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The wonderful thing about having a laptop is that I can do my Sunday afternoon blogging while I do my Sunday afternoon cooking.

I’m trying to get better at preparing meals on the weekend so that we can eat easily and healthfully during the week. Until October, I hadn’t worked a full-time job in two years. I knew I had it easy only working 3/4 time, getting off 2 hours earlier than everyone else, but it really hits home how much extra time that is when you don’t have those two hours free anymore–and you arrive home starving. Throw a few pregnancy-related food aversions and some morning sickness in there and you can see how we started eating sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Now, I have nothing against a good sandwich. I could list off three or four that I could eat for the rest of my life and be happy (even if my gut isn’t). Bread is the best delivery system for deliciousness I know. Cheese. Butter. Bacon. Turkey. Mayo. It’s all glorious on a sandwich, but I have this problem with bread. It just doesn’t like me. Even gluten free bread (which is all I’ve eaten for the past two years, when I’ve eaten it.) Gives me trouble if I eat more than two or three slices a week. I’ve always had trouble with yeast. I can’t digest it and I can’t fight it off, even with an arsenal of probiotics on my side (kombucha, sauerkraut, yogurt, pills) I can’t combat the indigestion it causes me unless I just plain don’t eat it. It’s helpful when I avoid sugar as well, but I’ve doing a pretty crap job of avoiding that lately. Thanks, Christams. But now that most of my pregnancy aversions are going away and the holiday season is just about over (just New Year’s and my birthday left!) I’m trying to rein in our food choices a little bit.

Today I’m boiling eggs so we have a fresh supply of deviled eggs everyday. One of the few pregnancy aversions still with me is eggs cooked anyway but deviled–but I still want them for breakfast every morning, if that makes sense. A giant butternut squash has been chopped, seasoned, and roasted, and mini burgers have been prepared, both for lunches.

One thing I keep seeing on pinterest are lunch bots, which are pretty much the coolest lunch box ever, but I’m not sure I can justify to myself spending $30 on one lunch box, even though I know it’s way more economical than sending a thousand ziplock bags in a paper sack. And when you’re not eating sandwiches for lunch, you tend to send a bunch of little things to make up for it. Perhaps for Christmas next year?

And for your patience, a little glimpse at the knitting I’ve done this week. Brock’s sweater grew by a few inches. Now that I’m learning the cable motifs, I’m hoping it goes just the tiniest bit faster.

Flarkin is going to tell you all about her Blackberry cardigan in the coming weeks. I can’t wait, since this cardigan has been in my favorites for quite awhile and the Junebug colorway makes me swoon! Our first back of giveaway winners is  here and our last batch of giveaway winners (with the grand prize winner) will be announced at 3:30p est, so check back! – Lauria

While my husband and co-workers call me Cris, you can find me on Ravelry as Flarkin.  That is my smiling face modeling the Amalthea cowl in the Moonshine pattern booklet.

I first encountered Moonshine while visiting the farm last winter.  Susan had some sample skeins leftover from the designing and test knitting phases of the Spring 2013 collection hidden in a closet in her office.  I instantly fell in love with the yarn’s soft fibers and natural sheen, and the vibrant, jewel-toned colorways of the collection really spoke to me.  I knew was the perfect yarn to make the Blackberry Cabled Cardigan, a pattern that has been sitting in my Ravelry queue since before I learned to knit.

While I admired pretty much every single one of the Moonshine colorways, Junebug stole my heart.  A deep teal green with heathered flecks in a lighter shade, Junebug has great depth and shine.

Now I am not normally much of a swatcher. I prefer to get straight to the knitting, but the fitted shape of this cardigan made obtaining an accurate size very necessary.    So, I knit a swatch AND blocked it.  (Yay me !)  As you can see, while Junebug is one of the darker colorways, the cables and texture of the cardigan still really pop, and the yarn glows in sunlight.

Now, Moonshine is a worsted weight yarn, and I stitched my swatch on size 8 (5.0 mm) needles.  However, the Blackberry Cabled Cardigan pattern was written for a DK weight yarn on size 7s (4.5mm).  While I was happy with the my gauge and the resulting fabric, after measuring my swatch, it was apparent I faced a significant sizing issue.  The pattern calls for a swatch done in the cable stitch (28 stitches and 32 rows) to measure 4 inches.  My swatch measured 5 inches, a full inch larger than the recommended gauge.

Rather than stitching on a smaller needle and compromising the gauge and the weight of the fabric, I opted to do some math.

To accommodate my measurements, normally I would have stitched the Large size (42 inch bust).  However, if I knit the Large size at my too-big gauge, I would have ended up with a too-big sweater.  (An extra inch every four inches would result in a sweater with a bust of a little over 52 inches.)  My solution is to knit a smaller size, relying on my too-big gauge to size the sweater up for me.

Because I am gaining an extra inch every four inches of stitching, I am knitting the Small size.  While this size would normally fit a 34 inch bust, at my gauge will add an extra 8-ish inches to the bust, resulting in a bust of approximately 42 inches.

Or so I hope.

Cris lives in bucolic western Kentucky with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of assorted four-legged creatures.  She spends her days as a librarian and her nights dreaming of a small plot of land where she could raise a few chickens.  She be found on Ravelry as Flarkin.

It’s been nearly six months since I’ve been able to write on here. Shortly after we moved in late July/early August, something went completely haywire with my blog and I couldn’t even log in. What with moving, and throwing a wedding, and finding out I was pregnant all within a couple of weeks of each other, I let it slide for awhile…a long while. I also had a really hard time living in someone else’s house. It was the worst case of inertia I have ever experienced. While I though of countless topics to write about, finding the motivation to even turn my compute on was difficult. I was very uncomfortable with all of my things packed away and living by somebody else’s rules coupled with the lethargy and nausea of early pregnancy, I was completely useless.

The good news is, we moved into our own HOUSE about a week ago, and my blog is working again. It’s almost like magic. (Magic and many hours on the phone with tech support.)

To celebrate, I snapped a few pictures of our new house in the couple of rooms that aren’t still overwhelmed with boxes.

Our first meal in our new home the day after we took possession two weeks ago. We ate gluten free muffins and lattes from the local roasterie, before moving in all of our boxes from storage into the house.

Last Saturday, we moved the furniture. I say we, but I mean my husband and my dad, and a bunch of my dad’s friends. I held doors open and directed people on where to go. At nearly 5 months pregnant, I am not supposed to lift much more than a bag of ice.

I have been hard at work. Here’s what the dinning room looks like after the furniture was added.

These are some of the tissue paper sunflowers we made for our wedding. I am adding them to glass jars all around the house.

This room, I just started putting together today.

A dedicated fiber room, all my very own in the sunroom upstairs.

Look at all that gorgeous natural light!

I’m hoping to get back into production soon, but I’m not making any promises. My day job is entering a very busy time, the kind of busy where I’m afraid to commit to anything outside of it. That should start settling down right about the time the baby is due. I am committing to keeping the blog updated. I have a whole house to talk about and a yard that’s perfect for gardening, and hopefully some fibery stuff in there too.

After only a few months of neglect and too many hours of tech support. I think we might be back!