Love*Craft

One of the benefits of last year's epic move is a new backyard with lots of garden potential. Finally Spring is here and with it comes my first season in the new garden space.  After a weekend of mulching and pruning and digging and bleeding (only a little) I have myself the humble beginnings of (I hope) a veritable plants paradise.

What's been going on since March?  This stuff!

• The chickens all grew into roosters.  Roosters suck!
• Went boating.  Messing around in boats != suck!
• Met some new people, moved into a new place.  New place is the anti-suck.  I sleep in a cubby in a room full of cubbies and skylights. 
  
• Purged a lot of stuff for the move.  I am now living approximately 2,134 pounds lighter.
• Beardo the cat is still fluffy and loveable.  Beardo approves of cubbies and skylights.
• Learned to make friendship bracelets and a better apple pie.
• Bought a nifty new truck!
• Learned to drive my truck.  Manual transmissions are neat!
  
• Crashed my truck while standing a half-block away. Sucks! Also, I have mad skillz to do this!
• Crashed my truck again! This time super-sucked.  Goofbutt rear-ended me and now truck is totalled. Sadness is ongoing.
• Learned the true meaning of Christmas--HINT it's second-hand stores and explosives!
• Blew some stuff up and returned to my knitting, pictures to come!

And that's what y'all have been missing while I've been busy living it. Hello again internet.  My on-again off-again correspondence with you is officially back on.

I'm not one to make New Years' resolutions.  Self improvement ought to be something you can do any day right?  And mid-winter is an awful time, I think, to be making sweeping condemnations of past habits and ambitious commitments to new behaviors.  Winter is for sleeping and being happy with what you got--friends, family, a warm place to sleep, and a kitchen full of lentil-loaf because, you know, it's too dang cold to walk to the grocery store. This winter was spent making mead, knitting scarves, and taking cocoa-milk baths. It was a good winter.

Spring is really when I get the urge to reinvent myself.  Now that spring is almost here I'm beginning to undertake missions.  Moving furniture around, learning to drive a stick shift, planning river trips, and knitting lace.  I'm even thinking a lot of going back to school, getting my PhD, and becoming a famous globe-trotting science type person.  I am supported in this by a cadre of friends and coworkers, women so badass they can think in binary code and wrestle grizzly bears, all without sweating or messing up their hair.  The plan is hindered by relative poverty compounded by a car that may explode any moment and concern that five more years in this town will kill my partner, someone I love dearly and isn't worth much in life-insurance. I worry a lot about money.  I also worry about the fact that I am 25 years old, have a college degree, and have very little in terms of financial and career stability.  Am I turning into a grown-up? Please, God, if I have to get older please don't let me go boring as well.

In order to combat this feeling that I'm getting too settled in a life-path to nowhere I've decided to make a few small, admittedly late, resolutions for the new year.  First, I am going to go on adventures without sufficient planning and stop fretting about every minor detail or possible hangup.  From now on nothing in my life can go wrong just more interesting.  This one has already been put to action.  I'm doing a whitewater training in Oregon this May and I have no idea how I'm getting there.  I am refusing to panic and trying my best to think "adventure!" rather than "plane tickets, OH MY GOD!"  Even if I manage to afford the flight how am I going to get to the meet-up.  Don't know.  Fun!

I'm going to eat better and do 600 pushups a day.  One of my fabulous bear-wrestling friends introduced me to the overwhelmingly orgasmic joy of fresh eggs.  I need chickens; I need them or I will die.  I have plans for a small coop to feed my new habit, and a plot at a nearby community garden.  I am on a mission of flavor for 2008.  I am also on a mission for giant raft-rowing muscles.  This one just sucks.

My final resolution for '08 is to get outside more, pout around my house less.  Life has been crazy sweet to me, I've got issues like anyone but nothing to mope about, I absolutely need, for the sake of my mental health, to get out of the house and go climbing, swimming, art gawking, whatever at least once a week.  I'm going to contact old friends I haven't spoken to in ages and reconnect with my passions. If it kills me.  But probably I'll just get a better tan. So there.

One of my favorite things about snowy weather is the way the snow disperses the streetlights, putting a melon colored glow on every building, car, and lawn for miles.  It's truly lovely.  In winter I try to look inward, hibernate a little, take a moment to slow down and take stock of my many blessings. I'm not very good at this exercise.  Lately I have been battling my cabin fever, alternating between a strong urge to nest and a strong urge to get outside and climb something.  Instead I've been knitting through the darker months and today I have something to show for it.

Xian's Dr. Who scarf (one full year in the making!) is finally finished, off the needles, and blocked to perfection.  I'm done! Pass the jellie babies and no more garter stitch for me ever, please!

The end of my winter knitting is a good sign, I think, that the thaw is coming.   Pathetic fallacy and all that, I know, but I who cares.  Right now I'm feeling downright indulgent.

My assassin completed her mission today at 12:15 PM.  I am now officially dead and out of the game.  Judging by the weather building outside I should count myself lucky.  Better to be dead with a warm hat than alive with cold ears.  Capoeira class is tonight and it's looking like I'll be happy for a little wooly goodness. 

