Hold on to your butts . . . actual knitting photos!

I know I still have a few more vacation photos to catch up on, but since this is theoretically supposed to be a knitting-related blog, I figured it would behoove me to share pictures of some of the things I've been working on lately. If you're looking for them on the OysterGirl store, you're going to have to keep looking until September--I'm not posting any new items until then.

So now I bring you . . . Baby Hat Bonanza! Alternate title: A Festival of Teeny Tiny Head Afghans.



I think this is my favorite one of the whole batch. I've always been a sucker for rainbows.


These ones are also baby-sized:


And this batch is sized for kids:





Lastly, I did a design for some little stocking-shaped gift card holders. Any thoughts for decorative motifs to put on them?


In other news, my garden is starting to produce produce! It's so exciting. Here are some pictures of it I took this afternoon. As you can see, the squash plants are pretty much taking over.


This is the little "Jenny Lind" melon patch.


This looks like it's attached to one of the plants that was supposed to be yellow cucumbers, but it sure looks like the start of a zucchini to me . . . albeit a really round one?


I have about three carrots coming up, but as you can see, they are in the shadow of the gargantuan squash plants! Next year, the squash and melons will be off in mounds of their own, away from the rest of the garden.


The row of beets, similarly squash-shaded.

Flat-leaf parsley!


Edamame!


More, blurrier edamame!

Pretty melon blossoms.

One more eensy squashy thing-in-progress.


I swear this picture looked like it was in focus in the little camera window. Shootface. It is my first purple stringbean! Whoo-hoo!

This beet was not very big, but it was mostly pushed up out of the soil, and hence not likely to grow much bigger. It was delicious!


I picked a little parsley and arugula, which I used along with some of the beet greens in a salad for my dinner this evening. Fantastic!


I was extremely excited to actually be able to eat from the garden today, and am hoping for much more of the same in the coming weeks. Yay!

Wow, do they ever work wonders

Okay, so the children's museum. It's in Bend, and it's called Working Wonders. And it's SO cool! There are costumes, and different rooms set up with make-believe. This is the grocery store.


This is you-know-who dressed up as a you-know-what. Actually, now that I think about it I'm not really sure what . . . but something fancy.


One of the rooms was a veterinarian's office, and when we went in there, Zoë went right up to the dry-erase board and wrote this:


Apparently office hours were open! There were all different "pets" to choose from, and real veterinary equipment. Including those cone things to keep puppies and kitties from pulling out their stitches.

A very fancy climbing wall--I'm mostly used to seeing ones that just have differently shaped lumps for holds, but as you can see, this one actually had representative shapes, rather than just abstract
.

We were there with Kristen's friend Nicole and her two boys. Upon arrival, Sully made a beeline for the firefighter's costume and wore it the entire time we were there. He is also clearly a veteran of the climbing wall, as he scuttled up in no time at all.


Checkin' out. I love those aprons.


As the days went by in Sunriver, the weather turned from record highs back to more seasonable temps, or even below normal. One day Z wore the Elmo sweater that I made for her SECOND birthday, three years ago. And it still fits! Whoo-hoo!


Since Z and I were sharing a bed, I needed to wait until she was fully asleep before retiring myself for the evening. On more than one occasion, I needed to move her out of the way in order to have adequate space on which to lie. I snapped this picture to be able to tease her with when she is grown.


Z picked a dandelion one afternoon and brought it in to put in water. Although it reopened only a bit, it did go to seed over the following week or so, metamorphosing from all yellow to all-white. We were quite impressed, and concluded that such a tenacious flower deserved the opportunity to continue its determined cycle of reproduction.


We went for fancy lunch at Thai restaurant Typhoon one afternoon. It was delish! Kristen is really good at napkin folding.

Woo vacation pictures woo. There are a few more from my last couple days in Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR. Stay tuned . . . I may just get caught up some time this week . . .

Enough is enough is enough

I must go on/I must go on/Yes yes yes

Hey there, OysterGirl blog readers! Bet you despaired of ever hearing from me again. Hopefully in my absence, you have been availing yourself of the Good Word of the Day over at MissLynn.com--not to toot my own horn, but there have been some doozies already, and the feature is only two weeks old! Which reminds me that I need to archive last week's words after I'm done here.

