Hunter Hammersen called for more test knitters and I jumped at the chance. This time, she needed a sock knit. The one I was assigned required thicker yarn, so I started with some 100% wool Hacho (Mirasol) that I bought a couple of years ago at Hill Country Weaver’s annual yard sale. Meghan expressed some doubts that the pattern would look good in this yarn, but I’ve been trying really hard to knit from my stash lately, so Friday night while TH was bowling, I gave it a whirl.

I honestly cannot decide if I like this or not, but I wasn’t in the mood to do mediocre knitting, so I headed off to Gauge in search of the PERFECT yarn.

While at Gauge, I found some lovely green malibrigo and MadelineTosh DK Silver Fox that would work. Green or gray? hmmm.

• These socks are for a guy, so I asked the random husband that happened to be in Gauge which he preferred (the gray) and had a quick conversation with his wife about how great knittinghelp.com is.
• I have some green malibrigo fingering weight in my stash and I’ve been wanting to try some Madeline Tosh.
• After seeing the gray/blue sock on Hunter’s blog, I’d already named this pattern Earl Grey Socks in my head.

Only problem was that they only had one hank. Carli was nice enough to let me know she actually had some leftover from one of her projects in the back that she could part with if I ended up needing more…the universe votes grey!

I will need 20g more and Monday, she made me a deal on 30g…. Thanks, Carli!!!

Ps. More on this pattern later, but I really enjoyed it!

I bought two pumpkins to carve. Turned out the first took a little more blood, sweat and time than I was planning, so I decided to paint the second one. There were grand plans for stencilling green shimmery leaves all over this pumpkin and how it was going to look magical. Lisa said, “I don’t have good luck painting stencils on round surfaces; you should pencil in all the leaves and go back and paint.” I scoffed at that, mostly because there was no way I was contributing that much time to my second pumpkin project this fall.
So, early Saturday morning, I got up and began to paint the first leaf with the stencil. Saying it looked a hot mess would be putting it mildly. It was unrecognizable as a leaf. Super. The nice thing about being wrong more than I care to admit….oh wait, I blog about it a lot…..is that I’m really good at recovery and coming up with a plan b. I had a pumpkin and some shimmery green paint…..hmmm.
I decided to stripe it. Overall, the number of sections worked out perfectly. I only had to do two coats and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. When asked for comment, TH said, “It looks like a gourd.” with a shrug. Behold – my second decorated pumpkin!

Ps. I enjoyed the most recent Harold and Kumar movie and I catnapped during the Rum Diary. If Johnny Depp can’t keep me awake, I cannot think I missed much.

This year, I dressed up as Saffron from the British Comedy, Absolutely Fabulous. Two of my work friends joined me as Patsy and Edina. By the end of the day, we’d decided that we were each a bit like our characters, since 99% of our costumes came out of our closets, but the characters took our personality traits to extremes. So, without further ado, may I present the cast of Absolutely Fabulous!

We would have been without a photographer, but luckily a Green Lantern swung by to take our picture.

You can tell she’s a real one because her ring glows.

I got some amazing feedback from folks:

• The manager whose office I sit outside said, “You look cute! Now, are you dressed up?” Methinks I need to re-evaluate my work wardrobe.
• One guy from the office actually recognized us without being given a hint, “AB FAB!”
• Another one asked if I was Amy Farrah Fowler off of Big Bang Theory and I had to concede that perhaps this year I’d stumbled on a double costume!
• I swung by the HeB (grocery store) on my way home. A couple of teenage guys approached me and the first one said, “Nice costume!”. I replied, “Thank you” and smiled. The second and less quick-witted one followed this up with, “Is that a costume?” I just continued smiling, nodded, and kept walking.
• A four or five year old little boy in the store gave me a, “Cool!”….he was evidently sure it was a costume.

Overall, another fun Halloween! Thanks for the great costume idea, Edina! And points for great execution to Patsy!

Ps. I almost forgot, when TH saw me, he said, “are you allowed to wear a skirt to work?”. He cracks me up. But, I do love some pants/jeans. Thank you, Katherine Hepburn!