Portable North Pole

My cousin turned me on to this, and it's the coolest Christmas thing ever.

Portable North Pole

Fill out some information about your child, upload some photos, and Santa sends a personalized video message. My five-year-old loved it! She sat watching, amazed that Santa had her photo, called her by name, told her all about her school, the things she'd done all year, what she wanted for Christmas, etc etc. Her eyes lit up as he spoke to her, and she nodded along in answer to his questions of "You're five years old, right?" and "Do you think you've been nice enough?" She got so excited that she decided to make him a video message in return. She said, "Santa showed me his office, so I'm going to show him my room." It was truly magical.

Merry Christmas, and may the magic of the season be with us all.

Our First Christmas Card of the Season

And my five-year-old came racing through the house waving it like a banner and shouting, "Look, Mommy, it's the Baby Genius!"

You Know What Happens When You Blink...

You miss it.

It feels like all I've done since my last blog post is blink, but it's nearly Christmas and where the heck has all that time gone?

It's been a strange fall. Strange and hectic. With both girls in school, I've had to adjust to a whole new schedule, and I still don't feel settled in. Big Girl goes to school 5 afternoons a week, and quite frankly, I think I'm as grateful for half-day kindergarten as she is. I just don't know how little kids do the full-day school thing. There are some days that she comes home so exhausted that she just falls right asleep. Fortunately, she really likes school; she's in a great class with an excellent teacher, she's made lots of friends and her only complaint is that some of the "big girls" (first graders) on the bus ride home are mean to her. My 81-year-old mom's advice to her: "Don't take anything from anybody. If anybody bothers you, punch 'em in the nose." That, as DH commented, is old-skool. It's also, I patiently explained to my mother, not exactly tolerated in schools these days. Although, honestly, it kills me to hear about kids being mean to my kid. Just kills me. Fortunately, Big Girl is not the punch-'em-in-the-nose type, although if she were, those other kids might think twice before being mean to her.

Little Z is now in pre-school two mornings a week. She's one of the "babies" of the class since her birthday is in October and she wasn't even 3 yet when the school year started. She also loves school; she's already got her little group of friends and she comes home full of talk about Katherine, her best buddy, and the others. Nobody is mean in pre-school. The teachers don't allow it, and the kids are so very supervised that not much happens under the radar. Little Z is definitely the punch-'em-in-the-nose type, so I think I'll have both more and less to worry about when it's her turn to start riding the school bus with the big kids.

And me? I'm still struggling with carpal tunnel, or whatever the pain in my hands is that I've yet to see a doctor about. I continue wearing braces and trying to vary my fiber routine, switching from knitting to weaving to spinning to just plain resting, hoping that eventually things will work themselves out. Yes, I can indeed spell "denial," and why do you ask?

But, I'm busy working on Christmas gifts: hats for DH and the girls (all finished, thankfully), socks for Mom (also finished) and Aunt C (unfortunately not), and maybe even Abi Grasso stripey watermelon socks for the girls if I can get to them before the 25th. I feel lucky. I feel blessed. We're all together at the end of the year, and I'm thankful for all that we have and all that we have to look forward to.

If only I could keep from blinking.

First Day of School

Kindergarten...riding the school bus all by herself...every penny spent on pre-K more than worth the moment when she stepped on board without a tear or a backwards glance, waving good-bye, excited beyond belief to be heading to her first day of school.

My Day in Pictures

Omega

I teach. The pay sucks, the benefits (as a teacher at a university, as opposed to, say, a public school) are minimal and my own personal commute is pretty ridiculous.

One bright spot, however, is our faculty spending account. Every year, we get a certain amount to spend on "professional development." While the administration has gone all Ebenezer Scrooge on technology purchases (as though having access to a computer doesn't contribute to the teaching effectiveness of the faculty), they are simply delighted to send us to professional development workshops. Which is how I wound up spending a week last summer at the Omega Institute, taking a Spanish Immersion class.

The class absolutely blew, which was shocking considering the fact that I'd loved every class I'd ever taken at Omega up till that point. The rest of the class agreed with me, and when we went en masse to complain we were each given a free R&R weekend as compensation.

I just came back from mine.

R&R at Omega is lovely. No schedules, nowhere you have to be, no one you have to answer to. I timed it so as to be there the same weekend as a colleague who was taking an actual workshop and who I love to pieces, and it wound up being the perfect combination of alone time and friend time.

