A Little Yarn On The Side

I'm not sure I'll have a prouder accomplishment all year--or a more surprising one.  I think I have a few fingerprints left. Andy is gone for the weekend, so the kitties and I are having a crafting weekend.  With their help,  I finished the first project of the year. The colors are a bit more subdued in real life, but I don't know how to reduce the intensity of this cell phone's camera.  I also cut some more strips for other projects, and wound another Hank from Hell:  A couple years ago I bought some Feza Rio that was on clearance, and for a cashmere/merino blend, it's not at all soft, and until this yarn, I didn't know one could hank yarn badly, but there does seem to be a way to do it so unevenly that permanent kinks are put into the yarn, and if that weren't enough fun, rather than being normal human beings who tie the ends into the threads holding the hank in place, these deranged maniacs tied the two ends together and snipped off the end...

Happy new year everyone! So, I didn't reach either of my crafting goals for last year, but I did use up 96 yards of fabric, which would really be making a dent in the stash if I hadn't also bought quite a bit of fabric last year.  Oops. There were a few late-finish projects, like another teal rope bowl, more flannel pajamas which I am currently wearing, and another rope bowl which was promptly gifted: Since I had to work the day after and day before Christmas, we decided to not have our traditional open house & game night, and instead had fun making homemade falafel and pitas--with Charlie helping herself to a pita, hanging out in the trees, helping organize the sewing room, and enjoying some new toys from a friend: Valentino has been slowest to warm to Charlie, probably because HE was the baby before her, but she's determined to wear him down: For New Year's Eve, I won a trip for two to Phoenix to attend a Jim Brickman concert (enter to...

It’s hard to say when a house starts to really feel like home, but if it’s when one starts having to fix things, then this was the year we settled into the new house.  2019 started off with a roof leak into our dining room, the death of my old washing machine, and a leak under the sink, so we’re very, VERY settled into the new house. And just in case we weren’t, in August we adopted a stray kitten we found (Charlie) who is busily tearing apart anything left standing.  For those counting, Charlie brings the feline population to 4, though some days it feels more like 9 or 10, especially during shedding season.. Andy continues liking his new job, and is enjoying being close to Bogus Basin and ran to work regularly in order to train for the Mesa Falls Marathon in August (in the mountains, so not as hot as that sounds).  For those not familiar, Mesa Falls is in eastern Idaho near Ashton, where the interstate gives up and goes back to being a highway.  We found a very char...

December 1, and yesterday I finished projects 40:  41: and 42: and I am taking a vacation day tomorrow.  There's a shirt I finally got cut out in spite of Charlie's help, and there could be some machine embroidery..... Hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving.  We went to the family ranch for what will hopefully be the last Thanksgiving there.  Theoretically, the ranch is finally sold, though it was supposed to close last week and didn't so one never knows.  We only spent one night there, partly because with the television on all the time and my family's tendency to squabble over even little things, it was loud and exhausting, but also because Charlie was spayed last weekend and we were attempting to keep her quiet.  which is a lot to ask of a kitten who has just discovered that she can climb the 9-foot Christmas tree.   You can perhaps guess how far up the smaller tree she gets:  It seems this tree is the perfect plac...

As you might have guessed from the general lack of activity on this blog, the new job is pretty demanding.  October was our big "sale," so there was tons of pressure to get everything signed leading up to it, but of course now that it's over, the pressure hasn't let up.  Plus they're remodeling the office to an "open office" design--throwing out, of course, the egalitarian origins of no offices for management--and just taking away all personal space from the sales team.  Originally, they were just going to send us home to work during the remodel, but then no one could micromanage, so even though there's no real space,we're expected to show up and work in the office, regardless.  Did I mention that I think we're up to 11 or 12 people leaving just since I started? I've been knitting a lot to reduce stress, which really isn't helping, though I'm getting a sweater out of it:  The back and now both fronts are done, and I'm wor...

It's September, and I'm 14 projects away from my goal of 50, and 5 projects away from my goal of 6 finished quilts, sweaters, or shawls.  And I have a new helper: Believe it or not, I am making some progress on quilting the dragonfly quilt, partly because Charlie can sleep/play under the table I bought for the new machine, and I can still actually quilt--unlike her version of helping me cut fabric: I don't have a picture of her "helping" me knit because I'm diving to save the yarn too quickly.  She can hear me taking knitting out of the bag from across the house, so the only knitting I'm really doing is in my car or outside, which at least is getting easier now that it's no longer 100 degrees, but I'm still not that close to finishing a sweater right now.    To preserve my sanity speed things up, rather than using the quarter-inch channels I'm using on the squares, I did half-inch channels for one side of the blocks,    ...

Back in 2007, I started a pair of flannel pajamas for Andy as a Christmas present out of what I thought was a fun coffee print, only to discover after making the pants, that I was about a yard short for the top.  We searched Joann stores everywhere, friends searched--nothing.  Three years later , I gave up and bought some brown flannel.  Andy actually never wears brown because his mom insisted on dressing him in brown when he was a kid and he's never worn it since, but for the sake of a finished set of pajamas, he agreed to try.  However, when I started cutting, I found I hadn't bought enough of the ugly brown flannel either!   And it was probably around this time when I discovered I didn't know where the pajama-top-in-progress was, so mixing the two fabrics was out.  When Andy and I were driving back from our trip to Ashton and Yellowstone, we stopped along the way for lunch in a town that just happened to have a Joanns, and by this time I'd acquired ...