It is March in Colorado, which means we are in the midst of endless weather adventure. This last week we experienced a march of weather fronts that came through the state with wind, wind, and more wind. It was sunny but still miserable for cats and people.
It was so windy the cats were afraid to go outside. I finally made Morgan a little fort by hanging a blanket over the patio table and chairs: he stayed in his fort most of the day Tuesday! Here he is under the table sitting on a chair under the blanket.
I was pretty miserable myself. Usually my joints are OK, but this week all of my tendons took to hurting. Gee, there are a lot of tendons in a human body! Not only did my hands and wrists hurt, but so did my knees, hips, feet… well, pretty much if it moves, it hurt. I finally had to resort to pain killers and spent a lot of time in bed this week.
Hello books! I polished off the last two books in this series of murder action/thriller books. These are fast reads and aren’t literary masterpieces (the authors did not spend great blocks of time agonizing over the correct descriptive phrases to use…), but they were just the ticket for me. All right, they were actually kind of silly and predictable, sort of like a racy (and totally unrealistic) detective show on television, but exactly the type of mindless escapism that I needed with sore knees and aching hands.MacKenzie spent the whole time laying on my legs while I was reading. He’s kind of like a purring, foot-kneading heating pad. What a good cat he is!!Thursday I crawled out to the grocery store and found this wonderful little rose bush there while I was loading the cart with the essentials of life: chocolate, soup and guacamole dip. Hey, my knees hurt!!Cheered up by the roses I took on a little job: look at this disaster of a pantry. There was no room to put away my new bag of corn chips for the guacamole! Clearly a crisis.Look what I accomplished in a half hour! OK, there were three bags of trash to take out. I really don’t think that I should eat food that is over 10 years old, do you?Friday it snowed 6 inches and oddly enough my hands felt better. Time to be productive: I made myself some cute soup bowl pot holders to use in the microwave. These are the most useful little items ever. My hands don’t grip well in the best of times, and this week they were really unhappy. These holders allow me to handle the hot bowls of soup with zero risk of accidents! The pattern was online and really easy to sew. I made two holders in about 90 minutes using fabric and batting from my stash. The pattern is from Seams Happy and can be located here.Last night I returned to knitting and made some progress on my “Waiting for Rain” shawl Look at that short row lace! It is much easier than it looks.and look at how nice my new stitch markers look on the lace!Now it is Saturday, the snow is almost melted away, and the sky is blue and sunny. Look closely at the left end of the tree branch. No, not the white patch of snow, the other end of the branches. Can you almost see the beak? That my friend is the FIRST ROBIN OF SPRING! He was on the ground when I first saw him, but for some crazy reason he flew as I stalked crept up to try to get the picture. Still, I can absolutely verify that he is a robin.
That’s right, it is now spring. We are in for weeks of chaotic weather, but the plants will be coming back to life, the birds will be arriving soon, and I can’t help but be happy. Today my hands feel fine, I’m going to heat up some soup for dinner using my new bowl holders, and then I have a beautiful shawl to knit.
It turns out that this was a pretty good week after all.
I started knitting my new shawl over the weekend. The colors are really cool. Check this out:
This is the beginning of “Waiting for Rain” by Sylvia Bo Bilvia. That cool yarn is “Garden Party” colored Lydia Sock Yarn.
I grabbed the shot of the knitting just as the sun was getting ready to set, but you can see the great way the flecks of color are showing up in the white yarn. I just love it! I can’t wait to get to the part of the shawl where the lace inserts appear. There are short rows coming, too. Fun!
Today my wrists were sore when I woke up so I decided to take a break from the weaving and knitting today. I vacuumed. I did laundry. I cut out some fabrics to do some sewing later on this week. I also took out my new beads and decided that it was time to make some more stitch markers.