Well, clearly I fell hard off the blog wagon while on vacation. I blame lack of sleep and general laziness. But now I am (more or less) back into the regular swing of things here at home, and it's time to get back on that wagon and see where it takes me.

Since I got back from Oregon, I've started my summer babysitting job on Tuesdays and Thursday, and in between Dave and I have been working on finishing up the Miss Lynn record.

In other news, the garden is growin' away . . . I came home to sizable plants of string beans, edamame, winter squash, zucchini, cukes, melons, and a big line of beets. It seems that somebody got at the arugula and carrots, 'cause the promising sprouts I left developed into only a few plants by the time I returned.

I do need to catch up on vacation pictures, so here follows the long-promised photographic evidence of my VIP tour at Bend's Deschutes Brewery!

When we first arrived, there was a tanker truck out front, pumping its contents into the building. Apparently this was a grain delivery in process. I will admit that I hadn't given the process a lot of previous thought, yet somehow this was not how I imagined the grain got into the brewery.


Big ol' bucket o' hops! Waiting to go into the cookin' pot.

Part of the creation of the wort (i.e. the malty stew of ingredients that later ferments into beer) is the careful addition of certain components at various points in the process. These are pre-measured ingredients awaiting their respective turns to go in the brew.

The Deschutes Hop Room. Boy, is it ever odoriferous (a.k.a. stinky)! As you can see, those bales of whole hops are bigger than Kristen.



And this is what the whole, dried hops look like up close! I tried one--I don't think they're likely to replace Fritos as a viable snack food any time soon.


INSIDE one of the kettles, where the hops are about to be mixed into the wort.


And the inside of an empty kettle. Seams in the metal would be hard to clean and would promote bacterial or fungal contamination, so these giant stainless vessels were forged as whole pieces and shipped from Germany to Bend. Making delicious beer is a laborious and serious process for the people at Deschutes!


Two of the German kettles as viewed from above.


They also take quality very seriously, so they are constantly testing the different beers for taste, smell, and appearance. This is the room where the panel members do the testing.


Being a former librarian, I recognized right away that this was the beer library. Just kidding. But it really is! Deschutes retains one case of every batch of each beer brewed for reference, in case any issues should arise in the future. I think this is extremely cool, although I think they should change the name to either A) beer-brary, or B) li-beery. (Feel free to voice your personal preference in the comments section below.)


Throughout the entire tour, I was struck by how similar the process Deschutes follows is to that of a homebrewer--the only real difference is scale. Homebrewers use an airlock during fermentation to allow gas to escape during fermentation without allowing outside air into the closed system. Below is the larger scale version of this concept: a hose in a Rubbermaid bucket. Fancy.


Once the beer is all beer-y, it's time to put it in bottles! This is the part of the tour that reminded me of the opening sequence of Laverne and Shirley.



The bottle-washer--you really have to see this in motion to appreciate it, a still(-ish) photo doesn't do it any justice.


That was it for my day at the brewery! It was great, and I sure did feel like a VIP.

Coming soon (and only a month late): our afternoon at the children's museum!

Lameness, thy name is OysterGirl

Sorry, peeps--I really thought I would have posted something new by now. But sadly, not. I still have lots of swell pictures to share from Oregon, but I'm just not feeling that motivated. Maybe some time this week? I can't make any promises.

In gardening news, things are bustin' up out of the ground! I have LOTS of bean and squash plants (winter and summer), a ton of beets (that will have to be thinned out), a few carrots and a little arugula. I think the bunnies or some other critters got the rest of the carrots and lettuce while I was out of town. There are a few sprigs of parsley, as well, but I don't think the basil took at all (I had been warned that it might not). The Jenny Lind melons also seem to be growing nicely so far. I'll take some pictures after I've caught up on the ones from my vacation.

If you're just itching for some new OysterGirl content--well, first make sure you don't have a bug bites or hives. If it's neither of those things, you could always head over to misslynn.com and check out the new stuff I put over there! Here's a hint: You may want to grab your crayons . . .

Thanks for checking in despite my laziness and I hope to relieve your disappointment soon. 'Til then, happy new week!