I arrived late Friday and enjoyed dinner and some quiet knitting time with my audiobook (Scott Sigler's Nocturnal) in the Ram Das Library. When I started feeling sleepy, I headed back over to my single dorm room for a little spinning out on the front deck, then settled in for a good night's sleep.

I woke at 6:45am, no alarm, no kids jumping all over me demanding breakfast, nothing but soft light coming in around the edges of the windowshades and a desperate need to pee. Breakfast with my friend, then knitting in the organic vegetable and flower garden, followed by a group reiki session and more knitting, this time in a comfy hammock down by the lake. I went to lunch only when the first drops of rain started to fall,rousting me from my spot under the trees.

I spent Saturday afternoon knitting, drinking tea and browsing the shelves in the Omega shop for small gifts for the girls and DH. After dinner -- all vegetarian, organic, locally-sourced and absolutely delicious food, as always -- the evening found me again at the library, knitting, then back at my room, spinning.

Sunday, my last day, was cloudy, but I still woke to the gentle morning light at around 6:45am. I spent the entire morning except for meals down at the lake, swinging in a hammock and putting the finishing touches on the socks I'd been working on all weekend. By the time I left after lunch, just ahead of an approaching storm, I'd been thoroughly rested, relaxed and pampered.

Here's what I have to show for it:

First and foremost, Mom's socks. She picked the yarn out last Christmas -- a colorway so totally unlike her that at first I thought she was joking. But for some strange reason, my plain-vanilla mom wants some funky rainbow socks, so who am I to argue? I just put them up to block tonight, and once the ends are woven in I'll tuck them away for this year's Christmas present. Score one for me for being ahead of the game!

Four ounces of Crown Mountain Farms Targhee singles in the Woodstock colorway, from their 2010 Fiber Club. This was an absolute breeze to spin and felt like it took no time at all. I didn't get crazy about setting up a control card or being super-duper careful to make all the singles exactly the same grist; I just let it flow, and it was so much fun I didn't want to stop. I actually spun up the second bobbin here at home in just the couple of days since I've been back, a true feat since I rarely get much spinning time around the house. I'm planning to spin up another 4 ounce bump of CMF, this one a lovely Polwarth in various purple tones, also from this year's Fiber Club. At the end of it all, I plan to 4-ply the singles to get what I hope will be a nice, lofty worsted-weight yarn.

And finally, this. My latest podiobook, Nocturnal. DH loves Scott Sigler, but I got totally turned off from him when I tried to listen to Infected, which is gory, to say the least. Nocturnal is pretty gory as well, but for some reason I got completely hooked into the story. As a kid, I was always a sci-fi/fantasy/horror junkie, so I think I'm just returning to my roots. I listened to what must have been something like 30+ hours of audio during a single weekend, and I didn't want the story to end. I absolutely love audiobooks and podiobooks. My latest pick is a classic: Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

And all this productivity has allowed me to get started on yet another shawl: a Blue Curacao in Misti Alpaca Worsted. So far, nearly a dozen rows in, it looks like this:

Not incredibly impressive, I know. But just you wait. This shawl is gonna be a knockout.

Now if only I had another weekend of alone time to work on it.

Hold the Mayo...and the Dessert

Sugar makes me crazy. Not crazy like my toddlers get crazy when they have one too many spoonfuls of sprinkles on their ice-cream sundaes. No, this is a slower, more insidious crazy. The kind of crazy that you know is taking over, but still you keep going with it because, well, that's what the crazy is, after all...crazy.

Now, you have to understand something about me. I grew up in a house with two parents who grew up during the height of the Great Depression. They ate mayonnaise sandwiches and made tomato soup out of ketchup and re-used teabags when they were kids. Let no one ever tell you that growing up poor doesn't do something to the way you look at food as an adult.

What it did to my parents was make them rather...liberal...in what they considered a healthy meal. If it was filling and home-cooked (my mother never did and never has prepared a meal out of a box), it was nutritious. Which is why I spent my childhood fervently believing that a big ol' piece of apple pie , warmed up just enough to melt a slice of American cheese on top and served with a nice, tall glass of whole milk was a perfectly acceptable breakfast. As both my parents attested, it had all four food groups: fruit, grain, dairy and -- since pie crust is made with lard, yanno -- meat. Bill Cosby does a famous bit about how as a father he fed his kids chocolate cake for breakfast because it covered all the food groups. Well, in my house, it was no joke. All our food was home-cooked from the best of the full-fat, high-calorie foods around. None of us ever thought anything of it.

