Happiness is...

Spinning something soft and sparkly in a sunbeam. Also, alliteration.

Photos of stuff I've made lately will come when I have a living room floor and thus an office and thus a damn desktop again.

Crafting continues!

Oh, yes. String!

After posting on FaceBook about the pleasure I gleaned from seeing Daven wearing three knitted items at the same time (it was cold in the house), one of my cousins requested a hat. The one she chose is a fun knit, though the colours requested weren't in my stash in acceptable weights, so I got to do a little run to my LYS. When I came up to the counter with 7 100g balls of worsted weight yarn, the lovely lady behind the counter asked if I was knitting a lap blanket.

"Nope. Hat."

"...That will be a very large hat."

The problem being that I needed approximately 2 oz of the most prevalent colour in the hat, and the rest needed about an ounce each, but funnily, super wash worsted weight yarns don't come in "snippets", so I've got a whooole lotta yarn now. On the upside (as I said to the woman, later, when we were resolving a charging issue), I've now got lots of yarn for socks for my dad, since his feet are too big for sock yarn. Worsted weight is the way to go with size 12s.

Once said cousin got me her head measurement last night, I was off and running. The swatch I had done lied like a lying thing, so after tearing back the hat band, I switched to a size smaller, cast onto DPNs (which I apparently knit more tightly on than circular needles) and started over. I just finished it, and now all I have to hope is that she likes it and that it fits.

The coolest thing for me (and I may be really late to the game for this) is that some weird little switch in my head finally went and now I can cheerfully do stranded knitting with an active thread in each hand, so I'm knitting both Continental and English styles at the same time. Much quicker than my previous "Drop yarn, pick up other yarn, do a stitch. Repeat forever." strategy. Enh, I don't care if it took a long time to arrive, this is fun. Also, for straight knitting or purling, I find that I kind of prefer Continental, suddenly, after knitting English for my entire life. *shrug* I just do what my fingers tell me to do. :)

Photo of the hat will come either after she says she wants to see it before I mail it, or after she has received it.

Pictures! And a story!

Because pictures will totally distract you from the lack of content for the last month, RIGHT?!

...Well, maybe not. At any rate. Look! Finished Objects! (That I totally already posted on Facebook, but not everyone is on my Facebook and really, you can probably deal with them a second time because I am proud of myself, alright?)

My first quilt!

The back of my first quilt! Hand quilted, baby.

My first real lace shawl, because I always would bugger them up, get frustrated and wander off before!

The local hippies will love this shawl.

Pointy edges!

Now I'm working on more quilts. Yes, plural, because this is me and you know I can't possibly only have one project of any type going on at a time. There's a long term scrap quilt that I'm literally only going to be working on when I finish other quilts, so they get represented in said scrap quilt, and my main lap quilt. I went into Joann's with A Plan (TM) but it was so not crowded that I ended up poking around and swapping out the planned fabric for another that I totally fell in love with. I still giggle about finding beautiful fabric, bringing it home and cutting it into little pieces. Quilting is weird, yo.

Whilst shopping, I had a really fun little encounter. Daven and I were standing at the fabric counter, waiting to get all of our stuff cut out, when an older gentleman and what looked to be his 10 year old grandson walked in. The grandfather had a scarf and some knitting needles clutched in one hand and asked the girls working if they could help his grandson, since he'd knit a scarf and now he wanted to knit a hat, but needed different needles. After the reply of "Oh...I don't knit..." was emitted (LAME, CRAFT STORE WORKERS. AT LEAST ONE OF YOU SHOULD KNIT.) I volunteered my services. I brought them back to the knitting aisle, talked about DPNs vs. circular needles and he decided that circulars sounded less scary. I grabbed him a set of size 10s, to match his straight needles and off they went. It really made me happy to help someone, and it reminded me how much I miss teaching. (I spent a year or so as an Event Coordinator for Michaels, which involved making a lot of displays and teaching some classes, including a weekly kid's craft class. It was fun, though hard on my knees, since when I wasn't in the classroom, I was working the floor.)

