Thursday, July 16, 2009

How My Garden Grows

I feel I should preface this post with the fact that I have a black thumb. I kill every plant that comes into our house within a week, and sometimes kill other people's plants that ask me to water them while they're away. So while my little container garden might not look like much, it is a HUGE improvement over my past attempts. First, though, let's have a little funeral for Mr. Tomato. He just couldn't survive the 27 straight days of rain we had, a.k.a. "June".

But his best buddy Basil is a rock star on my deck! I can't believe this is my plant. Basil must like to be forgotten and ignored:

My jalapeno is hanging in there. I have a few little flower buds that just might turn into peppers! Crossed fingers!

Then there's my herb garden. We have around a 50% success rate here. The sage & tarragon are doing great, but the cilantro looks like a random weed, and the rosemary is the same size it was a month ago. I don't use that much rosemary anyway. But the cilantro is a let down:

As for knitting, I finished something!! It's just socks, but they're the best things to knit in the summer, IMO. Look how much bigger my left foot is. Crazy!

The yarn is Malabrigo sock and the pattern is Knitty's Universal toe-up. I'm going to have to weigh the yarn to be sure, but I think I can make another complete pair of these with the leftover yarn. What a bargain!
Did everyone see the latest Harry Potter movie yet? We went last night (I wore my Hermione sweater! In July! Luckily it was only 70 degrees out, and the theater was freezing of course.) I have a BIG issue with a certain scene, but otherwise loved it. Don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't say what, but you'll know when you watch it.
Lastly, someone named Jen asked me a question on my last post, and I have to answer it here because blogger doesn't give me email addresses, so I couldn't write back to her. The question was:

So, why do you think gen x has brought knitting back into style?

I think that the women of the baby boomer generation had to prove that women are equal to men in ability, intelligence, etc, so crafts like knitting got set aside for a while. Now that a path is paved for us gen-x-ers in the equality arena, we have the luxury of exploring what our grandmothers' hobbies were rather than our grandfathers. Obviously this isn't an all-encompassing statement. I know plenty of baby boomers that knit, sew, cross stitch, and never stopped doing those things when they were "out of style," but in general is all I mean. The thing I love the most about the new generation of knitters is that there is no stereotype for the new knitter. Some of us are career women, some are stay at home moms, some are yuppies, some are hippies. There's no way to spot us in a crowd unless we're wearing our awesome hand knits!