The Alphabet Club - Z

I put so much effort into catching up with this SAL and then I almost miss the very last check-in...sounds right like me, doesn't it?

So for Z, our last letter, we have Link from the Legend of Zelda:

And for our German word of the month, we have 'zwölf' - twelve. Nothing fancy, or funny, but a wonderful bridge to the next monthly SAL, recently introduced by the wonderfully creative Jo: The twelve Zodiacs. Each month we are going to target one, with stitching appropriat to either the zodiac directly, or the birth stone/flower, element, or whatever else we see fit. I, for my part, have a few ideas I think you will like, and I am currently busy preparing my first post for October, and I hope it will be finished soon to share with you!

All the crafting we missed...

I have a bit of crafting progress to tell you about that kind of fell through the net with all the traveling and other stuff going on, so let me just quickly sum that up.

I managed to stay on top with one of my one-legth-a-day projects - Snowwhite. She's almost two months in now and I have decided that I'm going to stitch up to where her skirt meets her bodice, then continue with the skirt all the way to the bottom.

On The Puppeteer, I am still not quite up to date, but I actually managed to catch up a bit more and am now less than two weeks behind. What's more important, I had another page finish, which brought me to a full row finish across the width of the design!

In the weekends (not including the one we spent in Ireland and also not the current one - because that brought more progress I will show you soon) I continued working on Fire and Ember, and the face really starts to fill in now - I do love my little red dragon!

Last but not least, there are the two projects I brought to Italy with me. For conference itself, I brought some knitting - Viajante, that huge knitting project. I made some decent progress - about 40 rows, but I decided to stop counting them and just knit, so I'm not quite sure. I'm also not sure this will ever be finished! It's going to be huge, but so far it's still pretty tiny.

For the train and hotel, I brought my Halloween Cat with me, and made some pretty nice progress - I finished the head and hat and also the moon and clouds. Next up I'll work my way down the left side and then across to the right. Maybe I can even still finish her before Halloween?

How to take a vacation

I still owe you some stories and pictures from Ireland, and now I finally have the time to write about it. Being on vacation was kind of a 'new' experience for Felix and me - we never had been away together, not for more than a long weekend and without work (in fact, it was about ten years since anyone of us had done that without the other as well), and when we have time off to stay at home, there's usually so much to do we hardly ever get into that really nice, relaxed state of mind - so we were really due that vacation!

We flew to Dublin on Monday morning, got our rental car and on the road we were (after some initial confusion about driving on the right (the left) side of the road) we were off to our first B&B in Kilkenny. On the route we made a stop at Glendalough National Park and took a walk in the beautiful landscape. The next day, we explored the town a little, then went to the Dunmore Cave and then on to Killarney via the Rock of Cashel. On our first day there, we drove down to Kinmare and took the beautiful coast road of the Ring of Beara. Next day, we went to Kinmare again, this time to take the boat - the offer a beautiful cruise around the bay to watch the eagels and seals, which was really awesome. On the last day before moving on, we went to see Mukross house - only the outside, which is a beautiful park full of really big trees and plants. Our next stop was in the Galway region, but a little farther out. Our fist big trip there, we went up to Galway (were I visited a lovely little craft shop - can't have a vacation without a few souvenirs!) and then on to Kylemore Abbey with its beautiful Victorian walled gardens, from where we drove home via the stunning Sky Road. The next day, we had planned to take a boat out to the Aran Isles and to see the Cliffs of Moher from the sea side, but thanks to a storm warning, that wasn't happening. Instead, we visited the cliffs from the land, and then drove around a little, until I saw a sign 'Craft Fair today'. Of course we had to stop for a bit - it was a tiny fair, less then ten stalls, but on one a lady sat hand spinning, and I bought some beautiful onion dyed yarn from her. Turns out she comes from the same corner of Germany that I come from and lives in Ireland now! The next day, we went back to Dublin (via Trim castle) and did a little sightseeing there. Sadly, the exhibition with the Book of Kells had already closed for the day when we got there, so we couldn't see that, but we did see a few other things.

So much for the short version of what we did, now let me just do a big picture dump (in roughly chronological order) to share the gorgeous ;)