model has a bad clean sensor that comes on after just a couple of brews following a cleaning cycle; we can delay cleaning it by a week or so but inevitably the brewing cycle will turn off mid-brew, and it will even sometimes stop a clean cycle while trying to clean it. I know Florida water is hard to begin with, but we were cleaning this thing pretty regularly and the gadgetry still decided to turn on us. Yesterday morning my dad ordered a new brewer that has a self-filling reservoir, meaning that it hooks up to the same water line that one hooks up to their refrigerator in order to fill and run their ice maker and water dispenser. One problem: we haven’t had a water line in our refrigerator for a few years because our old water line wore out and started leaking and had to be removed. We’ve had the parts to replace it for a while, but for one reason or another my dad hasn’t gotten around to it. Since the new brewer will require him to fix the water line anyway, he’s essentially gonna be tackling two jobs at once. I’ll keep you updated on how the new coffee maker turns out.