Fireworks, family, and fingerless mittens

I hope all the Americans out there had a happy, safe Fourth.  No chair cushions were burnt on my deck this year – something I couldn’t say last year – so ours was declared a success.

Some of the Christensen-Wiessman-Harrold-Krumms

My mom and my sister with her two oldest kids came over for a barbecue.  Inbetween the hot dogs and hamburgers we played a loud and occasional violent game of beanbag bowling.

It started small and calm with grandma and my boys on the deck.  Then grandma started cheating, someone decided that we should throw from the deck to the lawn below, nerf guns got involved, and pretty soon small children were trying to retrieve beanbags from the roof.  It is all fun until someone is kicked in the head.

Luckily, cake and fireworks put an end to the game before anyone was irrevocably injured. It is a sad fact that the fireworks at our house were safer than the beanbag game.

And of course, there was knitting.  I put a few more rows on the blooming shawl, but also managed a long overdue finish.

In 2012 I started knitting a pair of socks during a school testing period where I had to be in the library with the students but had nothing to do all day every day but sit quietly while they worked.  When the testing was done, I put the single almost finished sock away and forgot about it. A long while – years – later, I pulled it out and took it along as my camping trip project.  But with the first sock finally done, I didn’t like the fit and ripped back to turn it into a fingerless mitt.  Then it and its mate languished again, just needing thumbs, until I dug them out yesterday and took the 20 minutes they needed to be finished.

Except I still didn’t like them.  The yarn doesn’t appeal and the pooling on the finger portion really bugged me.  So, while the beanbag/nerf war raged, I left them to soak in a dye pot.  I added more navy dye than I intended, so now they are a mainly solid color, still drying out.  But they are, four+ years later, finally done.

Or they were, until I discovered this:

Apparently a moth got to them before I did.  So they will be starting out their new life as Mom’s early morning pickleball gloves with a darn in them.  An unloved project from its earliest days.  But at least I can cross them off the WIP list!