WIP Wednesday #6: Progress!

Hello! It's been almost two weeks since my last post (what?!), but I'm finally back to tell you just a little of what's been going on around here. This post is all about progress, so first let me show you how the little raised bed garden is doing.

Remember this? This is how the little garden looked when we first put the wee tomato, chard, carrot, pumpkin, watermelon, and marigold seedlings in.

And this is just a couple of weeks ago. It's even more filled in now and we have since harvested the chard twice to make this...

I had never eaten chard before, let alone grown any, so I had to look around for a good recipe. Pinterest came to the rescue and led me to Smitten Kitchen's Chard and White Bean Stew recipe. We left off the poached egg and cheese, but in the first batch we did place a slice of toasted rustic bread in the bottom of the bowl, as suggested, and it was mighty good. This time we wanted to keep it lean, so no bread and I added some kale, which made this batch extra green. It was perfect. Made this way, it is a completely veg meal. I also cooked the white beans from dried in the crock pot all day. That means I have some beans left for Cilantro Lime White Bean Hummus. Yum.

And of course I've been knitting.

This is my Fundamental Women's Top-Down Cardi now in test and yet to be edited by Tracey, and you see I have started the first sleeve. This is working up pretty fast in this Schaefer Sandra in Florence Nightingale, but the cotton fiber makes my hands a little sore, so there are no marathon knitting sessions going on with this, folks.

I am also working slowly on a learning piece from Kristina McGowan's Modern Top-Down Knitting. It incorporates short-row shaping on the shoulders and the sleeve caps, so I am learning how to do this by making this sweet little dress (which I intend to make into just a hip-length top). The sample you see here is done with Louet Gems Sport in Navy. I am going to need to rip both the sleeve and the neckline edging. I picked up too many stitches on both...stubborn I am.

This brings me to the real reason for all the blog silence: this bunch of lace taking a bath.  A little over a week ago I decided to buckle down, put away all my other projects, and work solely on a shawlette I designed for Ravenwood Cashmere. Delia has been sweetly and politely asking me to design a shawlette for her yarn for about a year now and even sent me 800 yards of her lace weight to do it...kind of a while ago. It was high time to get busy on this. Because I know that Delia has done quite a lot of genealogy research into her Graham family line, I asked her about some family history so I could make the shawlette a meaningful one for her. Boy, did she come forth with an interesting story! I can't wait to tell you all about it when we release this shawlette pattern in about a month.

I am happy to say that the pattern is all written, my shawlette sample is finished and blocked, and Sue the magnificent is now testing the pattern with her own batch of Ravenwood lace weight yarn. Life is good.

And speaking of that, I am in the process of writing up a series of posts about some healthy changes we've been making over the past year. I'll bet some of you have made some changes, too. I hope you will chime in along with me and tell us about it.

Until then, happy Wednesday!