Also, because this is me, I'm second guessing everything I did. I told him to cast on and make sure that the stitches weren't twisted, but does he know what that looks like? I totally should have grabbed the scarf and made admiring noises at it, though I did say it was really awesome that he was learning how to knit. Ah, well. I hope he's knitting on 'em and isn't too frustrated. They were so thankful, it was really touching.

In other craft news, I gave my mother 4 pairs of socks that I'd hoarded over the last year and she still wants more. I think I'm going to be trying that sock-a-month thing again, just to keep Mrs. ColdFeet in socks. :) I'm still working on Daven's never-ending cabled sweater (just a few more inches on the first sleeve, then all of Monkey-Arm sleeve 2). Let me tell you, learning how to cable without a cable needle was like discovering fire. So. Awesome. And it save so much time! There's also the great big knit blanket that I'm doing the second tier of cabling on, a pair of fingerless gloves that I cast on in hopes they'll help me whilst at my computer and my purse sock, which gets worked on whenever I have to wait anywhere. Oh, and the weaving, which I have sorely neglected due to general malaise towards it. The same applies to spinning, which hasn't been worked on in a while. It'll happen. But first, I'm going to go quilt some more. A girl has to have some variety in life! *grin*

Because I don't have enough hobbies, right?

In addition to the knitting and the weaving that were already on-going, I dragged my cross stitch back out, and over the weekend, started quilting.

Since Saturday, I washed and ironed and cut and sewed and ironed and sewed and ironed and sewed and cussed and ironed and sewed until I have a baby quilt basically together. It needs the binding put on, but aside from that, just the tracing of the stencil and the hand quilting is left. I know, that's the long part, but I really enjoyed using the sewing machine, which is astonishing. Way back when, I learned how to sew by hemming sheer silk in a costume shop as part of my theatre major ways. Sheer silk has no sense of humour, and it left me with a terror of sewing machines. Thankfully, the last couple of days has helped a lot with that, even if the first sewing machine I used ended up breaking three times and now needs to go into the shop. The second workhorse, which is much more powerful and aggressive (my poor lightweight cotton!) got me through, even if it isn't ideal for such work.

The quilt is very fall-coloured, and I think it looks nice, if a little 70's-retro. Photos will happen eventually.

I also finished up the actual knitting on the Maelstrom shawl of psychedelic colours yesterday evening, and just need to block it. That will likely happen today. I'd been pouring most of my hours into this, so hopefully there will be forward momentum on other projects now that it is done.

My weaving has been sadly neglected, since I got distracted by many "ooh shiny!" things. Today is Wednesday, so it is for weaving, dammit. I shall get some work done on it. (The problem being that I'm not sure I love this project, and it is hard to work on something you're "meh" about.)

The cross stitch is hilarious. This is a sampler that I started...well, there is a notation on the pattern about buying my sister's 25th birthday present, and she's 35 now. Yeaaaaah. I also immediately remembered why I had put it down. It is done on 22 point fabric, generally over two blocks. The parts I have left are all over one thread, so this is reaaaaally fine work. I'll do it, but you can only look at something that closely for small amounts of time before your eyes start stabbing you in the brain. There really is not very much left, and maybe I'll eventually finish it. I also dug out all of my previously finished, but un-framed cross stitch projects. I really need to get those framed and up somewhere; there are some really beautiful pieces in there.

Turkey Day

As I was posting this enormous comment on the Pioneer Woman in response to the question "How was your Thanksgiving", I realized I should really make it into a blog entry on its own. So, here you go:

Well, the meal was a little hit or miss. And it inspired me to wax poetic and become rather verbose in the description thereof.

I was up until 01:30 the night before, waiting for the brine to cool because we forgot about the darn stuff until midnight, and it takes a while for things to cool off. Even when sitting outside in the 10F CO night, it took a while. But the end result was an amazing turkey.

Due to my husband and myself being on some rather strict diets, we only cheated a little bit...the "cheat" involved about a cup of homemade applesauce (no sugar, organic apples from our local CSA...SO GOOD) and a couple of pieces of my homemade bread. The bread was challenging, as I made a double size loaf and forgot to take that into account with the baking time. The first time I cut it, the knife came out...gooey. Ew. Back in the oven it went, and was the last thing to be served, but was by far the most popular item on the table.

