This weekend was my second Pittsburgh-adjacent getaway for the year, going to Steel City Con. I enjoyed the experience and really appreciated having plenty of time to knit.

Stitched or Still-in-Progress

My biggest gain this week was definitely on my Camp Loopy project, the Tarry tee. I completed all of the body shaping called for in the pattern, and I added a bit of even rounds between the waits decreases and hip increases. Now I have a few dozen rounds to go before I start the hem. I really do enjoy working with this yarn; and there’s a good chance I’ll have a lot left over since I’m close to starting the third ball, and I’d be very surprised if I needed the fourth by the time I’m done.

I have now set up a spreadsheet to track my progress on the shawl. I passed the 50% mark over the weekend, and I’m ahead of schedule to complete the project by the end of the month. While I don’t have any reasons to finish the shawl this month, I am monitoring my projects so I can clear my needles before the start of the Down Cellar Studio Pigskin Party next month. I also need to decide on what yarn I’ll use for the lace design at the edge of this shawl. The pattern is designed for fingering weight yarn, so my yardage is short. Given the theme of retreats as the inspiration for the design, I’m using that to help me decide.

And my remaining active project is my latest pair of self-striping socks. Last week I had finished the first sock, so this week I worked on its mate, and I’m more than halfway to the gusset increases. I only worked on this sock on Saturday while first standing in line for my photo op and then during the Q&A sessions I attended. I’ll want to get through the heel before my next movie theater outing, and I’d like to finish this pair and possibly another before Summer Sock Camp hosted by The Crazy Sock Lady ends at the end of the month. That’s my only driver to finish the pair, but it’s a strong one!

Cast-on Conversations

No new projects this week, but I am doing a lot of thinking and planning for next month. The Pigskin Party is a nice long make-along, so I can plan some bigger projects. I’m also keeping in mind the Net Gain/Loss challenge to use more yarn than I bring in, hosted by the Knitters Brewing Group on Ravelry. While I’ve participated in the challenge for a number of years, I’ve never managed to even come close to a net loss… until this year! I’ve been significantly more intentional this year about acquiring yarn, only adding when I have a specific project and/or pattern in mind for it. Of course, buying yarn for a project usually results in leftovers, so it’s also essential that I’m working from stash as well.

My biggest project plans when the event kicks off are an Aran sweater (in black yarn! ), a scarf using the leftovers from last year’s Advent set, and a Romi Hill shawl using the LMFA yarns I bought at ZK. And you know there will be socks!

Fiber Fun

While I did manage to get 30 minutes of spinning in (I carted my e-spinner to Pennsylvania but never pulled it out), I forgot to take a progress photo. I’ll grab one before I start up again, if that happens this week. I also got a new batt of fiber for the collection. It was on sale, and in a new-to-me fiber, Rambouillet. This will also be a Pigskin Party project – ideally, I’ll spin and ply it, and then knit a project using it, to keep it net neutral, lol.

Book Banter

Having the car ride to Pittsburgh and a fair amount of driving or sitting around, I managed to finish the audiobook of The Phoenix Pencil Company, an interesting novel by Allison King. The story gave me some ideas for journaling, and the last few chapters I listened to before my last day at the convention. I also finished the Audible Original Get It Done by Gretchen Rubin, providing some great motivation to get back to my non-knitting projects!

Environment Evolution

I have progress to share, plus some disappointing news and a frustrating side note. First, progress! My son’s girlfriend put in several solid hours early in the week, then she did even more while I was away over the weekend. If you’re new here or you lost track of what was happening here, I rented a dumpster back in the fall, hauling out as much as I could from the “accessed” half of the basement, the side where the laundry equipment lives. But my body could only handle “so much,” and the area I didn’t finish needed some serious energy to clear. A lot of the stuff was stuck to the concrete floor, for instance. Anyway, here are the before and better photos for comparison:

Her daughter did a bit more work yesterday, but I haven’t been downstairs to see what she accomplished.

The disappointing news: there’s a strong possibility that my house is not viable for a solar array. I’ve asked for one more person to take a look, but I’m not getting my hopes up. The reason is that I have dormers that interrupt the slope of the roof on both sides, so there’s not enough flat surface to place an array. I’ll let you know if the second opinion changes things.

As for my frustrating side note, I’m currently writing this from a local work club because my house is one of the 33,000 or so that lost power today thanks to some brutal storms that blew across central Ohio. There’s evidence to suggest that a tornado touched down within the city, though it will take further investigation by the National Weather Service to confirm this. Regardless, there’s just so much debris all over town, and power lines were heavily affected.

Some people lost power overnight, but mine went out while I was working… in the middle of a call I was leading. Ugh. The whole situation was so unnerving, I just took a personal day. I’d attended a couple meetings in the morning, and I did some work before hopping on my personal laptop here. Tomorrow, though, I’ll need to get back to the grind. Power or not, I’ll make it work. Right now, I’m getting my devices charged up as well as my portable power banks.

I really hope the power company was being ultra-conservative when they said that it could take until noon on Friday for power to be restored!