These are currently my favorite little stitch markers. They are simple, light weight and perfect for projects using fine yarn like socks and fingerless mitts. The largest bead is a 6mm Swarovski cubic crystal bead. I picked it up at a local store and have never seen them again.A couple of weeks ago I decided to just order some more cubic beads from Amazon.com so I could make new stitch markers. It took almost three weeks for them to arrive. Oh. Who knew they would be shipped from Hong Kong?!Here’s what was in the envelope. Two of these bead sets came. Sweet! Eight new stitch markers waiting to be made!I cleaned out my beading supplies a few weeks ago. Here’s the little drawer that I keep everything in. I need to use the needle nose pliers and the wire cutters to make the markers along with the beads and wire.I made little piles on the table of the bead colors thought I might use along with 2″ headpins and small stainless steel split rings. The rings that I used have an inner diameter of .25″.After playing around a little I finally settled on a combination of beads that I liked. I threaded them onto the headpins with the largest bead at the bottom. This was just personal taste: I could have also put small beads below the largest bead.Using my little jewelry pliers to anchor the wire I made a 90 degree bend in the headpin wire with my fingers about 1/4 inch above the beads, and then…I wrapped the wire around the headpin a couple of times using my fingers to wrap the wire while holding the loop at the top with the pliers. Easy-peasy!I cut the excess wire off after finishing the wrap. This is the only dicey part of the entire operation: you should wear safety glasses when you do this because the wire can fly across the table when you cut it. I try to hold the end of the wire when I make the cut, but you never know. Safety first! I even put the cats outside while I was working.All that was left to do was to thread the marker onto a split ring and they were done. Ta-da! I now have cute markers to use while knitting my “Waiting for Rain” shawl.
Won’t these look cute on my lace shawl?
Can’t wait to get back to knitting. My wrists are feeling better already. Maybe tomorrow. 🙂
I have been knitting on mitts like crazy, but for some reason I have shifted my interest to shawls. Seriously, I am dreaming about lacy shawls and the yarns in the stash. Must. Have. A. New. Shawl. It is a serious case of shawl longing for sure. It is less than a month from the Interweave Yarn Fest and I need to be flashing a new shawl when I go. It’s a matter of pride.
And besides, it is raining outside today. Gloomy. Cold. I can’t be expected to knit in these conditions. I need to go on a pattern hunt and then it is time for some serious stash shopping.
Lydia Sock Yarn in the colorways “Garden Party” and “Forbidden Fruit”
I think that the whole “I need to knit a shawl” thing started when I saw this yarn at the local yarn shop. Doesn’t it look like a great warm weather shawl? I want the body of the shawl to be in the light color and the bright yarn will be used for some type of color pop. Maybe knitted lace at the bottom of the shawl can be in the bright color. I have some shawls in my shopping cart at Ravelry (OK. There are 58 items in the shopping cart. Some of those must be shawls, right?), so I headed on over there to see what I could find buy.
Image credit: Softsweater
We have a winner! This is Waiting for Rain by Sylvia Bo Bilvia. I’ll be adding lace to the bottom and maybe some other pops of the bright color yarn. I bought several other shawl patterns that were in my cart while I was there with a smoking PayPal account. Here they are:
Well, once I had all of those patterns printed out I headed up to the stash to dig around and match yarns with the patterns. My stash is in the walk-in closet in the spare bedroom, so I took my laptop and a latte up with me and dived in.
As I matched yarns with the patterns I entered them into my queue on Ravelry. How organized is that?! I was digging through lots of yarn as I made my decisions so I just gave up and…worked on the floor of the stash room surrounded by little tubs of yarn as I made decisions and assembled the kits for the shawls.This is one of the shawl kits. I have the yarn for “Waiting for Rain” together with the pattern and the needles that I am going to use. This is the shawl that I plan on starting as soon as I’m done with the current projects. (I may even be able to stick to this plan… mostly. I can cast on a few more projects this week too, right?) I have the yarn and patterns for “Exploration Station” and “Solaris” also in this kit, but am still deciding on the final yarns that I will use. “Exploration Station” is the one that is the hardest for me to make a decision on: a new yarn color may need to acquired.The other shawl that I am dying to cast on is this Best Friends Shawl that I plan to get done in time for a friend’s birthday. The pattern is for two shawls with the colors reversed. My friend will get one one and I get to keep the other. It will be great!! I can’t wait to see how these two colors play together. I put this shawl in the number 2 slot in the queue.
I am so fired up and energized to get knitting on the new shawl projects. Check out my Ravelry queue; it is now really shawl intensive. This afternoon the sun came out and I spent some time knitting on the current projects. I do believe that I will have some FOs to show off by the end of the week.
Yarn, Books & Roses 