Big News!

So, it's been a while.  Wow has life gotten busy!  This past weekend was the Virginia Beach Lindy Exchange, and event I have helped run for a couple years before this and did a lot of the organizing myself this year.  We started out with a decent sized group doing the planning, but as things got busy for everyone with work/school/life most people had to pull back from helping much.  It ended up going relatively smoothly though, partly from being a slow year.  Here's a few pictures for ya!

Dancing on the battleship Wisconsin- always a highlight of the weekend, and we had a great breeze this year!

Some people doing the Shim Sham

Dolphins at the beach!  We were dancing on the beach, a storm rolled past to the north so we had to move to the grass for a while, and then when we went back to the beach there were Dolohins... everywhere.

So, in addition to planning this event, life itself has gotten a little crazy!   My husband is getting to that time where in a few months he will be transferring to a new command, and his time period to negotiate for orders began in June.  We had been planning, if possible, to stay put.  I love it here, thus why I moved here, plus I have a job and it would let us avoid having to move.  We like where we live right now.  With so many Navy installations in the area, we could be fairly confident there would be a possibility to stay put. 
And there was!  But we chose not to put in for it.  Long story short-

 WE ARE MOVING TO HAWAII!

We don't have the official orders yet, but word from the detailing system is that he was chosen for the orders to Pearl Harbor.  Not yet sure when we are moving, should be 6 months give or take a month or two.  As excited as I am, I am also scared as I'm not so great at dealing with change.  I want to move like, tomorrow, to get it over with.  Even writing about the move I start getting tears in my eyes, cause I LOVE this place, and it's going to be a huge change.  I know I will love Hawaii!  But seriously, huge huge change being so far away from family.  So now we are working on the long, expensive process to be able to move our cats onto the island.  We should have a lot of the expences out of the way in the next month, a huge chunk of which is Splenda finally getting spayed.  That part isn't necessarily required for the move, but it's needed to happen so now it will be happening in addition to all the vaccinations and blood tests and checkups.  We already got Splenda her first vet visit, she got her first round of shots amongst other things making a visit of over $200.  OUCH.  Tomorrow the other 3 go in for their first round of shots plus 2 of them are getting their microships... not looking forward to how much THAT one is going to cost.  Seriously.

So that is my big news about our big move!  I may or may not blog about the whole process.  We will see.

~Katy

Blanket Update and a Project For the Shop

Well, I promised that I would upload some pictures of the blanket soon and this post will not disappoint!  I've also added some pictures of some fingerless gloves I am working on for the shop.  I feel bad that I have only been working on things for personal projects basically all year so far!  But first up, here's some shots of the squares for the blanket with all the colors! 

First up!  The whole lot of them in the bag I keep them in.  Don't they look all pretty?

And here they are keeping my legs toasty warm ;)

And laid out, one of each.

And a couple pictures of what will be fingerless gloves.  The second picture captures the color much better, and it's such a gorgeous color!  I can't wait for these to be done, though, it's hard to get good pictures to list them without my camera.

And that is all for tonight!  It is a pain in the butt making a post out of a slew of pictures from my phone.  Blogger likes to mess up the formatting and jump the photos around. What a pain!  But anyways back to watching Dexter then some much needed sleep!  I hope you've enjoyed the update- oh!  And speaking of updates!  Nails are STILL looking great...just two super tiny chips at the tips of my thumbs.  Not bad!  I think this polish will stay until my nails grow to the point where they look weird. Very nice.

~Katy

Nail Obsession

Hello my loyal readers!  If I have any of you left.  Sorry I have been missing... life has been busy! So it has taken something to really impress me to make me write tonight. 

A little background information.  A couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to start painting my nails for the duration of the summer, so I bought (well, I selected and my mother bought) a selection of nail polishes.  Now here it is 2 years later and I am still painting my nails regularly, and I have been slowly amassing a collection of colors... when I can convince my husband to spoil me LOL.  He thinks I have too much to begin with.  

Even though I love new colors for my nails, I have not strayed from the top coat that was recommended to me when I bought that first batch of polishes 2 years ago- Seche Vite.  It's a great top coat, dries super fast, and was the first thing I found that would allow me to keep my nails from chipping within 24 hours.  Even in days past when I would get french manicures, I'd often get chips very quickly.  I only had one place where the nail polish would stay put for any respectable length of time.  Seche Vite fixed that.  I'm sure the base coat helps, too, but I've used 3 different base coats and not had one yet that really stands out... maybe because it's not as relevant with such a good top coat.

Lately, though, I've been wanting to see if I could find a top coat I like as much that maybe costs a little less. I got a bottle of Essie, No Chips Ahead trying to save a couple dollars, and quickly regretted it after reading reviews and finding out for myself that the stuff just. doesn't. dry.  So before trying anything else I took to the internet and found some good reviews for NYC In a Minute and decided to go and look for either that, or the Seche Restore to get the consistency of my old Seche Vite bottles back to where they should be.  What I found was AWESOME!!!

I've wanted to try out a Matte top coat since I noticed a couple of my nail polish colors are matte.  Why put shiny top coat on and ruin the effect?  But I can't go without top coat or my nails will chip.  Overnight.  In bed.  Within hours.  While looking for the NYC In a Minue top coat I found there is a MATTE version!  So I went ahead and gor both.  Now for less than $2 for the bottle, I figured I could justify trying this one out for myself just to see.  I have not been anything but impressed.  

