A Wonderful Day with Dad (and Knitting!!!!)

I hope everyone had a great Father’s Day yesterday. Me, hubby and the boys spent the day with my dad (and mom!) yesterday. We had a great day. We ate some good food, played cards, took the dogs for a nice walk (one of my dad's favorite activities) and just had a really great all around day. You're the best, dad!!

Another one of his favorite things is Sourdough Bread. I have been feeding and keeping a starter for about a month now, so I figured this would be the perfect occasion to see what it could do. I used this recipe and the starter performed wonderfully.

The loaves rose to about 3 times their size! They were beautiful. Then I scored the tops and put them in a hot oven.

Beautiful. The whole house smelled of bread baking. They didn't turn out quite as "sour" as I would have liked, but the texture and flavor of the bread itself was really nice. In feeding my starter next, I added a little vinegar to really up the sourness of it for next time.

There was actually knitting going on also this week! The back, front and sleeves of the Phyllo pullover are done, so I started to seam the sides in anticipation of putting everything together to knit the yoke. I finished seaming the first sleeve and stood back to take a look.

(excuse the over bright photo - flash!)
Something just didn't look quite right. I stared at it. I turned it over. Something was off. My knitters gut was telling me it just wasn't right. For good reason. It was the front, not a sleeve. Sigh. I ripped all that seaming out, and started on a real sleeve. By Saturday evening, I had all the pieces seamed as they should be. I'm hoping to assemble all of them onto one circular tonight and start the yoke!

My sister Naomi and I were also busy constructing some agility equipment this week. The teeter is one of the things that takes dogs a while to learn. Getting used to the movement is a huge thing! Ace now confidently does the teeter, but I would like to start training him for more speed. For this, I need access to the equipment every day (I like to do really short, daily training sessions - I think it sinks in more!). First, we looked at some photos of teeter bases, and drew up some plans using PVC from the local Home Depot. We set to cutting and assembling, tweaking and re-measuring and I really love how it turned out!

It is sturdy, and more importantly has an adjustable base, so I can make it competition height or really low for training (depending on how wide the legs of the base are set apart). I still have to get a few more things, but the board for the top has started coming together also.

The middle will be painted a nice blue. The entire board has sand sprinkled into the paint for grip so the dogs don't slide when they run across it. The ends are yellow to indicate the "contact zone" - the area that the dog MUST touch before any of their feet hit the ground. I'm hoping to get the rest of the board painted tonight and tomorrow (weather permitting!), and maybe some finished action shots later this week! Seeing how easy and fun this was to make, I'm putting together a list of the other equipment I'd like to make!