Oh, What a Night!

We had a delightful New Year's Eve.

Zip and I have never been big celebrants of N-Y-E.  We are stay home and have a nice dinner and watch TV types.  Who wants to be on the road after midnight???
Then about ten years ago, our friends Chuck and Willa asked us if we would go out to eat with them.  Of course we said YES!  We went to a local Japanese restaurant.  It was fun and somehow sushi seemed just the thing for the celebration.  So after that we went every year, sometimes with their children and ours joining the fun.

Afterward there was the option of going downtown in Shippensburg and watching the anchor drop.  SHIP-ensburg.  Far from the ocean and certainly not named for the nautical, but I guess you have to drop something.  Being a farming community, I would have suggested a cow (not a real one, of course!  I'm an animal lover!) but it would be more interesting than an anchor.
Well, there is no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks  that this woman would be caught downtown after dark anyhow.  Not in winter, not in the cold, not after 8 p.m.  No amount of music and dancing in the streets and fireworks could make me do that!

Chuck and Willa have since moved to Missouri, and last night we expecially missed them.

But not to be dismayed, we went to a new Japanese and Thai restaurant with Brad and Kami.
The food was delicious!!!  We had such a wonderful time that I forgot to take pictures until the meal was half over.  Not cool showing partially eaten food!  I had the least disturbed plate so will show it

This is Chicken Pattaya, with fresh pineapple, green peppers, mango and onion in a hot sweet chili mango sauce.  Yummy!  Isn't the flower made from daikon radish pretty?.

We all shared a scrumptious smoked salmon and mango sushi roll.

Before Kami and Brad met, she had never eaten Oriental or Mexican food.  In the four years they have been together, she's become quite adventurous.  I guess you have to be to go out to dinner with us.
We ended the meal by sharing an order of fried banana topped with whipped cream and chocolate sauce.
We all had plenty of food left to bring home and enjoy again today.

Willa and Chuck, I wish you could have been here with us!

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With my sweater knitting finished, it was time to do the blocking, the part I HATE most about making a sweater.  I've been stewing over this for a week, dreading this crummy chore.  Then I had an idea.  One that would hopefully be fast and easy and not require a zillion pins and those darn blocking wires.  A method I could use and not need a large uncluttered space which is very hard to find in my junky messy house.

I had Zip go to Lowes and get me a piece of 1/2-inch foam insulation board and on it I drew a full-sized schematic of the sweater body.   I made two separate sleeves, leaving enough excess so they could butt together at the center front.  I cut all these out..

I soaked and spun dry my sweater and 'dressed' the Maxi-Me cut-out, sticking the arms in last and securing it all with t-pins.  As an afterthought, I added a twisted coat hanger so I could hang it from the rafters near the woodstove to speed the drying.  The only extra pinning needed was down the front band to keep it straight.  Voila!!!  Sweater blocking made easy and reusable!

My yarn for the next project came yesterday.  I will be test knitting a vest that Julie Matthews of Knitting at Large (check my sidebar) has designed and will be offering as a pattern on Ravelry.
I am so excited to have been chosen to do the test knit!  Pictures of the yarn will be in my next post.

Speaking of which, my camera seems to be out of adjustment lately.  Without the flash everything seems to be too dark and then when I use the flash, everything is too bright and washed out.  Guess the instruction book will have to come out of hiding.

And....Blogger seems to be having a brain furt again.  I load pictures and then they disappear before I'm able to add them.  So I've been loading them one at a time as needed. Is anyone else having this problem???

Hope your year is off to a great start!
Happy 2012., everyone!!!