January Bliss

Happy Friday!!! How is your January going? It seems like it was Christmas only yesterday.  We have been having a new deck put on the back of our house.  We also added new doors, a new front door and doors on our new deck. I am really excited about the deck doors they have the blinds on the inside of the glass. Take that you dust bunnies.  Our yard and then our living room has been in a state of disarray.   Adding a new deck is something I have wanted to do for a couple of years now. We started the deck before  Thanksgiving and then rain and all of the workers being sick slowed the process. They finally finished the deck just before Christmas. There was a mixup on the new deck doors and they had to be reordered and that slowed things even more.  The doors were finally put in last week. Of course it was one of the coldest days we’ve had this winter and all of the doors in the living room were out. Mark took this picture from the upstairs.  We still haven’t painted the doors.  We are waiting for the temps to be a little warmer but I will show you an update when we do.

You can see a little bit of the new deck here. I am loving the new railing. I can’t wait until it gets warmer and we can sit on the deck and enjoy the sunshine.

Last Sunday I decided to make bread with my sour dough starter.  I wanted the regular sour dough and the cinnamon pecan sourdough.  So each cup of starter makes three loaves, and long story short I wound up with six loaves of bread  I gave most of it away.  I have to get it out of the house so I won’t eat all of it.

 

 

My niece Amy R and I decided to start a craft or project night once or twice a month.  Here are some of the things we are planning to do:
Hook a rug
Paint with chalk paint
Stencil
Make candles
Make herb butter

These are just a few things we want to start with.

But we actually started out last Tuesday making one of the knitted arm blankets. Something we hadn’t really planned on at all.   Man is that yarn expensive. It is a super bulky yarn and let me say it is a bit of an investment. We decided to go with a slightly smaller bulk. We don’t want to break our budget with these projects. We got the yarn at Hobby Lobby and we each needed two skeins. They are really large. They were on sale 30% off so we got them for about 15.00 each so $30.00 for each blanket.  The super bulky that we really wanted would have been about $75.00 per blanket. A little pricey for me on a beginner project.

We picked out a YouTube video and got started. This is an excellent video for beginners

Arm Knit a Blanket in 45 Minutes by Simply Maggie

It took us a little bit to get started but once we got the hang of it it went pretty fast. It is basically knitting with your arms instead of knitting needles. I guess because we were new to it and using our arms the open spaces in the blanket were a little large. We finished in about two hours.  I put it over the back of this chair and to be honest with you I was not really happy with it. I think it kind of looked like intestines.  Now that Amy and I have the hang of making one of these we think we will invest in the higher priced bulky yarn and try again.  I decided to unravel my blanket because I knew I would probably never like it and use it.  I can make quite a few knitted scarves out of the yarn. The yarn is very nice and soft and will make excellent scarves.

 

So as you can see I have been in this sort of nesting mode. I guess with the hustle and bustle of Christmas behind me I just want to take a breather and enjoy being alone and doing things I really want to do.

This is the book we are currently reading for our book club.  I just started it.  It is sort of the sequel to, To Kill A Mockingbird.  So far it is pretty interesting.  I need to go back and read Mockingbird because it has been many many years since I read that.  What a lot of people don’t realize is that Harper Lee actually wrote Go Set A Watchman first before Mockingbird.  Just some trivia for you.

My goals for January are going pretty well you can see them in this post  I haven’t lost five pounds yet but I have been more active and I have been trying some new things (like the blanket) but more on that at the end of the month

How is your January going?

Love your day your way