A Little Yarn On The Side

  It was the best of times, it was the most repetitive of times.   It was the age of home cooking experimentation, it was the age of movie marathons.  It was the epoch of home organization, it was the epoch of Zoom.  And it was, frankly, kind of a long year.  We’re still both working from home, getting two months to the gallon on our commute,  and thanks to Andy’s new label-maker and some free-time on my end, our pantry is cleaned,  organized, labeled, and borders on “a-serial-killer-might-live-here.”  The linen closet is cleaned,  yard work was almost kept up with, and there are several new craft projects completed.  I finally  gave my notice at my job in June after 14 months of exhausting hours and seeing problems not  addressed, and any qualms I might have had were resolved when my replacement quit on her third  day.  I left without having another job lined up because I was just too exhausted to be able to ...

 Or mostly, if we don't count switching back and forth between quilting and knitting.   In spite of help from the kitties, mostly Charlie, I have been working steadily on a new quilt project. The project instructions said "simple," so it only took me a solid two months, which included ripping out some of my free motion quilting once I got so far off that I had huge puckers: I am still very much learning, but the quilt sandwiching is one of the places I struggle most, and I did pretty well this time, AND didn't discover that my borders were suddenly too full of ease to ever work.  And, drum roll please, the finished quilt is in the dryer.  That's right, I used the term "finished quilt" and I wasn't referring to someone else's blog. YAY!

 Why is it that working from home makes for longer hours?   It seems I finished the purple socks AND sent them to their recipient without getting a picture, but I did finish them.  There has been quite a bit of sewing.  Back when I bought my first house, I made several sets of placemats using a fan pattern with doilies.  At the time, I never made more than 6 for a set because my table only had room for 6 people, there wasn't room in the house for a bigger table, and nothing in life ever changes, right?  A marriage and two houses later, I did find the remaining fabric and apparently the only remaining doily that will match the others, and made two additional placemats.  An in-progress shot: Not realizing I had the material or doily to make them, last fall I'd ordered fabric to make a new set, this time TWELVE with 15 matching napkins, because what isn't fun about hemming? (besides all of it).  Sometime in the last 18 years the original doilie...

I didn't make my goal of 50 projects for the year, but I did squeak in a last project for the year with fleece pajamas for Andy, and a last pair of socks, which are almost twins! Considering how many knots were in this skein of yarn, I'm calling it a Christmas miracle.  Of course, I immediately cast on for a new pair: because there might be some sock yarn that found its way into my stash this year.  Actually, a LOT of yarn might have joined me this year.  While under normal circumstances, I would feel bad about it, anything short of alcoholism to cope with the stress of 2020 seems like a "win."   I'm working tons and tons of hours at my new job, but I think I'm still going to try for 50 finished projects this year.  It's my turn to make gifts, so there will be some smaller projects--maybe fabric bowls?  More table runners?  How many table runners do people who don't sew use?  It's a lot, right? Let's hope 2021 is a MUCH better year than 2020....