A Little Yarn On The Side

All 5 table runners are now done, and as much as I like them, I am SOOOOOOOOOOOO ready to work on something--anything--else!  I love how they turned out, and we'll keep one for ourselves, but as soon as they were finished, it was time for something different.  Like a shirt for Andy for Valentine's day.   I haven't sewn very much clothing in recent years, so after making sure Andy liked the look, I opted for a shirt pattern with fewer pieces than my usual.  The key piece missing is the dratted button band for the top button--the bane of my existence with shirts.  It's not as nice of a pattern, but as I've mostly made pajamas in the last few years, this is not the time to be tricky.  I might even finish the shirt today, as I'm trying to stay out of trouble with my back.  I was achy yesterday, which is unusual.  I walked in the pool for an hour on Monday and was actually a bit sore before I started, but the water helped and I felt better ...

Crafting has lost out to exercise this week--I was able to walk in the pool both Monday and Wednesday, which is very exciting.  The pressure of the water definitely makes it harder than regular walking and helps build strength, but it does wear me out.  Tuesday I set out for a short walk and felt so good I went 3 miles.  Yesterday I was just worn out, so there was some VERY simple knitting and rest.  The great thing is that I was just tired and a bit sore from exercising--NOT from the back pain. YAY! I finished the Eleanor Cowl earlier this week, and finally remembered to take a picture of it today.  It still needs to be blocked and have the ends woven in, but this brings me to 13 finished projects for the year already!  I'm scaring myself just a bit..... Of course, being ahead is a nice change and if I get too worried, there's always this: I don't even want to TRY to estimate how far behind I am with these.  I think this is the 11th kit I...

Then I could have walked across the street to find out what the Sara Lee truck was delivering to my neighbor today: I don't know if I've ever even tried Sara Lee, but obviously some of us love her more than others....... On the crafting front, I'm still working on table runners, and I'm getting better, I think:  It does help that the top is very busy and I'm not that stressed about anyone seeing my stitches.  We'll worry about that for another project.  And speaking of another project, I've been digging through my pile of Christmas fabrics to find the eight coordinating fabrics I'll need for the Spicy Spiral table runner.  They are supposed to go from dark to light to dark, and I keep changing things out.  Oddly, the red side was easier than the green.  I'm still working on it.  Of course, I probably need to take a break from table runners and work on the shirt I've promised Andy for Valentine's Day.  Oh, and some knitting...........

Two more stippled table runners done!

I walked 4 miles this afternoon.  Doing math again--which is really not working out for me lately--I would have to walk almost 4 miles every day to walk my stash in a month.  Heavens!!!!!!  Surprisingly, I didn't grab the first project with big needles that I could think of after THAT horrible realization.  Instead, I dug out the Eleanor Cowl , which I started in December of 2013.  It got sidetracked quickly because I couldn't read the charts while doped on pain pills, and has been languishing in my pile of WIPs ever since.  It is going pretty quickly, so I might be under 20 WIPs soon.  Have I mentioned that I used to be a single project knitter with NO stash?  And speaking of uncontrollable and insanely large stashes, I have been doing some sewing!  In fact, the first stippled table runner was finished just minutes ago!  So far, I stink at stippling, and this one even had tension issues, but it is REALLY difficult to s...

I did the math, which is NEVER a good idea when talking about one's stash.  I have 114 miles of yarn in my stash   I think I need to lay down now...................

I had debated about this, and had originally planned to place one yarn order before climbing back on, but that STILL adds yarn to my sewing room, so instead I have just decided that for the next SIX MONTHS, I'm not buying anything.  Yarn, fabric, patterns--nothing.   I decided on 6 months because on my Joann's excursion on the 5th, I only bought 5 yards of muslin because it seemed quite different than what I'd been getting before, and I wasn't sure it was good enough to use for much.  I'm trying it out on the table runners, and I'm very unimpressed, so I'll need to find something different by then.  UNTIL THEN, time to use what I have! I used up all of the Patons Metallic yarn on two keyhole scarves, and ended up having to make one shorter than the other.  It will be fine once blocked, and I hated this yarn so much that I was not ABOUT to go buy more of it.  It's lovely and soft, but snags on everything--even dry skin, which is sort of hard to avoid...

