Between bouts of drizzle, out in the cool Minnesota Autumn air, our friends Pat and Amanda joined the Old Married Folks club.

I know it is only September 12, but now is the time to be doing your holiday crafts people. Not on December 12, and definitely not on December 22. If you start now, you might even finish all your holiday crafts with time to spare, and then you can actually relax and enjoy the holidays!

So what am I making for Holidays 2009? So far I am making a knit Christmas ornament for all of the hubsters clan members. I ordered the kit off of KnitPicks and it came on Tues. I’ve already made 3 ornaments – 1 ball, 1 sweater, and 1 stocking. To be honest I am not not that in love with most of the patterns, but there is a super cute elf pattern that I’ll probably make a bunch of. If I have enough yarn in the kit. Then I’ll probably make a couple of mittens and stockings. The sweater is cute, but it takes to long (6 hours!!!). I have to make like a million of these things. So the main ones will be the mittens and stockings, since those take about 2 hours to make, and don’t have a lot of ends to weave in.

Some people are knitting geniuses. Jacquie is one of them. She has created a Java dohicky for making knitting charts, and is kind enough to make it available for free. This is especially handy for converting old written instructions into charts such as from the ancient stitch dictionaries that I have laying around the house. What is especially awesome about her dohicky, is that it reverses course when you reach the end of a row when it is in 1-click mode. So you just click right along from right to left on your odd rows, and left to right on your even rows. Which, like I already said, is enormously handy for transcribing written directions into charts. Plus it makes special cable charts as needed. AWESOME.

There are a couple of things that it doesn’t do or it does sort of weirdly, but considering how awesome it is and that it is free, I got over it really quick.

1. It doesn’t have a quick way to save and image of the chart. Fortunately some DOS genius a million years ago invented Ctrl+Alt+PrtScrn. So I used that to capture the image, and scale it down using Paint. I don’t know what the Mac equivalents of Ctrl+Alt+PrtScrn or Paint are, but I know they have them. Maybe Yelley will tell me.

2. If you would like to save a chart to edit later, the dohicky creates a text popup with the code for the chart which you cut and paste into a .txt file to save for later. Then when you want to open a saved chart, you cut and paste that code in, and it recreates your chart. The cutting and pasting is kind of weird, but it works, and that’s what matters.

Even with these two things, it is an awesome dohicky, and I’m glad Jacquie lets us use it.

Well maybe not blazes, but it is darn hot. It’s like the weather department finally realized that it’s the end of August, and they still have all this heat that they need to use up before the days start getting really short again. Blech.

This week’s menu plan is based on the assumption that this heat is going to last:

Saturday: Hamburgers, Potato Salad, Creamed Corn

Sunday: Pasta Salad, Grilled Chicken Breast

Monday: Paninis

Tuesday: Pork Ribs, Green Salad

Wednesday: Fish Tacos

Thursday: Shrimp and Grits

Friday: Take out,  probably pizza.

So basically what Flylady has done for you is she has created a Master Cleaning Schedule. This is actually a pretty awesome way to break down the huge task of housekeeping, into smaller and more manageable tasks.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of her program that doesn’t fit for many people. She sends out a lot of emails. There are spiritual elements that you might not agree with. Certain assumptions are made about how your house works that might not actually work for your house.

Luckily, creating a MCS is super easy. And today I found a cool free online service Toodledo, that brings a lot of the Flylady good things to you. Basically what you do is create a list of all your housekeeping tasks, and assign them a frequency. (Daily, Weekly, BiWeekly, Monthly, etc). Then you can use one of their many alert options to get your reminders. I chose to purchase the iPhone app that goes with the service so I could get the reminders on my phone, but you can get them on your email, or texts, or you just use a firefox plug in to keep your todo list on your sidebar. What is really good about this system is that it is dynamic. You can add or take away tasks as you need to. If you want to work on just mastering the basics, you can put your few daily and weekly tasks in, and not worry about the bigger things. If you want to break up your house into different zones, you can. If you want things on a different frequency, you can. If you need to keep track of birthdays and holidays so you can remember to get gifts you can add that in here. If you need to remind yourself to pay your property taxes. Put that in here too. And you can set it up so that it reminds to do something only after you mark it completed. So if you don’t get around to doing one of your daily tasks, you don’t end up with 2 identical tasks.

Basically, it is like a personalized Flylady reminder system and an electronic notebook. And it integrates with google calendar and gmail. So in short, I think it’s awesome. And here’s mine.

FO #1 Another set of Ichthys Socks, this time in Brown Sheep and the large size. Hopefully these fit my step-mom. If you make a pair, please put them up on Ravelry, I would like to see them in some different yarns, but I can only knit so many.

FO#2 Whirlabag. This is my friend Yelley’s pattern Windmill Bag. I did not have an awesome 4 part spinning ninja windmill at any point in the knitting, because I picked up stitches to avoid seaming. Well I had one seam, which I could have also picked up stitches to avoid, but I didn’t think of that until later. If I make another one, I will do it completely seamless.  But this is a fun pattern and everyone should make it. It is also on Ravelry.

Let’s see how long this can last!

Last year my mom signed me up for Operation Beanie, and I knit 10 beanies in one month for soldiers. This year my aunt said she wanted to knit scarves. So I’m going to send scarves to Handmade Especially for You. They collect hand knit scarves for women in domestic violence shelters.

My goal is to send 10 by Halloween!

Suggested Yarn: Knit Picks Felici – Martinique, or another self striping yarn

Needles: US Size 1

Gauge: 7 st to 1″

Yardage: 215-300 yds. 215 yds for size small anklets (pictured)

Sizes: Small – Approximate circumference 9 inches, Large – Approximate circumference 10 inches

Pattern: Ichthys

Saturday morning I was trying to sleep in, and Echo the doggy was wanting to either play or go for a walk.  I was trying to enjoy some Theta time (a brain state which results in brilliant ideas), but she was not having any of it and so I got up and both walked and played with her. I did manage to have one idea, and this post is to bring you the result.

Backing up a bit, I did not get to go to the Sock Summit this year because I did not have $500 laying around when it was time to go. I suppose I could have squished the budget to make $500 appear, but I with having just gone to Seattle with my mom in July, and already having bought my tickets to go to Minneapolis in October, it was probably better that I did not squeeze on the budget any more.

So I stalked the festivities on Twitter, knit socks, ogled the special SSO9 yarns on Ravelry, and then I used my one good Theta time idea to dye some yarn.

I woke up on Saturday in the mood to dye yarn, but no in the mood to walk to the corner store and buy a gallon of white vinegar. And besides that I didn’t really want the whole house to smell like hot yarn and vinegar, and I didn’t want the finished yarn to have that  residual vinegar smell. And I didn’t have any Kool-Aid and I didn’t really want to Kool-Aid dye anyway because then the yarn has a weird melted popsicle smell. Then my Theta brain kicked in, and I remembered that I had a small container of citric acid crystals in the cabinet. w00t!

I’ve only dyed yarn a few times, but this was the best yarn dyeing I’ve done. The dye exhausted extremely quickly and they yarn held the color very well. I even remembered to write down the dye formulas. I used 3 different heat setting methods. I did 2 in the crock pot, 1 in a steam pot, and 1 in the microwave. I haven’t thought of names for the colors yet, but I am really pleased with how they came out.