Disney, Harry Potter, Knitting, etc!

Well I obviously haven't blogged in a while. But I think it's with good reason. I went on vacation with my family to Florida to go on a Disney/Universal Studios vacation, and it was amazing!

Main Street Disney

This vacation confirmed for me that you are never too old to go to amusement parks. Disney was as magical as ever. We went to all of the parks and I took lots of pictures of everything. However, I don't think they'll all fit in one blog post. Ceara made it onto the stage for the American Idol experience at Disney's Hollywood studios (the new name for the MGM park) and that was really cool. Every day they pick 15 people to perform out of the ~300 who try out and she made it! It was really cool.

Harry Potter world was amazing! Hogsmead looked just like I thought it would. Though for some reason they chose to depict it in winter... maybe that was so you could feel like it wasn't 92 degrees out?

Entrance to Hogsmead

And once we walked through the village we made it to the Hogwarts castle and let's just say if I could live in Harry Potter world and go to Hogwarts for school, I probably would.

Hogwarts

We also got to get Butterbeer from the Hog's Head pub and ate lunch at the three broomsticks.

 

Overall I recommend going to Harry Potter world, though the shops were in my opinion a bit too small and the whole place a bit too crowded... the off season would probably be the best time to go.

Now that we are back in VT, Ceara and I have been craving the sweet deliciousness that is Butterbeer (aka cream soda with some sort of delicious butterscotch foam stuff on top). And so we've started the great adventure of trying to make our own. Today I think we met with success after trying a recipe we found online here. And we added butterscotch caramel ice cream topping to the foam to make it taste more like the stuff they give out at the park. Here is the fruit of today's efforts:

It's delicious and pretty close to what we had at the park. I recommend trying it out if you want to have butterbeer in the comfort of your own home. 

Anyway that's the story on my vacation and now it's time for the knitting update. Which, even though this is a knitting blog I seem to get easily distracted. I like to think it makes my entries more interesting. :)

I've made some good skew sock progress since my last post. I finished the left sock and have started work on the right one. Sadly the first sock took longer than I planned since as I realized on the plane to Florida I reversed my markers and did all the short rows backwards. So, I had to take out about 50 rows and re-knit them. But have no fear the sock came out well once I fixed it.

The sock has a tight fit but it does fit! So I feel pretty successful. And the pattern is really interesting to make and not as difficult as I feared. The origami heel construction is really cool. 

After finishing the first sock for the second time I decided I needed a break before I started the second one. So I took a few days to make Lane a very belated birthday gift... an angler fish! It came out so cool: 

And now that I finished that mini project in the middle I've moved back on to the second sock and should hopefully be done that in the next few days. After my skew socks are done I've been commissioned to make a Harry Potter hat for Ceara in time for the last movie premier. So I'll be kept busy for the rest of this week knitting.

Next week I'll be moving to CT on either Monday or Tuesday (based on the vague date the moving people gave me) and then I start work on the 18th. I'm pretty excited! Hopefully the moving process is relatively painless...