We were also a family of late-night eaters. Oh, we had our meals early and like clockwork. Since Dad worked nights, Mom got up at the crack of dawn to get breakfast on the table by 6am, when he got home. We had dinner together every night at 5pm exactly, never any earlier (except for Sundays, when "dinner" was served between 2 and 3) and certainly never any later. But eating that early means you tend to get hungry again right around 9 or so, and that's when Mom would bring out the cookie jar. Or the frozen Sara Lee. Or the ice cream. You get the drift.

It didn't hurt that Mom was naturally skinny. When she got married at 22, she weighed 99 pounds and had a 22 inch waist. As a kid, she was under doctors orders to drink a milkshake every day to put some weight on her. Naturally skinny my dad was not, and I definitely take after him in the metabolism department. Thanks, Dad.

So, junk food and eating late at night have always been the bane of my existence. For a long time, I didn't even realize that this was a problem. I was teaching crazy hours at a bunch of different colleges, getting home at 10pm or later, and either picking up fast food on the way or raiding the fridge for whatever I could grab. So what if I ate it at midnight -- dinner was dinner, right?

Wrong. Of course, wrong. You know it's wrong. It took me years to figure out it's wrong. And, boy, is it hard to change something so hardwired.

At the beginning of the year, I set a goal to lose close to 50 pounds. I'd put on weight before I got married, then kept on weight after each of my girls was born, and quite frankly, I was sick and tired of seeing a fat, middle-aged lady in the mirror every time I looked. If I'm going to be middle-aged, dammit I'm at least going to be svelte. I don't have to be skinny. I just don't want to be fat.

I did well for the first part of the year. I lost a solid 15 pounds. Then, the bad habits started creeping back in. For one thing, I started eating late at night again. I'd been really good about eating dinner, brushing my teeth and not eating again until breakfast. I'm not sure when that all fell apart -- maybe when I started postponing brushing my teeth until bedtime, giving myself a whole 4 hours or so of eating time after dinner? -- but I soon found myself snacking away at night with my naturally-thin husband. (A man, I might add, so naturally thin that he actually loses weight when he doesn't exercise. What the hell's with that?) And so , while I managed to keep off the 15 pounds I'd lost, I certainly didn't lose any more.

I also realized that I'd gotten the sugar crazies again. The sugar crazies start when I exceed a certain amount of sugar intake -- what that amount is exactly, I have no idea, and maybe I'm just fooling myself by thinking that there even is an "acceptable" amount for me -- and fall into a cycle of eating sweets because I crave them and then craving them more so I eat more.

Over the past couple of weeks, I realized I'd hit that point. Not only because I found myself sneaking the kids' chocolate-chip cookies and raiding their stash of leftover Halloween candy when they were asleep, but also because I was getting violent headaches.

Every. Day.

So, I quit. Today was Day 2 of no sugar for me, and Day 2 is always the hardest. Day 1 is tough because the cravings are the worst, but since it's Day 1 I'm also always full of motivation: I can do this. I can do this. Boo-yah! On Day 1 I'm also full of Cheetos or some other salty snack since I realize there's only so much I can cut out at once without going head-scratching nail-biting nuts. Yesterday I ate an entire bag -- that's six full servings for those of you counting -- of Brand-X cheese puffs because that's all the Rite-Aid in Grand Central Station was selling. But, at least I didn't eat any sugar.

Today, I felt the sugar cravings starting to subside, but I also felt the boo-yah subside as well. Now it's more like a "boo." I found myself opening the fridge just to see what was in there and wondering if a glass of chocolate milk before bed would be a good idea.

And so, I logged on. And here I am.

And I didn't eat any sugar again tonight. And as soon as I post this, I'm heading to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get to bed. Because the hardest part of this won't be getting through tonight or tomorrow night or even the next. The hardest part will be getting through every single moment when my default mode is to eat badly when I should be eating well or not at all.

At least I don't have to eat mayonnaise sandwiches.

Bad News/Good News

I'm typically a "bad news first" kind of person, mainly on the theory that getting the bad news over with first allows for an uplift when the good news comes after.