My mother in law handled the gravy (I am not a gravy girl, so I don't try), whilst my husband took care of the turkey. The turkey, that was supposed to have a coating of canola oil to give it a beautiful brown glazed appearance. My intrepid love realized we had none in the house, so used Pam.

...

So, whilst the in-laws and the husband were out giving the yaks treats, I was babysitting a turkey that set off the fire alarm constantly due to the unfortunate flash point of Pam. I also had a neighbour's cat underfoot, as she randomly showed up yesterday and decided she wanted to be with us for the holiday.

But though the food was beautiful and made from scratch, with only the veggie stock in the brine coming from a box, the one real downer was over napkins. For, you see, three days ago, I had in my hot little hands about 3 dozen cloth napkins. They got "tidied", which means they will never be seen again. I was tearing around the house with the one solitary napkin I could find in my hand, getting unreasonably worked up. When I was told for the four thousandth time "it's FINE" I had a little explosion of noise that startled the heck out of my in-laws. So. Aside losing my mind and yelling at everyone over napkins, we had a great meal, and were pleased that my husband's folks were able to fly in from the East Coast to join us.

Finish-it Friday

Part of my grand scheme of having thematic days includes Weaving Wednesday (which didn't work out this week due to...I don't know. I was distracted in the morning and in pain in the evening. I failed, but I'll climb back on the weaving horse, promise) and either Finish-it or Forgotten-Object Friday.

This one has been working out pretty well. Basically, either I finish something that has been sitting on the edge of completion and just needs that last little push, or I work on something that I haven't worked on in at least a week.

Today ended up combining the two, and I finished two hats that are gifts (for a mother and daughter) that have been sitting on my desk for the better part of a month. It was the pom poms that stopped my progress.

I hate pom poms.

I like the look, but making them irritates the piss out of me. These managed to finish off one of the teeny tiny balls of yarn I had left from making the hats, so that was semi-useful, but as my sister can vouch (she called me mid-pom pom creation), I swear a lot when I'm making them.

I'm sure some people enjoy these, otherwise they would have fallen out of favour. I am not amongst that population.

Right. Enough bitching about pom poms. The upside is that I finished the hats, and I should be able to ship them out tomorrow. I hope they fit!

Related to this: last night I finished the fingerless gloves I was knitting for Daven. They match a hat I'd knit him a bit ago, and he'd requested them since hands get cold when using keyboards. Between those and the house slippers I knit him a few weeks ago, he's slowly getting kitted out in hand knit goodies.

Now, if only I'd finish his darn sweater. The hold up? Not pom poms, but good guess. No, it is that he has these monkey arms that go on forever, and though I've got the body finished, it has no arms yet. I'll get to it. Maybe next Friday. :)

In case you have interest in such things...

I started a new blog that I'm using to track my progress with my new bodybuilding program. It is located here: http://braveharlot.blogspot.com/

Feel free to ignore this at your leisure. :)

In fibre progress, I've been spinning and weaving and knitting like a mad woman, as per the usual.

I finished the weaving project that seemed to take forever, and I do have photos that I'll eventually get up here. I had some fascinating weaving-related drama, where I found that my math was Totally Messed Up (TM), and I had about twice as much width to my current project as I needed. This necessitated chopping off some of my warp, which was somewhat nerve wracking to do, and starting over. Three times. Kept getting narrower. Hopefully I've got it set up correctly now. Bloody thing. It is a stole for my mother, in two contrasting shades of purple. The sett is for a honeysuckle overshot pattern, though I'll just be using that in three stripes on each end of the stole, with the vast majority in the darker shade. This is for Lent, so I've got an actual time frame involved, meaning I have to *work on it* to get it done in time. We'll see how that goes.

I finished up spinning the two shades of teal alpaca I had, and decided to navajo ply them, as well as pair them up with a beautiful unprocessed fleece I picked up from the Estes Park fibre festival. I've broken out my drum carder, and have been enjoying making big floofy batts to spin from. I have plots in my mind for a sweater, if I get the yardage for it. Since I'm processing the lion's share myself, I'll probably tweak a pattern so that it customized for me. I'm envisioning another Norwegian style sweater, though I think I'll want to pick up some white alpaca to have as a third contrast colour. And maybe a purple. But first, I work on the silvery gray.

