Month: July 2022

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Coming Along

So, the work is coming along. OK, it’s not going as quickly as I thought. In fact, it is going so slowly, I’ve had to add more work to motivate me to get stuff done. It is almost August, the store officially opens August 1 and there’s 13 items there. Not enough to generate real interest. In truth, it’s going to be a few days before I get something new in there.

You remember this from a few posts back.

Now it looks like this. There’s another square behind it and a third square on the needles. These squares are pinned to my KnitPicks blocking mats. It might seem like the work is steady since there is a third square but it’s been a couple of weeks now and it hasn’t moved much.

I started a another afghan, this time a ripple one, for a friend who is off to college. And I am designing some faith based journal/planner digital stickers. The stickers are part of the planned inventory. The afghans may be as well as a customizable custom order thing. I know I want to do afghans again. While I like Caron Big Cakes, this color is kind of muddy and I am thinking to use some solid cream colors blocks to brighten it up a bit.

It’s probably a good thing I have until October. Lucas leaves in August. We are giving him a send off at church at the end of the month so that one has to be done in a few weeks. Didn’t take a photo of it. Not much to see anyway. But I will do an in progress shot and show it for the next time.

In the meantime, I’ve redone my budget. Let’s just say it’s so tight, I can’t afford to look at anything let alone buy it. I have to figure out how to get the income in.

 

 

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This Looks Familiar

This looks familiar…this pattern looks familiar. It’s not a knit or crochet pattern. It’s a behavorial pattern. Remember when I said I needed a new hobby? It was reading. Remeber? I thought reading would be fun and relaxing and something I could get back into. I still believe it could be all those things. 

The problem (one of them) with technology is that when you go on the interweb and you select something – like a book – then your email gets all these notifications about these new books. And just like with yarn, I now have a stash of books on my iPad just waiting for me to get to. Granted, a great many of these books were free and very few of them cost over a couple of dollars but I don’t know when I am going to get to them.

Kind of like these yarn beauties. I still have them; haven’t used them – or much of them. I couldn’t quite tell you where they are. Well, I kinda could. Before anyone asks, the yarn in the mesh bags came from Paintbox yarns. The others came from a JoAnn sale that was about two years ago – maybe longer.

I think my point, if there is a point, is that this is a compulsive behavior. An addiction of sorts that I have to nip in the bud. Even if the books are free, if I am not going to use them, I’m just contributing to the clutter.

This may even apply to yarn. (I heard the collective gasp and I feel your pain.) But it’s true. I still prowl the yarn sites as if I need or want new fiber to come and just sit in my studio. I have not yet made new purchases and I am determined not to. This behavior will be modified. I will gladly knit and read what I have on hand. When there is room – meaning when the clutter is cleared – I will add to both stashes. I am determined.

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Somebody’s Getting Married

Somebody’s getting married! Not me. I’m already married. One of my doctors. Emily takes my INR every month and her finger’s been itching for that engagement and wedding ring for a little bit now. She got it last year and the wedding is a mere 4 months away. I, in an unusal turn, have already started knitting her wedding afghan.

It’s what I do for weddings. I make the couple an afghan. And in a weird twist, I make it out of yarn I already have on hand. Now, for this one, I admit I went out and purchased three different tones of gray because Emily likes gray. But when I got them home, I pulled out some Caron Big Cake that I already have and settled down to begin the work.

I had in mind I wanted to do an afghan with squares instead of doing it all in one piece. I went online to find a pattern (not to follow cuz I write patterns but I don’t follow them atleast not stitch for stitch. I wanted to affirm the image I had in my mind. I settled on this one from Yarnspirations.

It was so pretty and just what I had in mind. I printed it out with the idea that although I knew I wasn’t going to use all the squares they had or at least not do them the way they did them, I might knit up at least one of the squares. And I did!! Not the one you see here. That’s from another book. What I ended up deciding is the knit the squares from the book and the website. I am using the yarn from that little sliver of the afghan you can see off to the right. It was a wip a bit back and it was never going to be made so the yarn is now going into this afghan.

I don’t think there’s enough of the frogged afghan to make the 20 squares needed for the new one. I have some cream yarn sitting in the stash that can help balance stuff out and brighten it up. It should be beautiful. I am enjoying working on it. I hope I am not tempting the knit goddesses by starting this so far ahead of time. They wouldn’t do anything to curse a wedding. Would they?

 

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Water Blogged

I am water blogged; I mean water logged. Let me explain. I started Intermediate Fasting for the second time. I gave it a try and decided it wouldn’t work. Then, one day it occured to me, I was doing some form of it naturally so I incorporated it back into being and I enjoy it. Not that it doesn’t present me with challenges but it seems to be effective.

I have an app (of course, there’s an app for it) and it, along with my doctor and nutritionist, talk about hydration incessantly. So, I set the app to notify me to hydrate. There I was sitting and knitting when I heard a funny sound coming from the phone. It took me a moment to realize it was the sound of water being poured into a glass. That was the notification to hydrate – every hour. I don’t jump up and drink when I hear it but if I am not in the midst of drinking something when it goes off, I dutifully  saunder and get either juice, tea or water. (The current drink is water.) I go and log it in on the app.

To give an update, here are three selfies that I took a while ago. It doesn’t show a huge loss – this isn’t a complaint. I find this entire process fascinating – but every pound lost is a golden thread to me.Sometimes the results come slowly. I am currently in a loss spiral and where as it took a month to lost the seven lbs in that photo, I am almost seven pounds down this month. Like I said, fascinating.

Back to the hydration. They say keeping hydrated is a hunger blocker and that’s no joke because I am feeling full. I was also feeling a little peckish a minute ago and the water with a single sheet of graham crackers knocked that edge off until dinner.

But what about knitting and crochet?

OK, check out the items in the shop. Continues to grow. We will get back to that in the next post. Promise.