Sharp Rock Fall Fest, etc

Well, I've completed another training session for work - translated that means that after three weeks of surrendering my life to the job, I can take a deep breath and enjoy myself until the next time around. Which also means I can catch up on my blog.

The last time we spoke, I was about to head out to the Sharp Rock Winery Fall Festival. This winery is the only one for which we faithfully attend all festivals - the location is beautiful:

The owners are friendly, down to earth people and the atmosphere is nice and relaxed.We sat under a copse of pine trees and listened to some really great blue grass. The sound quality in this isn't as good as it was live - obviously - this is just from my little camera - the most entertaining aspect of this performance was it was all one guy. He would lay down a track of himself playing one instrument, then loop it and pick up another instrument - he'd lay down that track on top of the other - loop those two together and pick up a third instrument - he'd keep on doing this until he had an entire ensemble put together. It was very entertaining.

Naturally, I did some knitting:

This little piece of knitting now looks like this:
I may have been busy, but that's not to say I didn't knit for three weeks - I mean, really - what were you thinking?

After the festival we stayed in a very quaint B&B called Conyer's House. We stayed in the Spring House which is up on top of a hill -very secluded - surrounded by woods.

This was our bedroom - we had a nice little fireplace, a loft with another bed, and a quaint little bathroom. It was such a nice day out, I didn't want to shut up the cottage, so I shut and latched the screen door and left the outer door open, thinking we'd come home to a nicely aired out room - with the smell of the woods wafting through our rooms - well, I'm not so sure it was all that aired out, but it did have a little of the woods in it - a nice big fat black snake had crawled in through a hole in the screen and made himself at home. I squealed like a three year old girl. The SigO nearly jumped out of his skin hearing me scream like that. And then, what was he going to do? He was the man - so he had to be manly - right? So he grabbed that damn thing by the back of the neck and hurled it out into the yard! My hero!! Rest assured I did a thorough check of the rest of the cottage before settling in that night.

The next day, we went for a hike in the Shenandoah. This is where I point out that both of us had been suffering from a nasty lingering cold - hacking up loogies - sniffling all day long - but I was not to be deterred - we hadn't been on a hike in too long, and we were going hiking! But I'm not a fool - I searched through my books and found one that was advertised as "a nice easy hike - suitable for the entire family". Yeah. Right. If you're a family of Sherpa's maybe! If you don't believe me, check out the view:

You don't get a view like this from "a nice easy hike". But it was quite gorgeous, and obviously we did survive.

Other than finish up the jacket pictured above, the only thing I've finished is my October quilt block for Carol Doak's newest Block of the Month (BOM) challenge. This time around, she's putting a "theme" block for each month for us to work on. This should prove to be as interesting a finished product as last year's BOM challenge.

Carol had instructed us to "embellish" our blocks, so I had all these grand plans to put in fall leaves all over the tree - well - it took me nearly as long to embroider this tiny little bush as it did to put together the entire block, so eff it - it's good enough. As is this blog!

Sometimes you get the bear...

And this time, the bear definitely got me. The knitting bear, obviously.

As already mentioned, I signed up for a class to learn Fair Isle and Steeking. As a side bonus, we also learned how to knit continental. Ah, but when I knit my swatch, I didn't know we were going to knit continental, so I knit the swatch using the good ole throw method...

Turns out I knit much, much, much looser with continental than I do with throw. Don't believe me? Check it out:

Here's the sleeve

Here's the body

that's just the back...obviously...

Maybe not as easy to see in the picture as it is in real life, but suffice it to say, since Hagrid is only a fictional character, I don't know anyone I can give this to in its current state, so it's going to have to be frogged, after which I'll have to decide: Do I want to hang up this continental thing and knit throw from now on, or do I always just want to go down six or seven needle sizes and two-three garment sizes when knitting continental. I really don't like loose knitting, so I'm leaning toward the former, but maybe if I go down enough needle sizes it won't matter? I don't know. And since I don't want to make that decision right now, I've picked up my suede jacket to work on instead.

This is knit in Berrocco's Suede Tri-Color and here's the thing with that - if I had known it was going to knit up into such definitive stripes, I think I would have ignored the pattern and knit in the round, then steeked the front. As it is, I'm going to either have some seriously mismatched stripes when I sew it together, or I'll have to work really, really hard to make sure the stripes match up - and knitting isn't supposed to be about working really, really hard....so I guess I could frog this too - but probably not - I have a limit on how much frogging I can take in one week.

I guess that makes the score: Knitting bears - 2, Jo - 0.