I've been knitting on this for the last couple of weeks, in a perfectly wonderful obnoxious colourway of Zauberball (fuchsia). It is very trippy, and the bright colours make me ridiculously happy.

I, of course, have a billion other projects on the needles, but those are the top ones right now.

We're frolicking! We're frolicking!

Hopefully that'll work. Sorry about the quality of the video; I was using a little point and shoot, in addition to trying to follow fast-moving yak-beasts. Also, my voice is weird. I blame the fact that I apparently use baby talk on the yaks. I should stop that.

Cautious optimism

So far today, I've had no head-spinny incidents. If this keeps up, I'll restart my workout routine tomorrow.

Since I've already wandered off the supposed topics that this blog is about, now I'm going to go into further uncharted territory. Specifically the amazing ability for the human mind to strive for change and then be surprised when it happens.

Today, I finally broke down and admitted that with the weight loss that has happened on the incredible diet/exercise program I've been following, my bras didn't fit no mo'. Luckily, I throw nothing away, so I had all of my "thin" bras to go back to.

I feel like I'm turning back the clock. The weight I'm at now I was last at 3.5 years ago. The clothing I am wearing now is from that time frame, too. Back to my 20s, woo! :> As I said to Daven, I can only go back so far, since I was at my lightest when I first met him 4 years ago, at 175. Anything beyond that is uncharted territory for me as an adult, and that is only 12 lbs away. Considering the changes I've had so far, it isn't out of the question for me to reach that again.

This time, however, I will reach it via good diet and exercise, and I will reach it with growing strength. Before my whole "my brain is trying to escape" week, I had hit a new strength record for lifting 15 lbs more than my body weight in my favourite lift. This is more than just a relative strength increase; I had previously topped out with this lift at 175 for three reps, but I got 7 reps at 205, and I felt I could increase the weight. (If you lift, I was doing Romanian dead lifts, which I really enjoy. Full dead lifts are too hard on my knees, and I'm not built for 'em, but Romanians are fantastic for me.)

The last time I was thin, I was "skinny fat". You could poke me in the middle and your finger would keep on going. This was great from the corsetry standpoint, but not so good from the "being strong" standpoint. Now I've got muscles behind the rapidly decreasing layer of squish. This is the leanest I have ever been, and the happiest I have been with how my body looks. I still have a lot of work to go, but with the awesome guidance of my trainer, and the support (and cooking) of Daven, I am going to achieve my goal of being every inch the amazon I want to be!

Not having to do with anything else...

Yet effecting everything.

Since last Monday, I've been dizzy. Specifically, I've had vertigo. On Thursday, I figured that this should have passed if it was going away on its own, and I went to a walk-in clinic. A nice long wait and a blood draw later, I was placed on bed rest and given a Rx for anti-dizziness.

I'm still dizzy.

It comes in waves, and it feels like the whole world is rushing past me. I haven't fallen yet, but it worries me.

I'm sleeping a lot. I've averaged a 3-4 hour nap every afternoon since seeing the doc, and I'm sleeping in, too, but I'm still tired and woozy.

The best way I can describe it is like being slightly drunk. All. The. Time. With none of the fun parts associated with being drunk, because this isn't on purpose and therefore just isn't a whole lot of fun.

I should have the blood work results by Monday. I hope they are indicative of *something*. Because otherwise, the doc told me to find a neurologist and see about getting an MRI.

I don't think I have to tell you that the combination of "bed rest" and "neurologist" freaks me the heck out.

This is part of why I haven't posted my September photos. My attention span is ridiculously reduced. I've got a sore neck from tensing it during the dizzy spells, and usually have a nice stress headache from the neck tension.

Amusingly, I've started on a really elaborate and complicated project and it is going well...because I *have* to stick to the chart. I don't feel like I can "cheat" by memorizing the pattern. Almost every row is unique, and that is working out just fine with me.

So. If you could cross your fingers that it is one of the suspects that the doc had in mind (anemia or my thyroid freaking out), it would be appreciated.