It took me two days of frantic knitting to complete my doom-hat for the Hat Attack! (think Sockwars for your head) swap on Ravelry.  Here is my geeky missive of murder who's seemingly random cables are actually placed to represent a series of numbers in binary code.  Neat!

It would have gone faster too if I hadn't had to rip out the foundation ribbing twice or if I had brought the right needles with me when we left for Phoenix.  I ended up using a safety pin as a cable needle and it worked okay (aside from the poking). So there ya go. Someone's gonna die this week of awesome-hat-initis. 

Progress continues on the extra fine camel/silk blend I'm spinning for the shawl project. The one I haven't blogged about or even mentioned because it is so daunting I try not to even think about it except in yarn terms. As in, "ooh, I should buy that... It would be great for the shawl project" or "my spinning sucks, it will never be fine enough for the shawl project."  I'm not entirely sure what the shawl project even is just that I am going to make one.  A big one. And it will be perfect.  In short, I have already doomed myself to failure.

But...the yarn's pretty.  It's sooo slow going but so relaxing and the silk makes it really easy to work with.  I sampled a bit of it plied and it knits up luscious. I get passionate about spinning about once a month, this is the result so far.

Last Saturday some friend's and I celebrated a birthday (not my own) with a whirl-wind yarn tour of Prescott's finest fiber establishments.  I've spent all week considering what I want to do with my new acquisitions.  As usual I expect I'll just spin it as I spin it and the project will come on its own. The first thing I shouldn't have gotten was this gorgeous merino roving. The picture sucks, it's really much greener and less red white and bluish.  Mossy with strands of salmony pink, which sounds kind of gross actually. I'll take a better picture when the light comes back.
I also got some ingeo.  It's a plant fiber made out of corn and I'd never heard of it before last weekend.  The ingeo is soft like soysilk but a little grabbier, the fiber length is pretty long, and it doesn't stick to my hands like bug silk does.  I think it'll spin up nicely and maybe make a nice summer garment of some sort.
This trip also killed my need for a new baby project (not mine) and allowed me to replace the two sock needles I broke a month ago.  You can knit a sock on three needles but two is pushing it. Believe me, I tried.

I finally put aside some time to fill out my ravelry projects and stash.  Man do I have a ton of yarn but not nearly as many UFOs as I'd thought. 

Xian's Dr. Who Scarf is almost finished.  Yes, it's been more than two years now.  But it's had a lot of hibernation time.  Seven bajillion rows of garter stitch gets boring, alright?  Here's some luscious scarf-on-Tom-Baker action plus the scarf I'm knitting for comparison:
The yellow is a bit too bright but otherwise I think I matched the colors pretty well.  It's hard to tell though, since the old video episodes are pretty orange and the photos I've seen are crazy bright.

During the great yarn excavation I found a bunch of old (new and untouched) balls that I had forgotten all about.  This rainbow colored Trekking is going to be a pair of Rainbow Socks assuming I figure out a way to end a wedge without leaving a gaping hole at the end. Any thoughts on this?  The Ravelry forums have been enlightening but I haven't found anything addressing this particular issue.

Got a few other bits on the needles but nothing that'll see progress until the scarf is complete.  I'm setting a February deadline for this one.  Hopefully, Xian will still get a chance to wear it this year, dagnabit!

Just in case there's somebody out there wondering (but mostly because I want to show off this year's Christmas cookies -- see below) here's a breakdown of what I've been up to during this winter of scant (non-existent) blog posts.

• Obsessively fussing over our now fully recovered cat.  Since the great puke-a-thon of 2007 Beardo has acquired a whole new mountain of toys, daily play time, and a brand new diet.  We're an EVO house now, part dry and part wet, with room for exactly 12 greenies a day.  Because if I couldn't keep my cat healthy before, my powers of OCD insanity will keep him alive and happy FOREVER so long as I measure out exactly 420 Cal of food a day.  Sounds about right.  Right?
• Making new fiber friends.  A few of the town yarn ladies and myself went to see the Cloud Dancer Alpacas open house just outside of town.  We got to sip spiced apple cider, feed the fuzzies, oooh at the babies, and buy yarn! I got some incredibly soft lace weight.  I'm thinking it's gonna be a shawl, someday when the Dr. Who scarf is finished.
  
• Baking cookies.  This year Xian and I tried out this cookie recipe from The Pioneer Woman Cooks.  Screaming success!  The yolk glaze didn't make the cookies all eggy and gross and the process was much easier than futzing with frosting.  It's ridiculous how difficult frosting can be at least for me -- to the point of crying tears of frustration in a cold shower, trying to get the red and green food coloring to come off my face.  Not pretty.  But these were.  Thank you Pioneer Woman
  
• Poisoning myself with rotten shrimp which I will never order from a restaurant again ever so long as I live. This one wasn't as much fun as the others but the emergency room staff was very nice to me and when I woke up three days later, five pounds lighter, and significantly poorer it was Thanksgiving and time for all the taint-free mashed potatoes I could eat.
• Running the Xmas party circuit.  This year's holidays were remarkably warm and drama free. We got to see and hug all our relatives, sip wine, eat chocolate, and watch cartoons.  Dad said it was a Christmas miracle how everyone got together and played nice.  It was.  Hooray!