I'm so ashamed

And I think that's why I've had such a hard time writing this last week. I didn't want to admit that I'd started a couple of new projects without finishing any of the old ones. Now that this has officially become a needle-work blog that didn't leave me much to talk about. In my defense, the first picture is of what will eventually be the inside of my winter purse so it's mostly a continuation of an existing project.

I have less excuse for the second project, although I've been contemplating a jammie holder since Christmas time when I bought the complete Weldon's Practical Needlework series. I would like to mention that I did finish it, in case that counts in my favor. There's no excuse at all for the last project. I went to cast on a ruana I'd been thinking of for the last six months and it morphed into the origami shrug experiment that I'd only been considering for a couple days. It's particularly experimental as my first plan was to use a rectangle and I don't know if starting with a triangle that becomes a rectangle will work right or not.

Hey! Confession is good for the soul. I'm not sure I want to mention the filet curtains I've started to crochet though.

Yep, I still hate the wind

About the only reason I was looking forward to moving to Missouri was that I figured, admittedly with no evidence, that the wind would be minimal here. It's a good thing there are a lot of nice things about Missouri that I hadn't known about because the wind here is pretty intense when it gets started.

Yesterday was very windy and by the end of it I was a very tense and grumpy mommy. Needing to go chase down the recycling bin, and scattered contents, didn't exactly improve my mood. Ours was the only bin to blow away, and the only one without the lid on so I'm thinking there may be some connection there.

I did it

I got Eevie a harness and let him take me for a walk this afternoon. He seemed a lot calmer after exploring for half an hour or so. At that time he managed to ooze out of his harness when I tried to get him out from behind a bush I couldn't get to but was content to let me immediately pick him up and go inside.

I also let Son get a BB gun, but he only gets to use it when I'm watching, in fact it will live in my room, or at the house of a friend who also has one. Royal Rangers has a badge for BB guns, which he finds a lovely intersection of something useful and that he wanted to do anyway.

What I didn't do was finish clearing the flower beds as completely as I'd thought as the side beds are longer than I was originally thinking. By the time Son and I had removed six barberry bushes there wasn't any room in the trashcan to do the final long side so I think things will work out well as long as I don't forget or give up.

Inspiration and execution

This is the beginning of the wall hanging that I mentioned here.

Instead of the three panels of the same motif in different textile forms, which would be too narrow in this case, this will be one of two identical edge strips with a wider floral center. I'm considering having the brown be the base color of the center panel and the design in lighter shades of the colors on the side panels. The colors are a very good match for the existing paint and fixtures as well as the floral arrangement that I added. It's going to take me awhile to finish this since I'm working on it around all the other projects.

Eevie has spring fever

One of the reasons John chose Eevie at the rescue was that he didn't "dart", try to escape, every time a door was opened. Lately though we've really had to watch him and he's still gotten out a couple of times in the last couple of days.

Whenever he gets out he wanders around sniffing everything he can before we manage to coax him close enough to catch. Once returned indoors he walks through the house "mrowing" and sniffing around the doors. It's as if his nose is telling him things that he has no way to interpret and it's making him sort of nuts. I feel sort of sorry for him, since he seems so confused and unhappy. I'm even thinking of getting him a harness and leash so he can be outside in a safe way, something I've never done with any other cat. Still, can't help hoping this is a temporary rather than permanent condition.

I'm very proud of myself

No, not because of the cyclamens. That's just a handy flower picture that I took in January or so. I'm proud of myself because I've gotten all the front flowerbeds, five in all, pruned and cleaned for Spring. The fact that it took multiple days but I finished anyway is why I'm particularly pleased.

Where'd all the paragraphs go?

The title pretty much says it all. I both double-spaced and indented the paragraphs on that last post and Blogger refuses to show them. In fact, the last several posts have been beset by this problem and I have absolutely no idea why or what to do about it.

Alas, poor shower

Yeah, that's completely out of context, given that I prefer baths and thus don't know the shower well. In fact, if I were having a house built, I would never have sprung for the separate shower, sunken tub, or walk-in closet since I consider all of those a big waste of space. That being the case, my tendency to anthropomorphize things lead me to believe that the shower would, or perhaps should, feel humiliated for now being used as a yarn drying station. Oh, and the cat does have a thing for the built-in seat, so I guess yarn drying isn't it's sole use after all.