The bad news, then, is that the Dorothy loom that I had so very much fun using is, simply put, killing my hands. The carpal tunnel that I struggled with earlier this summer is slowly creeping back, and the Dorothy with its side levers (and the force required to make them move) just makes my wrist ache. I can't even switch off hands because the levers are side levers -- all on one side, the right. I'm bummed because I really, really like weaving on a multi-harness loom, and I know the friend who lent me this Dorothy would give me a decent deal on buying it. Sigh.

The good news, though, is that now I know I really, really like weaving on a multi-harness loom; I just have to find one that is a good ergonomic fit for me. Another friend has a Schacht table loom with front levers, and she's going to let me try it out. Of course, I might just have to bite the bullet and get a floor loom that I can work with my feet to avoid the whole carpal-tunnel issue entirely. But, yanno, I'm willing to make the sacrifice. It's the least I can do for my health.

As a result, the warp I set up for some cotton dishtowels will have to sit until my hands feel better. In the meantime, I'm direct-warping my Beka RH with some leftover Tilli Tomas 100% silk to make a brown-and-bone plaid scarf. My first plaid, and of my own design, too...wish me luck!

A Walk to Remember

I've been weaving! And knitting! And crocheting!

I finally finished my Not Yo' Mama's Doily Shawl. It only took a couple of weeks, but it felt longer. I do like the result, even though it's so light and ephemeral that I can't really imagine when I'll wear it. The stitch pattern is sooooooo pretty, though, don't you think?

No sooner had I gotten this off the needles than I started...yes, you guessed it, another shawl: a Citron in green Zauberball. I know, I know, green is not my color. But this green just called to me. And miracle of miracles, it looks good against my skin. Hooray for blue undertones! No photos yet, but if I can get through the last rows of 400+ stitches any time soon, there will be.

Not to let my weaving fall by the side of the road, I also finished my Dorothy sampler.

It was fun, and I did learn a lot. Of course, since I'm product- as well as process-oriented, I immediately warped the loom up for a set of dishtowels. Yes, I know that Debbie Chandler recommends doing a shitton of samplers. I, however, want to sample with something I can use. I'm saving the wool for when I'm ready to make a nice scarf, but I figure kitchen cotton is cheap and I can always use more towels in the kitchen. I think I'm going to combine straight twill and point twill threadings according to a sample shown in the Chandler book, and then I'll pick one treadling to stick with for each of the four towels to see what I get. At least the warping seems to be going faster this time around than the first. We'll see how the rest of it goes.

The only other thing on my plate right now is Small Shawl Wars, and believe me, that's enough. I really want my target to like her shawl, so I'm thinking a lot about what yarn to use. Can't say any more just yet except that I can't wait for this to start.

Oh, and I hope I can at least finish my target's shawl and send it off before I get killed myself. Here's hoping....

The Killers Among Us

Can I tell you how much fun it is to weave on a 4-harness loom?

Pretty damn fun, that's for sure.

Here's what I've been working on:

It's my sampler, taken straight from Learning to Weave, by Debbie Chandler. Tonight, I finished my 9 inches of plain weave (3 inches each in balanced weave, weft-predominant weave and warp-predominant weave) and started on my 2-2 twill. It's tough for me to get a balanced weave in the twill; I feel like I'm hardly beating at all and I'm still getting a clearly weft-predominant weave. I'm also annoyed that my right-hand selvedge looks like crap (but the left-hand selvedge isn't too bad, so that's a plus) and for some strange reason the entire right-hand side of my fabric is slightly canted up and out, although it doesn't seem visible in this photo.

Still, the variations on the different weaves are fun, and once I'm done with this twill I'll "play around" as Debbie suggests. What I'd really like to do is find a draft that I really like and make a whole scarf using two other skeins of the yarn I'm working with now, Araucania Ranco. I've set aside a bright fuschia and an olive green, which I think will play off one another nicely and cause some cool op-art effects if only I can find the right design to weave. We'll see how that turns out.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling a bit "stuck" with my latest crocheting project, a shawl in laceweight tencel. I love the look and feel of the fabric, and it's an easy two-row repeat that was simple enough to memorize and execute, but I think I'm feeling the need for a worsted-weight project in my near future. Something less fiddly than lace and quicker than the couple of weeks it's taking me to pull this shawl together. Not quite sure what it will be, but I know I need a break before Small Shawl Wars starts and I'm going to be knitting shawls nonstop...until someone takes me out, that is.

