Sunny afternoon.

It's actually a beautiful day outside, sunny, breezy, perhaps a little muggy, but not like your typical midwestern July afternoon, which is sort of like being slapped in the face with a wet towel. And I'm sitting inside, typing in my blog. :-p Actually, I'm on doctor's orders to avoid "strong sunlight" due to the heinous antibiotic ("antibacterial" as my mom calls it) that I am taking to kill the nasal invaders. I'm actually feeling a bit better. Still out of sorts, because the narsty mold that was stirred up (which clogged up the sinuses that gave me the infection, that swallowed the fly) was still stirring about at work. Lovely. Oh, well. I have tomorrow off, so after I take DeNephew to see Transformers (which I am looking forward to more than he, primarily because I loved, loved loved that cartoon when I was but little more than his age now) maybe I can get some knitting done.


As you can guess, this past weekend was a wash. I did a lot of sitting on my glutes and a lot of reading. I did a bit of a 'splurge' at the bookstore on Friday (curses! They sucked me in with discount mantitty novels and they trapped me in the science fiction section) so I had some reading to do anyway. Two trashy novels, a movie novelization (guess which one; I'm a sucker for Alan Dean Foster--he could rewrite the manual for my VCR and I'd probably read it) and a mystery book for my mom, who I was late meeting for dinner because of said bookstore distraction. Sigh. And no furtherance of my evil plots against humanity. I'm really falling down on the job, aren't I. Actually, my plots were never really evil. A little perverted, slightly twisted, yes, but not evil. Not per se. Unless making hale and hearty young men dress up like Dr. Frank N. Furter is evil. *makes innocent eyes* Granted, no one can wear it like Tim Curry did, but oh, I can hope.


Anyway. These are the projects on my needles right now, in order of when I started them:

This was my first "real" project, a rug. As you can see, it's making very little progress. It's a b*tch knitting with that eyelash and novelty yarn. And garter stitch gets...tiresome. VERY tiresome. For thirdly, it was a gift for a certain aunt of mine, begun before she insulted me. I've forgiven her, really, she was under stress and a bit out of her right mind at the time, but you can see how I might have lost my motivation.


This was a scarf for my mother which I'd begun during the wrist warmers phase, flush with my success at M1 and YO. Yes, I'm a beginner, how can you tell? :-) Anyway, it's being created in a homespun type yarn, which I greatly dislike. I can't figure out how to keep it from winding up tighter and tighter and tighter as I go along, and it irritates. So:

I need the needles for my neice's scarf, anyway. I'll come back to it, when I figure out the damned yarn. It's really very lovely, if I can manage to work with it.


I apologize for the tilt. I can't figure out how to rotate once I've downloaded, which I would think is possible, but I'm new to Blogger. Anyway, this is a dishcloth. I do them for practice, for stitch work, for my future kitchen, which will be blue and have a really sweet pastry mixer of my very own and no soy anywhere. I'm allergic. No, really. I have to be very careful what I touch in high-end yarn shops. Anyway, they're easy and a dishcloth just like this was my first completed project. So I bear a distinct fondness for them.


I'm sure you can tell from the colors what this is going to end up being. It's perfect for mindless knitting--it's endless garter stitch, but I do have to watch my counts and tie in. Cool. Of course, it calls for 19 stripes, each stripe is 18 rows long, and knitting in the round is a new skill I'm not loving. Makes my hands cramp.

My latest notion: attempt felting. I like this wool (it comes off a sheep's butt, so it's ok) and I'm going to NYC this fall, and wanted a new bag to carry. This, this wee, humble beginning, will be a purse. And I'm going to wind really fine jeweler's wire into the strap, so the pickpockets/cut purses (literally, in this case) can't slice it. Sweet.

Well, as you can see, I've got quite a lot to be doing at moment, including a project I'm waiting on to arrive in my mailbox (a cross stitch for my boss that says "of course I care,"), and a book I bought online (second hand--I read the author's second book and realized I needed the first which had, alas, gone out of print) and I'm still feeling a bit sluggish so I need to get my neti pot out and cleanse. I should just let you Wiki it, but here you go: Neti Pot.