The reason I'm abusing my shower this way is that my other option is to wash and dry, outside in iffy MO weather, twenty skeins at a time once summer gets here. In CO this wasn't a problem since I had whole months with little concern about precipitation. Locals claim that should be the case here in July and August but I don't want to be stuck with a huge pile of yarn if that doesn't work out, which has been the case the two summers we've been here. Also, twenty wet skeins are really heavy when they have to be carried downstairs. Hanging each one and then attaching the weights gets old pretty fast as well, especially knowing that it has to be done a couple more times.

I didn't wash my yarn for the first ten years or so that I spun, but I tried it for reasons I can't remember and have never looked back. There's a surprising amount of controversy about whether adding weights to the wet yarn is good or simply stretches and distorts the fibers. I prefer the way my yarn behaves after it's been weighted and figure it's not my problem what anyone else does with theirs, as long as I'm not using it at least. If I used other people's handspun frequently I'm sure I'd find myself developing opinions as well.

Yarn, yarn, yarn, yarn, yarn ,yarn, yarnity, yarn

This is all my yarn. Okay, no it's not. It's all my yarn that isn't in the bookcase on the other side of the room or currently involved in a project of some kind. So it is most of my yarn. I like having it out and available as inspiration for projects. They're also a good reminder that I already have ten pounds of yarn and should probably look through that before buying more.

I'm quite proud of the bags on the floor, since I made them. As the picture shows, they are color-coordinated to the skeins they hold and sized based on my general use of those colors. I do foresee a potential problem if my color preferences change dramatically, but they're a lot better than the opaque containers and bags that the yarn was in to start with.

The yarn wall represents twenty years of spinning. Most of the handspun is a good deal newer than that, but I just recently washed one of my first skeins and that has to be at least twenty years old.

Well that wasn't particularly pleasant

This is the first time that I've ever heard tornado sirens during bad weather and I have to admit that it was a rather unsettling sound. It took me a minute to realize what I was hearing and I probably wouldn't have recognized it at all if there hadn't been a test about a week ago. I'm not sure what the criteria is for sounding the sirens so I don't know exactly how bad the weather was. I don't think we had any hail here, although I heard there was some further south, and the electricity stayed on which is certainly the best outcome in the situation.

You're very welcome

I just got a card from mom telling me how much she likes her vest and that she got a lot of compliments. This is always very gratifying, and particularly in regards to completely original projects that I was a little nervous about.I put up a different photo of the vest than I have in the past since I wanted to show a closer view of the colors and stitch pattern, and there wasn't a picture of it yet on this page of the blog.

Speaking of vests, the right half of Peggy's vest has become the left since she said it didn't matter much to her what stitch I used and I decided I liked the purl side of the work better. Of course I decided this after using a three-needle bind-off, which means a thickish seam, to finish the first half. This meant that I had to put everything back on the needles, turn the work inside-out and bind off from the knit side. The measurements are close enough that I'm fairly confidant of everything working out. The only way to know for sure will be to finish it and let Peggy try it.

Soon my name will be in lights!

Well, relatively speaking anyway. One of the side-affects of having the camera up and running is that I have been updating my Ravelry project page fairly consistently since projects with pictures are much more interesting than those without. A side-affect of that is my checking at least once a day, and often multiple times, to see how many "views" my various projects have gotten. These numbers often won't change for several days to a week but they can change rapidly as well. I suppose it depends on if a particular project gets a lot of "buzz" for some reason.

There is the option of linking a particular project to any of the groups that a Raveler is in and, of course, more groups linked equals a higher chance of getting views. An example of this would be my "Half-circle thistle shawl" that I linked to twenty groups and have recieved 479 views, 25 "favorites" and six comments in the last app. two years. There is a, fairly new, tab at each project for the viewer to click if the description has helped them in any way and I have three "helped" as well.

Interestingly the shawl pictured above, a half-hex from a pattern by the same designer, has gotten three "views" and one "helped" in the week since I listed it and I haven't linked it to any of my groups. One of the views and the "helped" came sometime today and, since I didn't link it, I have no idea how the other Ravelers have found it. I suppose the most likely way is that they followed a link to one of the other projects, from there to my general page, and then to this specific project. It will be interesting to see if that particular shawl starts to get a lot of interest or if this was a fluke.