You know, the last (and first and only) time I ever participated in any kind of "war" was in college. It was my freshman year, and my dorm played "Assassin" (or was it called "Killer"? or something equally uninspired?). We each were assigned a target and given a ping-pong ball. There were rules about when and where you could kill someone, and of course, you killed a person by hitting them with the ping-pong ball. I think I lasted all of two days -- didn't even kill my own target, I'm sure -- before my killer took me out with what I thought was a fairly clever ruse. To earn spending money, I typed papers. A dollar a page, and this was pre-computer, so I was working on a Brother electronic typewriter with the little white-out tape that could go back a whole line to correct errors...but beyond that, you were screwed. Anyway, my killer contacted me through my ad for typing services, then enlisted someone else in the dorm to walk with me to our appointed meeting place (supposedly for me to pick up the paper to be typed), and when we were in just the right place under just the right conditions (per the rules, not within a certain distance of certain buildings, other people, etc), my "escort" took off running and my assassin beaned me with a ping-pong ball. Ah, college...good times.

At least this time around, I'll get a shawl out of the deal. Much better than taking a ping-pong ball to the shoulder.

And the Winner Is....

Me! Can you believe it?

First, I won two books: Cat Bordhi's Treasury of Magical Knitting and Knit Fix: Problem Solving for Knitters. Frankly, I'm surprised as heck. I hardly ever win lottery-type things (and, in truth, mine was the second name picked; I won only because the first-place winner didn't respond in time). I do love Cat Bordhi, and I don't have either of her Magical books, so I'm pretty excited.

Second, I definitely won the swap game...or this round of it, at least. I swapped two skeins of Wollmeise in Maus Jung, a variegated grey ranging from very light to medium-gunmetal, for two skeins of the same in an unpronounceable colorway that is the most amazing shade of deep blue-purple (aka blurple). See for yourself:

This is the closest I could get to a true representation of the color, and even this falls far, far short. Someday somebody will be prying these two skeins of yarn out of my cold, dead hands, it is truly that beautiful.

I also started yet another shawl, this one out of a laceweight tencel in a colorway called Pick Me. Working with the tencel is interesting. It reminds me of crochet thread, but slicker. I love how the lace pattern is coming out:

The shape is forming nicely into a U, which I prefer over just about any other shawl shape for the way it stays easily on my shoulders. Again, the colors didn't come out quite right -- in real life, this piece is less contrasty, more harmonious, with lots of purples to help blend the pink into the blue. If this is as quick a crochet as it seems, I'll be wearing it within the week.

And finally, Dorothy got some love tonight:

I finished threading the heddles at last, and now all I need to do (I think!) is tie the warp onto the back beam and I'll be ready to start throwing the shuttle.

Now if only I could find a few extra hours in the day....

Really Most Sincerely Done

Blocked and beautiful, Heaven d'Or has been christened.

Here she is, right before DH and I heard a sickening crash at the bottom of our driveway. Certain that someone needed an ambulance, the three of us -- DH, me and the shawl -- went flying down to the road only to find some drunken yahoo had peeled half the side of his car off along the rock embankment and come to rest, tires shredded, car parts strewn willy-nilly, in the middle of our driveway. Before anyone panics, he was fine.

The upside is that Heaven was the perfect wrap to wear to a car accident. Large enough to clutch snugly around myself, warm enough to ward off the slight chill from the lake that Drunk Dude was lucky not to have plunged into, and with a solid, weighty feeling that comes from having a slightly heavy viscose/silk/linen blend edging on a downy light camel/wool body. I am totally and completely in love with this shawl.

I am, however, not looking forward to picking car parts out of my shrubs in the morning.

A Little Bit of Heaven

You know that feeling when you're not at all sure that the choice you've made is the right one? That feeling in the pit of your stomach that you get every time you look at a project at just the right angle and think, "Holy crap, what was I thinking?"

Well, I'd been having that feeling.

It started when I ran out of yarn for my 198 Yds of Heaven shawlette. I'd had these three skeins of Bouton d'Or Ksar in my stash for a looooong time -- had gotten them in a mystery swap and just hadn't known what to do with them, but wanted to use them for something nommy because of the camel down content -- and I finally thought I'd found just the right project. Trouble was, I had also just started posting FOs for the 10 in 2010 KAL/CAL on rav, and in order for my latest project to count, it needed to use a minmum of 250 meters.

