A Little Yarn On The Side

And almost a finished scarf. To what do I owe this abnormal display of crafting dedication? * A tragically delayed tomato crop that has yet to cooperate with my visions of a weekend of salsa canning. * The true "stocking up" of towels to embroider on, without any idea at all where to store them until needed, and the final admission that there is more room in the "gift bin" than in the entire sewing room--a truly sad state of affairs... * An audio book causing me so much stress that it was either finish the darn thing this weekend or start taking sleeping pills at night. * Being perhaps caught up with cucumber harvest enough to delay the next batch of pickles until perhaps Tuesday. * Deciding that taking a weekend break from any elaborate cooking would be a really good idea...unless we wanted a week of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches next week. * After the socializing & entertaining marathon of last month, being burned out enough to schedule NO part...

I had decided early in the week to make today a crafting day--meaning no gardening or cleaning or anything that "had" to be done--and had a long list, starting with embroidering some towels. About a week ago I found kitchen towel packs on sale at Shopko (and tablecloths on clearance for $2.99 each, which has nothing at all to do with this story but SCORE!!!!) and they were ones I could embroider on, so I stocked up. As you may have guessed, we're pretty social people and always need hostess gifts or prizes of some sort, so I set up my sewing machine to embroider, thinking I would knit while the machine worked.... ....and promptly scalded my right hand while making lunch. Nothing serious--not even enough to cause blistering, but enough to render me with only a left hand for the day. (The soup, by the way, turned out quite well, but I still wouldn't say that it was worth it.) So, no knitting, but and one more in the machine as I write. The white stuff is a water-s...

To be honest, I'm so proud that I remembered this. I get distracted so easily by things that "need" to be done and I get going on other projects and forget about my resolution to take some time for hobbies. But I am proud to announce that I DID NOT CAN ANYTHING TODAY!!! Shocking, I know. So, I spent most of the day in the sewing room. First the August scarf got a few rows: but I thought it had a pretty good chance of some knitting tonight before bed, so I moved on to..... The Christmas quilt top I started back in January ! (And if you're wondering how long it took for there to be a cat on it, 23 seconds tops.) This took as much time as it took me to walk downstairs for more coffee, locate a new bottle of distilled water for the iron, fill the iron, and get back to the sewing room. Makes you wonder what the state of affairs might have been had I decided to throw in a load of laundry as well, doesn't it? I knew I wanted to do a one-inch sash followed by a wid...

OK, I had my to-do list all lined up for the day......and most of it didn't happen. Want to know what did happen? KNITTING! That's right--I actually sat down with sticks and strings and added some length to the August scarf while TOTALLY IGNORING my list. Which is all my book club's fault. I have been a member of a book club for around 10 years. At first we were quite diligent & even did some research on the books or came to meetings with printed discussion questions. Then as we grew closer & started experiencing more life events together, the book discussions grew shorter, the meetings moved to evenings in order to accommodate wine, and personal life discussions took center stage. Then for several years we became "The Group Formerly Known As Book Club," which was perhaps more appropriately named but less diligent about getting together. I think it struck us as odd to have regular bi-monthly meetings to NOT discuss books. This summer, however, we h...

Which is in the dryer right now, so you'll have to take my word for it, but I got the clothes done under the one-month-late deadline (the ON TIME gift idea being completely foreign to me) and now 4 more yards of fabric are out of the sewing room. Yippee!!! That one still can't even see the floor is a topic for another day.... [And incidentally, due to the differences in language usages between English-speaking countries, if you logged on yesterday to find that I had announced that my loving spouse had underwear, I apologize. He does, of course, but this isn't really that sort of blog.....] I also finished up the second skein of yarn on the August scarf, so I got to move ALL the tallies today--a big day for me indeed. Still, I'm missing a bit of the crafting drive I had last year, which I think is because I don't have a goal for the number of projects to finish this year. So, in my normal this-sounds-like-a-good-idea-right-now sort of spirit, my crafting goal f...

....but I don't knit as much as I used to. I use to do it on lunch breaks from work--and in the last year at my job, it was basically to break up the misery of trying to sell large phone systems in an economy where no companies could get credit, no one was sure what the future would bring, and the contacts I had at companies were disappearing on a regular basis. Knitting brought me sanity. Now I'm not working, I have planted a garden TWICE the size of last year's garden, and I don't seem to be as stressed. Either that or with this much garden, sanity is not really welcome around here right now........

Finishing Friday worked!!!! The pants are done and the shirt is past the collar!!!! Shirt collars are perhaps my least favorite part of sewing. It's a close race between zippers of any sort and shirt collars. Luckily, women's clothes rarely have them. Unluckily, Andy positively refuses to wear women's clothes, so I am stuck with shirt collars. I don't know why they bother me so much. Maybe it's that whole trying-to-get-pointy-collars thing, or that they are always two-part unless your spouse is more tolerant of Mandarin collars than mine is. Maybe it's that they are so tricky, and unlike zippers, are extremely noticeable, so all errors really must be fixed. At any rate, forcing myself to sit down at the sewing machine for two hours got me through it. And the threat of dragging out the silky blouse-that-must-not-be-named if I gave up on it didn't hurt any. Now I just have the sleeves to attach, buttonholes to make, and a shirt hem to do. Yay! And a...