I painted my nails Saturday before going to a wine tasting.  They had some bubbles from the base coat I used so when I got home I redid one hand and redid the next the next day.  Now it's Wednesday night after a half a week of the usual things AND some less than usual things like peeling tangerines (yum!)

Not a single chip.  This stuff is amazing.   Seriously, I am impressed.  Now, I did have to re-do more nails (even after I fixed the bubbles problme) just because I am not used to top coat that doesn't dry nearly instantly, but that will be a matter of getting used to it.  It is looking more satin as the days go one, but so what?  I can't wait to try the non matte version, but I'm having trouble inamiging this polish chipping any time soon for me to want to take this off and put on a new color.  I don't re-do my nails just to change the color, I do it because the color is chipping (or peeling.)

For anyone who may be wondering how my big project is going, that blanket of granny squares, I am up to 64 squares and we have added 4 new colors so it is 10 colors now!  Sadly, I have lost my camera so it is hard to me to get good pictures but I will try soon!  I am sure I will hate the end, where I have to stitch 210 squares together, but for now it's nice being able to toss a hank of yarn in my bag and work on a square when I am stuck in stand still traffic or waiting for my mouth to go numb at the dentist.  But I will have to get pictures of the squares soon, including the new yarn colors!

~Katy

More Projects

Well, I was itching to get the second blanket started after I finished the first one.  The only thing that was stopping me was a lack of appropriate yarn.  My husband wanted something less thick than I used on the last blanket, and one of the local yarn shops was having a sale on Superbowl Sunday.  So, I went in to see what they had and found this!  It is Cascade Yarns, 220 Superwash Sport.  It's a sport weight, 100% wool yarn that can be machine washed and dried.  That was a requirement as well, MUST be able to be tossed in the dryer.

I chose 6 colors, a pink, a purple, a mint green, a coral shade of orange, an ivory, and a turquoise.  I started off with 2 hanks of each, though at some point I will have to get many more.  This is one of the times that I really appreciate my husband, I brought the yarn home and he liked the colors as well.  Also, we had also both agreed on what granny square we liked better when I had made some just to try (which was when he decided I should make another blanket LOL.)   

I am super excited to be making progress on this one!  I've now also made 3 squares of purple.  After I made the first square and settled on how many rounds to make it, I figured out how many squares I will need to make for it to fit on our bed, after I add a border to it.  The grand total will be 210 squares.  WOW.  The yarn I have for it currently will make 48 squares total.  I will definitely be getting more yarn, but that will have to wait. Thankfully with a granny square design, I personally don't find matching dye lots to be too important. I may stick with just these 6 colors, or I may add more.  Not sure yet!  But for now, I am just working away on the yarn I have.  Each time I finish a square I count down how many are left, right now it's at 15 down, 195 to go!  That's a little overwhelming but considering I got the yarn less than a week ago, it's not so bad.

But, enough about the blanket (for now!) I have another project to share!  Today, we had a fun little incident where a bird managed to fall into our fireplace.  Eric managed to get it out, and let it out so it could fly away and on with its life.  But I took that opportunity to check our chimney flue.  I suspected it was open for a while now but was too lazy to check (bad me!) and of course if a bird got into the fireplace, the flue must have been open.  Turns out, the flue is stuck so it will only actually close half way.  After a brief google search I decided trying to fix the flue was too complicated.  Trying to insulate the fireplace seemed a much better idea!  And a couple short hours later, here we are!

My original intent was to use an adhesive backed magnet strip around the edges to secure it.  I went off to Hancock Fabrics to get everything I would need, not sure whether or not they had the strip magnet or not.  I didn't see it there, and, well, I'm not a fan of just asking.  So I devised an alternate plan!  Since our fireplace bricks come out passed the fireplace opening, I chose to use tension rods.  And lucky me, they were on sale!  I ended up using 2 tension rods (one on top, one on bottom) as well as some blue fleece (color chosen by Eric.  It worked out well!) and lined with Insul-Bright.  I brought out my sewing machine for the first time in YEARS... not sure really whether it would quite work or not.  It was handed down to me by my mom who had it for goodness knows how long.  Welp, I set it up and like many things made YEARS ago... it worked just like the first time I sewed with it when I was little.  It ended up being a super quick and super inexpensive project- the rods and the fleece both being on sale made it total to less than $30.  Not bad!  I wish I had thought of this ages ago.  I don't feel a draft in the living room anymore and who KNOWS how much this could have saved on our electric bill when it was colder out.  But hey, it'll help now!

One last project, that's not even so much a project, is this little thing I was playing around with.  It's just a different crochet stitch, which I found via Pinterest.  It's a linen stitch, or woven stitch.  I tried it out with some yarn I got from a friend of mine, and I am loving how it looks!  It's only a little swatch... I haven't yet decided what kind of project I can make with it, and goodness knows I have my work cut out for me with the blanket!

If you want to try out the woven stitch yourself here is where I found the instructions for doing it.

I look forward to updating everyone with the progress on the granny square blanket!  And hopefully finding my camera to add some better pictures!

~Katy

Ten Pounds Down!

 Some of you may remember I posted back in September about needing to lose a few pounds.  Well, I have been counting (or estimating) calories since then and with the exception of a month around the holidays have been pretty steadily, if slowly, taking it off.  I've now lost 10 pounds!  Taking me from 156 in the last post to 146 now!  Here are my new pictures, and the old ones to compare them to.

 

Before 

 After