Vacation and Secret of the Stole progress

Isn't that pretty? I was lucky to get that shot on the morning that we were leaving for home. We slept in and missed the sunrise on all of the other days.

We decided to catch one last bit of warmth and picked a great week to do it. It was so warm on the beach and it really did feel like summer. We didn't do much besides play on the beach or in the pools. Well, we did go out to eat at a lot of yummy restaurants. E loves the beach and water. It was so hard to get a good picture of her because she was constantly in motion. She ran all over, dug in the sand, got buckets of water, collected shells, etc. It took a bit for D to get warmed up to the idea of all that water. At first, he was very content to just play in the sand. By the end of the first day, he was running everywhere with E.

I took a lot of knitting with me, but only finished one pair of socks for E. And that was done mostly on the car ride down there. It was nice to just relax. In the evenings, I just zoned out and watched tv. I really wanted to knit some lace, but didn't bring any along. When I got home, one of the first things I did was to get the next clues for the Secret of the Stole and the Secret of Chrysopolis. I worked one the Secret of the Stole first and finished clue #2.

It is a fast knit, but does require a lot of counting for those long stretches of knit stitches. You can see that it measures around 19.5 inches wide across the top. From the point to the needle cable, it measures around 21 inches long. I don't have a clue as to what the theme is, but the hints are interesting. It's fun reading what everyone else is guessing. It doesn't really go with the hints so far, but those things above the three vertical lines look like spiders to me. Hey, they have 8 legs. ;-)

I'm currently working on clue #3 for the Secret of Chrysopolis. I really like how these two stoles are so different in looks and design.

While on vacation, I picked up the Vogue Knitting's holiday issue. I love the stole in it. Yes, I know that I don't need another stole, but this one has beads in it too. I really like the beaded edges on the short ends. That one is definitely going on my must-knit list. I probably have enough yarn and beads around here to knit it too.

Coming home brought us back to reality. We really need water--again. It's been so dry this summer. The azaleas and rhododendrons look so sad and curled up. Even the dogwoods and smaller trees look wilted. We're trying to use as little water as possible. For now, we're still running off of our cistern. When that gets too low, we switch the whole house over to the wells. Our wells are usually reliable, but I almost ran one dry washing two loads of laundry in one day earlier this summer. For next summer, I want to have some kind of system that will use the grey water from our kitchen sink and our showers to water our plants and garden. We've tried washing dishes in a huge bowl/bucket and then dumping that water on a plant outside. It works, but it's a pain to do. We have all winter to brainstorm ideas.