Today is Labor Day and we’re having a quiet day at home with no picnics or barbeques. It’s just enough to be here at home and celebrate the workers. I want to particularly celebrate the migrant workers who pick our food when nobody else wants to. I am so grateful to them. In Maine our blueberry barrens have been battling drought conditions and a lack of rakers (it’s backbreaking work when harvesting by hand) and I love those little berries! So, thank you to the farmers and rakers for our blueberries!

I took a walk around the yard this morning and found this big cicada on the garden post. Our vegetable garden has suffered from the lack of rain and we’ve stopped watering to conserve our well water. We have some tomatoes still on the vine and that’s about it. Soon we will pull out the plants and ammend the soil and get ready to plant our garlic. (I got smart and ordered it early this year!)

The daisy is the last one to bloom and then they’ll be ready to cut back and I want to transplant some (the bunch has gotten HUGE and is getting in the way of some iris) to my “new” garden that the kids made when they were here in July. I’ll be putting daisies and some wildflower seeds up there and we’ll see what grows! We still have plentiful black-eyed susans and the wild roses are needing a big cut … they really are invasive if they grow so well here on our lake shore. I’ve got to move the remaining blueberry plant, too … we’ll see if it will actually grow if it has some space.

I stopped knitting the body and have wound off the chocolate brown colors in the second hank of yarn. I really wanted to see what it would look like on the sleeves if I made them more “consistent” by going back and forth with the blue/brown/beige part of the yarn. Because sleeves are a much smaller circumference than the body of the garment, the colors change much more slowly but I am pleased with the results so far. I have been knitting 14 or so rounds (it’s a seven round repeat) on one sleeve then I break my yarn and knit 14 rounds on the second sleeve to keep the colors sort of the same. I may have to wind off some of the blue/brown to get to the brown/cream to end the sleeves. I’ve even thought about knitting the ribbing in the chocolate brown but I haven’t decided for sure (yet.) I will be trying it on this morning before I get dressed to see how it’s fitting and how much longer the body needs to be. The pattern calls for two inches of ribbing on the hem and the sleeves. I’m getting close!!!

Yesterday I worked on my Jaunty again for a bit. I’m about half-way through the third ball of yarn and the decreases are happening pretty quickly! I am excited to finish this shawl/scarf and get it blocked – I think it’s going to be even more squishy than it already is once the yarn relaxes in its bath. I also machine washed my cream colored Lane’s Island sweater for the first time. I’ve always washed my hand-knits by hand but this one really needed a good wash and the yarn, Berroco Remix Light, says it’s machine washable. I’m impressed at how well it washed up on the gentle cycle. This is a sweatshirt-y sweater and I love wearing it on the cooler days between seasons. I may have to wash the pink one as well.

Gone knitting!