The three balls of Ksar topped out at a nail-biting, head-scratching 249.6 meters.

So, I decided to extend the pattern. I worked another full pattern repeat of the body, and then I thought I would just pick a contrasting yarn for the edging.

Easier said than done.

The Ksar is a breathtakingly soft and lofty, plied camel/wool blend in a dark chocolate brown. I had nothing in my stash to match it for structure, look and feel.

Nothing.

And so, I punted. I pulled out all the stops and went in a completely different direction. For the edging, I used a viscose/silk/linen blend -- RY Natural Silk Aran -- in a slightly tweedy bone color. This yarn knitted up nothing at all like the Ksar. For starters, it was rustic looking, to say the least. Where the Ksar was soft and inviting, the Silk Aran was crisp and stiff. The flecks of blue and red running through the slubby, 2-ply Silk Aran seemed somewhat out of place against the classic, smooth three-ply Ksar. And every time I looked at my shawl, I got that sinking feeling that this just wasn't going to come together.

So, I did what any other sane, logical knitter would have done.

I kept right on knitting.

Here's the result:

Isn't she luuuuuuuurvely???

I'm so pleased, I truly am. I can't wait for it to be cool enough to wear this. I love the way the two colors and textures work together, and the hard blocking really brought out the best in the lace pattern. At first I was regretting not having had enough of the Ksar to simply do a one-color shawl, but now I'm really glad that I had to make do like this. I got a much more interesting result and a much more attractive shawl than I would have otherwise.

Now the question is, what shawl do I cast on for next?

Holy Heat, Batman!

Where has the past week and a half gone? Work, mostly, and melting into an icky puddle in this absolutely insane heat we've been having.

But the upside is I've gotten a ton of stuff done! Funny how that happens when you fail to post in 12 days.

First up, my Marigold Wrap. Ta-da!

Please to excuse the crappy under-the-fluorescent-bathroom-lights-taken-in-the-mirror photo. It was the best I could do in the middle of the night, and I just couldn't wait to post my pic on rav and call my cute little shawl finished.

I love how this turned out! It's got a nice weight and drape -- heavier than many of the shawls I've recently made, but not overly hot-feeling. The petals make it cute and I can wear it all wrapped around my neck, boa-style, like in the photo, or spread out over my shoulders for a sweet little ruffly shawlette.

I'm already onto my next shawl: Heaven d'Or, based on the 198 Yds of Heaven shawl pattern. I'd had this beautiful cashmere/wool blend yarn hanging out in my stash for well over a year, and I kept wondering what to do with it. When I saw this pattern, and saw that it called for worsted or aran weight luxury yarn, I knew I'd found what I'd been looking for.

The shawl is coming out thick and heavy despite the allover lace pattern. I love the feel and drape of the cashmere blend, and I'm making it larger than the pattern calls for because it just reads as a snuggly winter wrap to me. Plus, I have 250 meters of this delightful stuff and I don't want a bit of it to go to waste. Photos to come.

There's more, much more, but it's late and I'm sweating and in desperate need of a cold shower and about eight hours of sleep, though I'll only get six at the most. More, then, later....

TGIF

What a week it's been! Getting back to work after a nice, long break is always hard, and splitting my time between teaching and administrating only makes it that much harder.

I must admit, I'm a reluctant administrator. I'm organized and competent, but I'd much rather be teaching than shuffling through student records or trying to match room capacity to class size. I do the admin because it suits my schedule...for now. I teach because I love it.

The nice thing about going back to work, aside from the fact that I love my colleagues, is that I gain massive amounts of knitting time. Traveling 2 hours one-way does that.

Lately, though, I'm devoting my knitting time to crochet. Check this out:

There's my Marigold Wrap, all squiggly-looking because it's not blocked (nor even finished), but still pretty cool nonetheless. I'm following my own path on the placement of the rows of flower petals, and I haven't yet decided if I like how it looks with the wide, open spaces between petal rows or whether I want to fill the whole shawl in with a riot of petals, one row per row of double-treble crochet.

