Monday, July 27, 2009

I'm being very good...

...in some ways. Other ways, not so much.

We recently had a financial windfall, and that money has been earmarked for fixing my teeth (Yay! I've been waiting two years). I've been really good at holding back my spending, because quite frankly getting this crap taken care of is going to feel a heck of a lot better than seeing a bigger pile of yarn that is my stash.

No, seriously. That's how much they've been bothering me. Because we all know how much I LOVE my yarn.

However, as good as I have been about spending, I have been mega-lazy with getting organized and getting back into "real life" after my vacation. My Flip video camera is still sitting here on my desk, filled to the brim with a treasure trove of vacation-y goodness. Have I off-loaded it? Edited it into a cutesy DVD? Mailed it to my family? Nope. There's even extra footage that I off-loaded onto my laptop while I was up there, since the camera only holds an hour. Haven't touched that either.

The only thing I've done since I got back is re-arrange my Netflix "Watch it now" queue to watch while I knit.

I *have* been going to town on the knitting though. With the allowance that piled up for me while we were out of town, I did make a small purchase from Pisgah and got cones of Peaches and Cream yarns for the *sole* purpose of cranking out dishrags. I have made two so far. I have also started two large blankets, one in the Peaches and Cream cotton in a three-toned blue, and the other in double-stranded Palette yarn from Knit Picks in a three-toned Plum color set. I had to start the cotton one because I ran out of the wool before I'd finished the first square, and am waiting on the order.

Both blankets are being done (in a rather loose interpretation of the pattern) using the "Moderne Blanket" pattern in the Mason-Dixon knitting book. It's a modified log cabin layout in garter-stitch... I would call it modular knitting. You create a block, bind it off, then pick up stitches along one edge in another color, knit a block, and repeat until you get the size you want.

I'm going to attempt to do the pattern in the exact method for the wool blanket (the double stranded Palette makes a luscious-feeling fabric in the garter stitch) but my cotton one is going to be attempted in a more free-form way, using the method more than the instructions. It should prove to be fun!

Somewhere in the middle of all this I will hopefully start taking some pictures, and organizing my vacation snaps and footage.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

We are home!

Okay, I didn't exactly advertise in bright neon that we were going on vacation. There was a safety rationale in there somewhere, lets just leave it at that.

It could, quite possibly, be catagorized as the first "Perfect Vacation" we've ever been on. Even though I had to go to the emergency room in the same town where my high school is located (a surreal experience, to say the least) for an irritated nerve that was making me miserable, everything else was downright idyllic. I filled my small video-camera twice, and finished last night with only five minutes to spare. Much fun.

Right now I'm still recovering from my re-awakened coffee addiction, so I'll have more later.