I woke up pretty early for a Sunday - 8ish - and did 2 hours of stitching on Ivy while watching some shows off my DVR - Gossip Girls, Big Shots, and Smallville. Gossip Girl is my guilty pleasure this TV season. I went to high school on the Upper East Side - it was NOTHING like the prep school on the show though, but I still recognize a lot of the scenery & laugh because I probably had some of those kinds of kids in my school too. Last week's episode was pretty good, they introduced a new character (Vanessa), and I'm really hoping she'll be back in future episodes.
Smallville was GREAT this week, I love seeing Lana's evil side (finally!) but we all know she's gonna get slapped by the Luthors in the end (unfortunately). Chloe is still one of my favorite characters, and this week she was still reveling in her side-kick-ness - I'm waiting for her to bust out some superpowers of her own already!
Despite all that happened in TV land, I made good progress on Ivy. I'm working on the skirt for now, figure get the *boring* parts done before moving on the torso and wings, which have prettier colors and the sparkly Kreinik threads. I'm about 1/3 done with the skirt... so about 20% through the entire project? Let's optimistically say 20% ;-)
In case you're wondering, I'm stitching this on "Denim Blue", but it looks Periwinkle or Purple IRL. I was going for something more blue but I'm still okay with this color.
The weather today was GORGEOUS - cool and sunny - and all the leaves are turning colors, so after lunch (and straightening up a bit after Sky), I took Sky to a park near our house. It's mostly woods and has a mile-long path where people take their dogs for walks off-leash. Sky is fairly well-known there, since she's pretty unique looking and usually goes to this park 6 days a week (not Saturdays). I don't usually take her, so I've gotten used to strangers and their dogs greeting Sky and either ignoring me or asking where Sky's *regular* people are. Surprisingly though, today Sky didn't have any admirers and we barely saw anyone on the paths. The park was GORGEOUS with all the turning leaves and fallen pine needles, so we kept busy looking around instead of socializing. It was my first "fall something" of the day.
My second fall something was very spur-of-the-moment... I was trying to get through to a friend to go ice skating, and just when I'd given up she called and suggested we go to Old Bethpage for the afternoon. Old Bethpage is a restoration village, basically they started out with a very old farmhouse and barn and all the farmland associated with them, and whenever they find an old (1700's or 1800's) building on Long Island that's in decent condition, instead of knocking it down they'd move it to OBVR. So now there's a whole village, and the coolest thing is that all the buildings are right from our area. My favorite buildings are the Cooper House (that's Cooper as in the Cooper Union, he was pretty cool), the original Powell farmhouse, and the workshops where people demonstrate crafts such as broom making, blacksmithing, and hat making/finishing.
One of the nicest things about OBVR is that they have something interesting going on pretty much every weekend in order to attract visitors. They have programs for St Patrick's Day in March, old fashioned baseball games in the summer, the Long Island Fair in September, Thanksgiving and Christmas themed stuff in November and December, and all with a historical, this-is-how-we-do-it-in-the-1800's slant. Today's theme was of course Halloween, and there were historically accurate talks/demonstrations in the cemetary and numerous houses, period crafts for sale, and a display of civil-war era gravestone etchings and clay molds.
Of course I forgot to bring my camera, but I plan to go back for the Thanksgiving programming in November, so I'll try to take some pictures then.
Oooh! Another nice thing about the excursion to OBVR - my friend drove, so I got to start knitting a hat! I picked up some very pretty, 100% wool yarn at AC Moore last week. You probably can't see the colors very well in the photo, but it's variegated yarn with lots of different shades of pink, all pretty soft though. I've never really felted before so this is going to be an experiment. I just hope it comes out too small instead of too big - I could always give it to my little cousins if it's small, but too big would just be weird... unless I cut it down? I'll have to see.
Tonight I picked my parents up from the airport - Sky was seriously overjoyed to see them - and then we did the family dinner thing with takeout Chinese food. Now I'm waiting for the game to be over so my Red Sox fan friend will return my phone call :-/ I'm a Yankees fan, but I've pretty much given up hope that the Rockies will come through for me. Oy, my Mets-fan friends are going to be SO annoying tomorrow if the Sox win!
Ok, off to finish the hat and root for the Rockies.