Grandson Glimpses

I have some fun photos to share and a couple funny stories about the munchkin’s antics. One day last week while I was working, he wandered into my office with a bunch of random Lego pieces. Kiddo laid them out on the carpet in some sort of order. Then, he got up and walked out of the room into the living room. Next thing I hear is him calling out, “Fire in the hole!” Apparently, he was laying dynamite??? (I was told it’s something he picked up from some family’s YouTube channel. Um…

He has also taken to using my Google browser to “see what’s going on” with whatever topic he’s fixating on at the moment. Most often, that is ghosts. He’ll type random characters and then claim that he sees “what’s happening” on the screen. He has quite the imagination, so I’ll play along with whatever he’s thinking, lol.

We had one not-so-brutally hot day last week when I had some free time in the afternoon, so I took his bubble machine out to the front yard for a bit. He had fun chasing the bubbles, but he also fixated a bit on the ones that were blown way up high, so he missed the ones blowing right behind him. Still, he had lots of fun until the bubble solution ran out.

When I got home on Sunday after the convention, he was happy to join me on an outing to the car wash so I could get the bugs and gunk off my car. I was glad we got a few more lollipops for my car stash – I prefer to have a few on hand in case they’re out of them.

Travel Tales

Big, big doings here this week! It was a short trip, but I had some wonderful experiences. As usual, I used my photo ops as an opportunity to get finished object (FO) pictures of recent projects. It was a bit too hot for my bright red cardigan, so that will keep until December. I opted for the Recalibrate tee, a combo of my Monarch tank and the Sunshine on My Shoulders shawl, and during the weekend I added on another op, so I was glad I had my Herringbone Boomerang.

I drove out early on Friday morning to be sure I could get to my photo op with Rebecca nice and early. I wasn’t able to check into the motel yet, so I had to change clothes in the bathroom. Then, I managed a prime central seat for the Hangover panel: Justin Bartha, Rachael Harris and Ken Cheong. I haven’t seen that movie, but I’ve seen all three actors in other projects. They shared some wonderful stories, clearly enjoying their time together on stage. After they left, Virginia Madsen was introduced, and she was also wonderful.

It wasn’t until sometime on Saturday that I realized that the weekend was very women-focused for me. Every Q&A session I attended had a woman, and more than not, she was the only celebrity on stage. My second day started with another photo op: Karen Gillan, known for roles in Doctor Who, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Jumanji re-boot, along with plenty of other roles.

I had two more Q&A sessions to attend, featuring my first two photo op women. But Rebecca’s session was a tad unusual. Instead of the usual moderator, she was interviewed by her husband, Jerry O’Connell (Stand by Me, Sliders, and more) who also happened to be dressed as Mystique, the role his wife played in the original X-Men trilogy of movies – who will be returning in Avengers: Doomsday this Christmas.

Rebecca has also been part of another well-known franchise, as a regular in the cast of Star Trek: Brave New Worlds. The tidbits she shared, along with her husband, were fabulous. I could’ve sat and watched them together for hours, lol.

I was very eager for my last Q&A for the day with Karen Gillan. Originally, she was to share the stage with her Doctor Who co-star Arthur Darville, but Arthur was very delayed. He didn’t arrive at the convention center until Sunday morning, while Karen was supposed to be leaving right after the Q&A. She ended up changing her plans – so incredibly sweet! But because she had travel plans, our Q&A was very brief. Still, I loved hearing her share stories about her experiences with so many projects I’ve seen. (She mentioned the movie Duel, and I was the only person in the room to whoop for it. If you haven’t seen it, you may want to check it out – it’s an intriguing story.)

My plan for Sunday morning had been to attend Christopher Lambert’s Q&A session (Highlander). But after seeing the first panel on Friday, I added the photo op with Rachael. For one thing, my other pictures were with very tall women (both are 5’11”) and Ms. Harris is a diminutive 5’1”. 😆 But I also was hoping for another opportunity to connect, even if only briefly. Rachael is from a suburb of Columbus – my nieces graduated from the high school she attended. And I know several people who went to college with her in another local suburb.

As it turned out on Sunday morning, I was the last person in line for her photo op, at least for a few minutes. She was incredibly warm, greeting me and asking my name. I then began to name-drop the people I know who were in the same theater program she attended. Her eyes got huge and her jaw dropped. It was very amusing. We took the photo and had a couple more minutes to chat, which was very nice – usually it’s a rapid-fire parade of people, but Sunday is the chillest day of the convention, mostly since the biggest names have left.

I didn’t stick around after getting my photo, and I’m glad I hit the road right away. It turned out that Christopher Lambert had to cancel the Q&A session because he was still in the hospital. He had collapsed while signing autographs on Saturday – either due to low blood sugar or dehydration, or possibly both. I did hear that they were adding a session with the Burns twins (the twins from The Shining), but I was much more interested in getting home.

The parts of the event I participated in were very fun, and I spent a lot of down time sitting and knitting, either in the lounge area at the Q&A/photo op site, or my motel. The next Steel City Con event is in December, but it’s the same weekend as GalaxyCon Columbus. I’ll wait to see who is attending each before I decide.

Random Ramblings

I have one quick fun bit to share here. With the cleanup work in the basement, my trusty helper was finding a bunch of photos. Anything I really wanted to keep is already in scrapbooks, but I still enjoyed leafing through them. She got a kick out of the older photos though, and this one I decided to scan to save: my junior prom, 1984. The guy had been my long-distance boyfriend since we met on New Year’s Eve, as he was in Illinois at school for most of the time. He came home in time to take me to my prom, and then I never saw him again. C’est la vie.

Knit on. 🧶