There have been a LOT of table runners on this blog in the last year, but if you think that means I have this great stockpile of gifts all set and ready to go, you would be wrong. A lot of them have already been given away and only a few--if any--will still be around when Christmas 2015 rolls around.  And while there are 5 red and white runners in progress, they aren't exactly whipping right along.  Three have all the sashing, and I have stippled my first project.  I used white thread, so I haven't been able to get a good picture of it, but you can take my word for it.  I had a few tension issues, I had to rip out a bit because I got the backing muslin folded over on itself at one point, and I can only hope a real quilter never sees the thing, but I'm good with all of that.  Free-motion quilting has been on my list to try for some time, and I finally got the courage up to do it!!!!!  There's still the binding and the other 4, but I tried free-motion qu...

So I finally got all the blocks put together, and it turns out that I am making FIVE table runners.  This is fine, as I do need quite a few gifts this year, but it would have been easier had I guessed this before trying to lay them out and running out of flat surfaces.  They're pretty random, which I'm proud of myself for doing.  One of the prints is just slightly the wrong color in certain light but works in others, so I'm hoping stippling will help with that, though with FIVE table runners there might be some experimentation with decorative stitch "ties" as well.  Five is more than I had anticipated. The next step is a white sashing around the runners, and at this point I realized that I'd used all my heavier white cotton on kimono ornaments.  I have a lighter one, but the seams would show through.  Steeling myself, I went to Joanns after lunch, and the store was almost empty!  There wasn't even a line at the cutting counter IN SPITE of their b...

Yesterday I received an email from Nancy's Notions touting 7 ways to get my sewing room organized in 2015.  Unless she was actually advocating large donations to charities, I don't think any 7 things would make a bit of difference in my sewing room--but I do admire her optimism...................

Last night I went to bed excited in the knowledge that I was 200+ stitches in to the final row before the armhole on the marathon sweater.  This morning, with a whole lot LESS excitement I am undoing those 200+ stitches because the instructions include the horrible phrase: Do not knit the final row of the gusset, which I am sure I read at some point but since I started this monster in September of 2012, I am obviously a bit fuzzy on the details--like why I thought this was a brilliant idea in the first place.  At least it didn't say "at the same time."  I have lost a lot of my knitterly goodwill to that phrase over the years--especially because the place one is most likely to find those words on any written knitting pattern is after a great deal of text explaining the previous step and most often on the next page to catch unwary knitters who have not learned to read ahead, which I believe is about 99% of us at one point or another.  It's moments like this that ...

Wow!  A 4.9 earthquake hit Challis, Idaho this morning, and I actually felt it in my sewing room.  It was my first earthquake ever, and as I was upstairs it was a pretty big jolt, but it didn't even occur to me that it was an earthquake.  Challis had a smaller one two weeks ago, but the last big quake was in 1983 and measured 6.9.  My hometown did feel the tremors of that one, but we were in a car on the way to school and missed it--it wasn't until we pulled up to the school and found the entire school in buses parked on the football field that we knew anything had happened.  An earthquake!!!!!!!!! It shouldn't be all that surprising in geological terms--Idaho is very close to Yellowstone which is a monster volcano, and we have natural hot springs everywhere, and we even have Craters of the Moon and even further north where I grew up, there is so much lava rock that there's one large chunk of land on the ranch dubbed "the Rock Pasture."  And the presence...

The new year is off to a strong crafting start!  20 new kimono ornaments are done, which uses up 1 yard of fabric from my stash and which I'm counting as 5 projects because 2 cuts of 45-inch wide fabric makes 4 ornaments.  To be fair, I've been working on them for several days now.  They're cute, but they aren't that quick.  We usually give most of our family and friends a new homemade ornament every year, but even with Andy making all the wooden ornaments and what looked like a pretty big stack of kimono ornaments, we still ran out and I ended up giving away more ornaments from last year.  (Note to self:  Math would be a good idea).  Obviously, having made 365+ ornaments, I did have some to spare, but it might have been easier to keep track of who got what 2014 could have been kimono ornament year or wooden ornament year.  I've kept 9 of these guys for us and put the rest in the gift bin.  Not a bad start for Christmas 2015....... And ...