A Lot of Running!

Today I ran the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Marathon.  I really love this marathon and have run it ten times now.  Why do I love it?  Well, Harrisburg feels like my home town since I worked there for 27 years.  In the early years I ran along the river at lunch time.  19th and 20th century officials preserved the land along the river to ensure it would never be an ugly industrial area.  Instead it's a beautiful park.  During later years, when my job began to interfere with a lunchtime run,  I ran at 6 am.  Most of the year it is dark at the hour and as I ran I would watch the day emerge.


Since I have now run 97 marathons, including one in each of our 50 states, people often ask me what my favorite marathon is.  I've never answered, "Harrisburg," preferring to mention Big Sur or other marathons with equally beautiful scenery.  But today I realized that my favorite is indeed Harrisburg.


BTW, I ran pretty well, although it was a struggle.  I ran 4:42, which is an hour and 15 minutes off my PR, but after all, I'm older now and I don't expect to see a PR again.  Today's time was good enough for a 2nd place age group award.


When we got home I planned to work on Liam's sweater vest, but took a nice nap instead.  On tap for tonight and tomorrow - finish the sweater vest and head to IKEA to buy furniture for Clay's new (following the flood) office.  I was dumb enough :-) to re-carpet the rooms and now I will buy furniture.

Here I am during the last mile.

Finished Objects (FOs) and Unfinished Objects (UFOs)

I previously posted the designer's photo of the Noni Clematis Bag.  I'm happy to say that mine is now an FO.


I used colors quite similar to those of the original, although I customized other things about the bag.  (I say this only because Kathy (Colonial Yarn Shop) looks askance at the practice of copying the pattern colors.  She prefers to find different yarns and color schemes.)  I lined the bag in fabric that I love.  It is a floral print with colors that coordinate with the bag.  I think it looks great.


The knitting and felting part of this project was a piece of cake.  The rest, however, was a pain.  Here is a shot of the bag prior to felting.  Note the dollar bill to show how huge it was.  I think it was 3' X 3'.

And - all of the following needed to be done to actually finish the project.

• I bought some plastic mesh to make the bag more solid and proceeded to sew it into the bag.  Now this was really hard, because the mesh is non-flexible and the thread couldn't show on the outside.  I made good use of needle-nosed pliers and a thimble.
• I knitted and felted the vine and the clematis flowers.  Nothing hard about this and the clematis pattern is clever and fun to knit.
• I followed the on-line directions to make the lining, adding two good-sized pockets.  The lining was a pain!!  I don't really like the method (one piece of material) and for a future bag, I might piece it together instead.  It is very difficult to size it with the Noni-prescribed method, and I constructed it twice to get it close to correct.
• When I looked at the vine and flowers I realized that they all had to be sewn on.  I tried to convince myself I could use glue, but knew better.   But - before I began sewing, I realized that I needed to remove (unsew) the plastic mesh.
• With the flowers and vine sewn on and the plastic mesh back where it belonged, I needed to sew in the lining.  But first, I had to figure out the magnetic snap.  Since the lining is thin and you cannot have the snap showing on the outside of the bag, I consulted YouTube.  I still had to go back to Joann's for advice where a helpful associate told me to use iron-on interfacing.

It's finally done and I'm very happy with the results.

If you click on the picture, you can see a larger view of the lining.

I also finished my hat for Debbie in Anchorage.  She is my new friend who treated Clay and me to a wonderful dinner and great conversation at her home.  I sent her the hat and she called me immediately to say how much she loves it.  I asked her if the weather has been cold enough to wear it.  She said, "Are you kidding?  It was 18° when I went to work this morning!"  I hope to have a good picture of Debbie in her hat, but this will need to suffice.  The colors in the hat are beautiful (Cascade Jazz), but you cannot tell in the picture because of the orange shirt and the Ukrainian flag in the background.

I am currently working on a green sweater vest for Liam, using Sirdar #1784 pattern and Cascade 220 Superwash Sport color #1950.  I have yarn to begin making projects for late winter classes at Colonial.  Two of the projects are Ysolda's cabled beret and Knitty.com's Commuter Gloves.  More on these in a later post.