I'm here

I missed my usual weekend posting. Saturday I was intent upon working on my projects to get as much as I could done. Sunday was not so good. The black dog of depression came visiting and hit me hard. By the end of the evening I was a mess, so was glad to finish the day. I rarely get days like that but when I get them it's miserable. I can only attribute it to a combination of frustration with my asthma and whacked hormones. When the week started up again, the blog sat in idle while I worked at resolving the latest setback. Today I'm doing much better moodwise thanks to getting a change of asthma meds and focussing on other things. I've decided to go on leave from the chorus so that I can use the time to get stronger and pursue projects that can give me a little spending money. New filters are on the furnace and things are getting picked up around the house. We're moving on.

I finished the dickeys! They came out very nicely too. I'm hoping the recipient finds them comfortable to wear. Her response will help me decide whether to add more sizes to the pattern write up I did to see if it would be salable. The Christmas stocking is on the needles but is a bit slow going only because I'm not looking forward to doing the intarsia portion.

I was reading an article the other day about photo editing software. There's MS Photo Editor and Photoshop, as well as a bunch of other software out there for people to tweak their photos with. I've used Photoshop in some things and for some editing it works really well. But for the most part my photo editor is MS Paint. Yep. That primitive little software residing in your Accessories file. About 99% of my photos that I post here are edited in MS Paint. It doesn't matter what computer I'm on -- as long as it has a Windows OS it'll have MS Paint.

Case in point is the latest project I've posted in my Ravelry projects. I couldn't wait until summer to start MMario's Queen Anne's Lace shawl. I didn't want to do it in laceweight because I didn't want to work with a super light yarn. I knew I had in my stash a bunch of Elsebeth Lavold's Silky Wool I had picked up a few years ago with the intention of knitting a sweater out of it. It had enough yardage to do the QAL. So I cast on last night.

Now the beginnings of a lace shawl are pretty puny. This thing has over 150 rows. I'm on row 16. So instead of leaving a blank pic on my project page, I figured I needed a placeholder. Buster's an excellent stand in, so I created this:

Ravelry has a habit of loading the pic so that you can't use the entire picture, so I centered the writing so that it's positioned well for making this an avatar. And it was all done in MS Paint.

Tomorrow's a new day. More rows to knit. More fiber to spin. And my fourfoots to love.

Did you look over at the counter? Twenty thousand looksees. And some come back. Thank you for coming over to visit. Mwah! Mwah!

Gearing up

It's hard to believe that next week is the last week of August. My August was going to be lazy and quiet, seizing moments where I could just sit and read or knit whatever I pleased. It didn't exactly turn out that way. An experiment turned into a potential pattern for sale so I've been busy putting that together. Then I got yarn from Judy Ditmore so the pencil, paper, and needles have been busy thinking up patterns for her. I got a call from the chorus' director asking if I would be able to sing with the chorus' small group Influence this Saturday so I lost a weekend to chorus rehearsal last week. I know; I could have said 'no' but how often does one get chosen to sing in the auditioned part of the chorus? I'm thinking it as my audition for the coming season *grin*. Ray gave me the music for the upcoming Tour and holiday concerts for copying, so tonight will be spent with Mr Kinko and his chunking machines. So the summertime lazy days are over for me. While it will be sad to not have those days, I can look forward to my favorite time of year coming up: early fall in Oregon.

I joined Ravelry July 4th (it must have been too much potato salad putting me in a carbohydrate stupor). I'm in the lower 3000's now and word is they're getting ready to load in servers that will be chucking out invites like spam. I had thought of loading in my stash but I'm going to wait until I have a good feel for the site to see if I need to take that time to do it. Perhaps just the labeled items. I have anonymous stash yarns gifted from me that will stay off for certain. It'll be nice to be able to hunt for patterns for them though. What do you do with a hurkin' big hank of handspun that looks like bricks lightly brushed with frost? Or another that looks like a pale child with measles?