September 19

Yesterday, I sat in meetings for 4.5 hours. Seriously. I did manage to get my 10K steps because I took a HUGE walk. I managed to get both bathrooms cleaned in anticipation of a sleepover (that we’ve now had to postpone—more on that later). I also talked both girls into doing a fitting on their PJ pants, which was harder than it should have been. Despite being sore from yoga, I did three 30 second planks.
However, I got rid of nothing. (unless you count the gross stuff in bathroom cleaning- which I do not)

Today I have a kid home sick. I don’t keep kids home lightly, and I should have kept her sister home a day last week. I think, given the fun stuff at school today (They were going to EAT mealworms) and the sleepover which I said I’d postpone if she stayed home, she probably really feels crappy. Probably I am the parent everyone hates, sending kids in when they are sneezing or coughing but the reality is that if I kept a kid home every single time they were runny nose, cough, sneezing—they’d stay home most of the winter.

Anyway, today I’ll declutter and plank, and get my 10K steps. I’ll finish the pj pants, and maybe start some new ones. I need to go to work. Most of what I need to do I can do from home, but I guess I’ll need to arrange someone to stay with my poor sick kid for what I need to go in for. I’d like to update the decluttering blog.

I had her take some pictures of my dahlia cardigan. I finished this back in March—and I posted pictures but they all had strings that I hadn’t weaved in. So I was thinking I should take some new pictures not that it is totally finished and my ends are weaved in and the provisional cast on is off. The upside to having a tween stay home, is that you can usually bribe her to take your picture. And she may make you laugh even.

September 9

Yesterday turned out to be a really fun day. I canned 9 pints of peaches, took a 12 mile bike ride, planked 75 seconds, and got my 10K steps. No decluttering, but I did update my decluttering blog. On the surface, it looks wonderful, but it was a day for piling on the stuff for today. And the 10K steps only came because I paced for about 15 minutes before bed.

pints!

Today, I have the rest of the peaches to deal with. A staggering amount still. I was thinking about running, but any exercise is really going to need to wait until the peaches are done. I figured yesterday that it takes an hour for one batch (3 pints) and then 1/2 hour for each subsequent batch as long as i keep working. If I take a break (say for a bike ride or lunch or whatever) it stretches the time out.

So we'll stick with todays goals being, finish the peaches, run if I have time, plank (maybe some sets of 30 seconds), get my 10k steps and get rid of two items of "clutter." I have a bunch of other stuff to take care of today --starting with cleaning up the kitchen from last night (I had a meeting), and moving to putting in some hours at my work, so we'll see.

My kitchen smells GOOD I tell you.

project on hold

I'm nearly done with the first of the kid sweaters. I had an entire skein of yarn left and so offered to add a hood. The hood offer was accepted, and so I started knitting a hood.

Yesterday, I was knitting what I felt must be about the last few rows on the hood and then tried the sweater on my daughter. She complained that the sleeves were too short (which means they actually came to the perfect sleeve length--a first for me!), us agreeing that perhaps an additional 1.5 inches couldn't hurt, and then I put the hood on her.

"Almost there!" I chirped.
"not if you expect me to *wear* it" she snarls back.

Oh my.

We've dealt with increasing sassiness, increasing rudeness before, but never have I been so shocked and quite frankly devastated. How long have I been planning this sweater, so everything is just right? Months. I've been actually knitting less than a month, but I agonized over style and swatches and patterns before I started actually knitting. What came next was me slipping it from her shoulders and as calmly as I could saying, "I don't really feel like knitting more on this tonight. I think I'm done working on this for now."
Of course there was more, she's had this attitude for a while and this wasn't the first incidence of her rudeness even last evening. But man that hurt.

