I’m still baking, but it is mostly repeats at this point. I continue to make all of our sandwich bread. I’ve made biscuits and banana bread. I can’t stop making cinnamon swirl bread.

I’ll probably stop baking as much now that summer is almost here. I try not to turn my oven on because it heats up my whole house.

Have you been baking lately?

I finished my Rose City Rollers. I loved working with this yarn, but I’m thrilled to be done with this project. Three pairs in a row with the same yarn is just too much for me.

We are one week away from the start of the Pride KAL. Let’s show the LGBTQ community we stand with them by knitting rainbow socks.

This week Elliot made eggs twice (once with a huge mess), Audrey made sheet pan French toast (also with an eggy mess), we painted with water, did face paint (which I’m not getting better at), and made clay charms.

I enjoyed the clay charms when I made one myself, but I did not like doing this craft with the kids. They loved it. There was glitter, which we applied outside, but I’m still finding it all over the house.

I hope you had a crafty week.

I’m thankful for our new firepit. We spend a lot of time in the yard, and it will be fun to have another area to enjoy. If we have good weather tomorrow I’ll be thankful for s’mores tomorrow night.

I’m thankful for cheap flowers from Costco. They are an easy way to brighten up the house.

I’m thankful for air fryer carrot fries. Everyone but Elliot loves these, and we are well on our way to eating a five pound bag of carrots in a week.

I’m thankful for Wrigley. She is a sweet dog who is great with the kids.

I’m thankful Elliot learned how to pump on the swings. Audrey also knows how to pump. It’s going to be a good summer.

I’m thankful one of our favorite restaurants is open once a week for meal pickup. They aren’t opening any time soon, but once a week you can pick up food to heat up. They also had mango margaritas, so I’ll be trying that later tonight.

I’m thankful the sun has been shining the past couple of days. It was a gray week.

I hope you had a great week!

We had a day that felt normal. It was wonderful. Our zoo opened today, with several changes. We normally go to the zoo every week and we had been missing the zoo. We wandered around the zoo on the now one way path without any indoor exhibits and it was great.

After our trip to the zoo we picked up Chick-Fil-A, partly because I was feeling like a fun mom, but mostly because I was really craving one of their cobb salads. We spent the rest of the day outside, only coming in for a bath after dinner.

It felt great to have a day that felt like our normal lives. I look forward to easing back into activities, even if it means wearing masks.

I can’t believe I’ve been working on this sweater for seven weeks. I don’t remember the last time I’ve worked on something for seven weeks without stopping and still been in love with the project. The yarn is swoonworthy. I feel lucky to be knitting with it whenever I pick it up.

This week I worked on pockets. I decided to knit the pocket lining using the Spider chart in the Alterknit Stitch Dictionary. The Throughstone sweater I cast on in March, then cast to the side when I started the Arachne, has colorwork pocket linings, and I love the look. I decided to go with a black background and orange spiders. I knit the linings flat, because I didn’t feel like working with DPNs.

Today I tried on my sweater to decide where I should put the pockets. I was surprised to discover that they were ready to add to the sweater.

This is my first time adding pockets in this manner in a top down sweater. It’s easy with bottom up sweaters. I ended up kitchenering the pockets to the sweater, knitting around the sweater, then using the knitted cast on to replace the stitches kitchenered off. I’m planning on doing an inch or so (until I get bored or annoyed) of garter stitch at the top of the pockets to decrease rolling. I didn’t research this method, I just decided to add pockets and made it happen.

I wasn’t planning on working on this sweater much over the next week, but John told me the sweater reminded him of when teens wear cut off jean shorts so short their pockets hang out. I can’t unsee that image now, so I’ll probably knit furiously until the pockets are covered.

Are you working on an Arachne? How is it going?