A short trip into the city

Yesterday we spent the day at the Taste of Chicago. This was probably our 11th or 12th year attending this food frenzy. This was the first time the temperature was perfect in the 70's. It's usually in the high 90's.
Here we are just down the street at Millennium Park smiling into the "bean".



Being stuck in Illinois in the summer isn't so bad with beautiful Lake Michigan views and fun neighborhood festivals only an hour away.

What else happened?

I'm really bad at responding to being tagged for a meme. It all goes back to the elementary school days where I was IT the entire recess because I was the fattest kid in school and unable to tag anyone.

While browsing JenLa I came across a recent meme and thought it was entertaining. Don't worry I'll be it and I'm not going to tag anyone at the end of this post.

Here are the guidelines:

Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday month and day only. Then post 3 events, 2 births and one holiday that occurred on your birthday.


July 12
Events:

* 1812 - War of 1812: The United States invade Canada at Windsor, Ontario.
* 1960 - Etch A Sketch, the drawing toy goes on sale.
* 2002 - Gay rights: The Superior Court of Ontario orders Ontario to recognize same-sex marriages

Births:

* 1817 - Henry David Thoreau, American writer and philosopher (d. 1862)
* 1937 - Bill Cosby, American comedian and actor

Holiday:

* Kiribati - Independence Day.

A Green Tomato

My Tomato Top featured in No Sheep for You is finished. I finally completed a project with lots of yarn left over. I usually have to make my tops short because I run out of yarn. I used 7 and 1/2 balls of KnitPicks shine worsted in grass for the main color and 1/2 ball of shine worsted in cream for the contrast color.



I love that it's so soft. I also love that with top down patterns you can try it on as you go but hate to put all those stitches on waste yarn to do so. After my waist decreases I moved half of the stitches to another circular needle to make sure this size was going to be big enough. My Picovoli of last summer was a bit snug so I am relieved this shirt had room to breathe. If I could go back and change something it would probably be to change the front neck ribbing. My husband thought I made a mistake on the front four ribs because the pattern calls for K2tog for these. I guess it kind of looks like a mistake but if you look at the photo in the book you can see the "mistake" here too. Maybe it's for accentuating the bust (if the contrast stripe running across your bust isn't attention grabbing enough). I loved the top down, no seaming aspect of this sweater so much I purchased my yarn for the next Sexy Knitters Club kal over the weekend. It's FIFI from French Girl designs. It's a top down, seamless, cabled t shirt that I hope knits up as comfy as it looks like in the picture.

Lots of pieces

For some odd reason I'm drawn to patterns that involve lots of seaming. It's not because I love mattress stitch. Here's a picture of my current work in progress...



I still have 2 button bands and a hood to knit up in addition to seaming it all up. Fun stuff!

The hole in my backyard is slowly beginning to look like a swimming pool.



We're hoping for sunny, hot days for a few weeks as the water temp is a bone chilling 55 degrees right now.

Have you heard...

If you love knitting you've probably heard of the new site Ravelry. It's in beta right now and I've been on the wait list for what seems like a really long time. They are sending invites out daily so one of these days I'll get mine.Here's a list of what you can do at the site. The muggles don't get it but us knitters do. This site is so sweet! When I get in I can finally justify all my computer time by saying "it's helping me stay organized." Of course I will ignore the laughter that follows.