So here's what is left to do: lengthen the sleeves, finish the hood, add the button bands/edging. However, I think I'll be setting this aside for a while and maybe working on her sister's sweater. I don't like knitting something when I feel angry or resentful. Plus, even though she apologized (and honestly not the snooty one that came when I called her on this), I think I still need some time.

blah

I'm feeling like I'm in a knitting ... well rut isn't the right word. I want to knit something, but all that I have yarn for is socks... well and a sweater or two. So I knit a sock:


The yarn is Felici from Knit picks. The pattern is a basic toe up from interweave knits. The second one is on the needles now, but it suddenly got hot here in the North and so now if I wear socks it looks more like this:


Which honestly isn't making me wanting to crank out the socks. I have some laceweight yarn and Elizabeth Zimmerman claims shawls are the perfect summer knit. I love lace, but I'm not sure I'm a shawl wearer. Which is also making me less likely to want to knit a shawl.

I did however finish the Retro Redux shrug from Lace style:



And I really like it--especially with my new dress.



Right now the only thing I want to knit is another shrug or lace jacket or something in the purple of the dress. I have no yarn in that purple right now, and no way to get any until late next week. Plus I don't exactly have a pattern picked out. I'm kinda in a rotten mood about it too. I know I'd feel better if I knit, but I don't feel like knitting (well except for that imaginary perfect purple shrug-like thing). Kind of a catch-22.
I'm sure I'll snap out of it, just as I'm sure I'll be knitting socks all summer long.

knitting blahs

I'm in a knitting rut. And a knitting slump

I think it started with the ill fated skirt. Then it moved onto a pair of socks that I was knitting that seem a bit snug. Then I thought why am I always knitting socks?

Well, I can save you many days of soul searching and tell you that I am always knitting socks for these reasons:
1) I wear socks almost every day
2) I have a ton of sock yarn
3) socks are portable
4) I have a ton of sock yarn
5) Socks are easy to do while watching TV
6) I have a ton of sock yarn.

You get the picture.
Seriously I spent 2 days trying to figure out something non-sock to knit. And I realized, I don't wear that many scarves or shawls, and I can't knit lace or anything complicated while I watch TV (looking at you dollar and a half cardigan). I don't have a lot of yarn for mid-sized projects--either socks or one-skein things or sweaters.

I have three balls of Muench Touch me, and toyed with a velvety scarf. And I could not for the life of me think about where I might wear such a thing in MAY. And of course I *could* save it for winter, but please, I want something I can appreciate NOW, not 5 months from now (oy, really 5 months from now I'll be wearing a scarf--yeah probably). I also have some leftover yarn--Briar rose Sonoma I think--that I have mittens and scarf from, but was thinking I had enough for some sort of hat-like thing. Again, 5 months.

Then it hit me. I have 2 skeins of Malbrigio silky wool In a beautiful purple. Surely I could get a small shrug out of it and certainly it would match the bits of purple flowers in the dress I bought to replace the ill-fated skirt. Well, yes and no. Yes, I probably had enough to make a small shrug. Like the small one in Lace Style which is not pictured in that link... But the purple wasn't quite the right purple. The purple bits in the dress are more red. And if I could tell that before I pulled the dress out of the bedroom (and into the sunny living room) then you know it was off. But I also noticed that there was some olive green in it too (and black and white--mostly black and white with a few purple flowers with olive leaves) and I have some olive yarn.

The yarn is Elle Aran gold and it is acrylic. I've knit with it before though and find it to be a lot sproingyier than most acrylics. In fact I made a whole sweater from it, which I actually still like and wear on a regular basis (wore it this week even). Of course it was a dead match for the olive in the dress, how could it not be. How could my expensive really want to create something lovely from it yarn be so far off as to be funny, and my cheap (purchased at a LYS closeout sale) acrylic match perfect? Well that's the way of things. Plus I had enough for the retro redux shrug pictured in the link above.

I was intrigued. I was interested. I swatched. I started dreaming of how I would look the NEXT time I wore that dress (which is in 10 days most likely). And I cast on, more excited about this project than I have been since I messed up the toe on that last sock and it the wall with my sewing.

Although, if anyone has a non scarf option for the lovely purple Malbrigio silky wool--I have 2 skeins which makes about 300 yards (274m) of a dk weight yarn, leave it in the comments. Oh heck, if you have a scarf pattern that I can wear in early fall--say September let me know about that too.