The only thing putting a damper on my fun is this:

I've got a matching one on the other hand, and I don't think my lingering carpal tunnel is being helped by the hours I've spent crocheting this week.

At least I started warping up Dorothy last night, so getting all my threads onto the warping board without screwing anything up should keep my hands busy while (hopefully!) not subjecting them to more damaging repetitive motion.

Um...like typing.

Endings and Beginnings

Have you ever had a project assume such mythic proportions in your head that you couldn't even bear to pick it up? The fear that it would be too hard, take too much time, prove too daunting just kept you away indefinitely?

Well, for me, that project was my mom's 80th birthday present: a blanket woven out of 400 4" Weave It squares and painstakingly seamed together.

I seamed it halfway, then -- completely undone by the thought of weaving in all those ends -- set it aside for the better part of a year. There it sat, still in the fancy gift bag I'd set aside for it, taunting me from the bottom of my closet of shame.

It was the shame, mainly, of making mom wait so very long for her gift that finally made me pick up that blanket again last week.

And guess what?

I finished it.

That's right, the blanket-without-end is finally finished.Mind you, I finished weaving the last of the ends in during the car ride to Mom's house on Saturday, but still it's done, done, done, and I couldn't be happier.

Here's how she looks in situ:

And from another angle:

And just because I can't seem to stop bragging on this:

Isn't she luuuuurvely???

So, that's the end. And as for the beginning?

Check this out:

Meet Dorothy, graciously lent to me by Joe, a weaver friend who is off to bigger and better looms. Along with Dorothy, Joe lent me his copy of Learning to Weave, by Debbie Chandler, and I've been reading it nonstop for the past week. I've already picked out the sock yarn -- two skeins of Araucania Ranco, one in grey and one in mauve -- to use on my first sample. Now all I have to do is actually sit down with the book on one side and the loom on the other and get started.

There are so many things I've never done before! Using a rigid heddle loom up till now has allowed me to skip past a bunch of the basic skills that a weaver has to develop, like winding a warp on a warping board (I've only direct warped). But, I just can't wait to play with my 4 independently-operating sheds! I've been eagerly poring over the drafts in Learning to Weave, trying my best to understand them (again, something I've completely managed to avoid up till now), anticipating playing with plain weave and twills and all the other beautiful designs I've seen for a 4-shed loom.

If only work weren't busy getting in the way. I went back today for the first time since the beginning of May, and while it was good to be back and even somewhat fun prepping for the start of the new semester, this whole "job" thing seriously cuts into my fiber time. If only I didn't need the "money" that said "job" brings in.

In any event, my time over the next couple of weeks will be quite limited, so I doubt I'll even manage to warp my new baby until things taper off in early- to mid-July. Till then, I suppose I'll have to satisfy myself with looking at Dorothy, reading Debbie and dreaming of warping day.

Oh, and crocheting my Marigold Wrap in -- what else? -- vibrant shades of orange, yellow and deep brick red Wollmeise.

But that's a project for another post.

The Perils of Having Children

Up at 5am with a sick child, I'm sooo wide awake and yet I know that if I don't get back to bed before the little one wakes up I'm going to be a wreck all day. So what do I do? Post, of course.

What I really should do, if I'm not going to go back to bed, is keep working on Mom's Birthday Spread. I'm so close to finishing I can almost taste it: 18.5 rows of blocks sewn together, only 1.5 rows more to go. Then about a bajillion ends to weave in. Ugh.

We go to visit Mom on Saturday, and how I would love it if I could bring the finished project with me to give her. We'll see how close I get.

Then I can start the next project that's tugging at my attention: a sock yarn scarf on my borrowed Dorothy LeClerc.

Maybe I'll try to get a few more minutes' sleep first.

Excitement!

Just a quick post before bed to announce some amazing, pie-in-the-sky news. I'm going to be borrowing a 15" 4-shaft LeClerc table loom for the summer!

I'll be picking her up on Monday from the friend who is lending her to me. After a crash course on using her, I'll be taking her home and figuring out where to set her up. This is a try-before-buy situation, so I'll have the whole summer to decide whether I'd like to own this little loom before committing.

I'm so excited! Since weaving my Lorna's Scarf, I've been trying to figure out what else I can do on my rigid heddle loom besides plain weave. I know that a lot is possible, but it just seems like multiple-harness looms make more complex stuff that much easier. I guess I'll find out firsthand in a few days....