We’re in the final glide path to high school graduation here, plus birthdays. We spent the weekend cleaning and gardening like crazy – and there’s still a ton to do.
That means removing a frosting of construction dust from every surface of the house; unpacking and placing the remaining kitchen goods (sorting out stuff to save for future spawn-apartments, or for charitable donation); washing all the floors; replacing the rugs stowed away from the chaos; waking up the garden from winter doldrums; building the new bean trellis out of last year’s giant grass canes; planting the beans; attacking the colonizing blanket of unwelcome weeds in the flower beds; staking the peonies; scrubbing down the bathrooms (similarly affected by construction dust); and generally putting everything to order. We didn’t finish, but we put a huge dent in it all. That means no time spent on detailed photography of the new orderly and in-service kitchen, and precious little time on needlework or knitting (although I did finish the last of my stack of Birthday (and Un-Birthday) socks in time). Plus the normal weekend regimen of cleaning and cooking for the ensuing week. I am now exhausted just tallying it all up.
Here is what I can report photographically.
The kitchen works! This is old news already – The Resident Male making short ribs last weekend:
Younger Daughter and The Denizen got all decked out for the Senior Prom. The went with a herd of friends, and had a great time.
Spiffy, no?
And we had an amazing joint birthday cake – home-baked, of course, courtesy of Younger Daughter. She used the America’s Test Kitchen Salted Caramel Chocolate Cake recipe in her first trial run of the new ovens. Oh, so good!
String-Or-Nothing 
Kitchen looks great! You have an accessory that I’d love to have – a Resident Male who can cook! (I have a Resident Male but he is an older model and his functionality is limited to washing dishes. Not that I’m planning to upgrade.) Love Younger Daughter’s outfit with the brocade(?) top. And she can cook, too – you’ve done well.
Congratulations on the graduation! We’ve had a couple of those in our family too, always wonderful to make another step toward fully fledging.
“a frosting of construction dust” is much more poetic than my usual “?!$# drywall dust!” exclamation. It’s insidious, but is a price to pay for a spiffy new kitchen, congrats on that, too.
Hello! I am looking for a computer based program for design. I need to be able to change colors and see different colorways without actually having to knit it!!
Thanks for any leads. I couldn’t find anything on Ravelry on this topic.
Hi Sue – there are lots of options for drafting designs – and I am assuming you are talking about colorwork, and not garment or pattern drafting. Some are specific to knitting, some are primarily for counted needle arts like cross stitch or needlepoint, but either have knitting settings, or can be used that way. I have played with many of them but vastly prefer my own home-grown solutions based either on MS Visio or the freeware platform, GIMP. These are described in the tutorials section of the site. I know others use Excel spreadsheets, although those don’t allow easy selection/replacement of colors the way you want.
In the mean time, if you Google “knitting colorwork software” you’ll find several options, and lots of blogs and reviews. I will say that having played with most of these programs, you do get what you pay for. The best and most flexible are also the most expensive.
Things to look for to make knitting easier include ability to customize gauge (non-square charting units), ability to select and sub by color (most do this), and the ability to change the graphed area’s size (adding rows or columns after the design has been started). Some programs include visual presentation in knit stitches, the ability to accept photos, or other graphics and translate them into a graphed design, or the ability to represent texture stitches (not just plain stockinette).
It’s important to note that NO ONE PROGRAM does everything well, and that finding the one you are most comfortable with may take some time. Especially because there are rarely complete demo packs that allow you to stress test the things before you buy.