This week there is more talk of vegetables and knitting.

The Non-Knitting (aka The Veggies)

There is just nothing like fresh tomatoes for salads and sauce. Every year when I plant my garden, I over-plant tomatoes. And I plant them too close together. It becomes a jungle and an overwhelming harvesting task.

This year I think I struck the right balance of plants (5) and distance apart (not too close).

Shortly after planting:

Today (in the rain):

This probably doesn’t tell you too much. But normally I’d be struggling to find tomatoes in the middle of the plants. (By the way, I mentioned the pickle planting in my last post… they are on the left, in the front. Again, a story for another day. Maybe next post.)

So, here is the second haul from my 5 plants:

Oh yeah, toward the back of the garden there are also two grape-like tomato plants, hence the tiny ones in this picture.

I am now up to 2 1/2 gallons of tomato puree. Lots of chili and sauce in our future. The little tomatoes are great for salads. We are getting a little overwhelmed with those too, so I’m thinking of slow-roasting them to get them a little dried out and putting them in olive oil to make them last.

The Knitting

My pandemic knitting show and tell continues today….

This is my Odyssey shawl by Joji Locatelli:

Somewhere near the beginning of stay-at-home rules, I joined the Malabrigo Dos Tierras Knit-a-Long. I bought the Dos Tierras yarn from my LYS The Spinning Room to help support them while they were closed (they have been GREAT with phone ordering and contactless pickup and now they have a great, safe system for in-store shopping).

It was a fun project and I loved the yarn.

Next up is my Breathe and Hope shawl by Casapinka:

This was also a knit-a-long that Casapinka organized to help local yarn shops. If you bought two skeins of fingering weight yarn from your LYS, you would get this pattern for free. So, I called The Spinning Room again and got my two skeins. They even put some colors together online to help with picking a pair. I ended up with Plymouth Happy Feet Splash (the lighter color) and Periwinkle Sheep Watercolors in The Disruptor colorway (the BRIGHT pink). Love that color name. 🙂

Fun and easy pattern (just as Casapinka wanted) for pandemic knitting.

Behind the Scenes

So I’ve got that great dress form to model my knits so I can take pictures of them. I got it at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Brimfield, Mass several years ago. It is from 1960-something.

Want to see what it looks like when it’s not modeling?

It’s the hold-all-the-shawls-that-I-make-but-don’t-wear holder.

Side note: Another casualty of the pandemic for this year is the cancelling of Brimfield. It’s usually held in May, July, and September and some years we have gone all three times. We love it and always find something great. Paul restores old step stool and pedal cars, I find purple bottles (see above tomato pic with them on the windowsill). A somewhat new favorite vendor, discovered by our friend, Tyler, is “The T-Shirt Guy” (our name, not the t-shirt guy’s) where you can buy these great (somewhat irregular), comfy t-shirts for a dollar. A DOLLAR! Last time we went, we got ten. (Tyler got twenty.)

Last up is the progress on my nephew’s college blanket. Just for a refresher, here is last week’s picture:

And here is this week’s progress:

That’s the last progress picture I’m going to show before it is done. There is nothing more boring in a blog than seeing a huge project inch along! But I’m really hoping to be done soon.

Next post, you’ll get to read about my pickle planting story and maybe some zucchini news. And hopefully by then I’ll have more knitting to show you. With all this not-going-out-much stuff, I’ll try to come up with something more interesting to show you aside from vegetables (there will ALWAYS be knitting).