That was...uh...yeah.

I went on vacation. Two weeks in the Las Vegas area -- mostly spent outside Vegas, in the national parks and museums in the region. Two days I visited the Strip.

That was more than enough.

I am not a Strip sort of girl, you know? I mean, I had fun at the MGM Grand -- I did the CSI: The Experience and then we test watched a new show (you all should really, really, really clear your Wednesday nights in the traditional CSI: Original Crispy time slot of 10 pm Eastern to watch Stalker. Just sayin'.) Those bits were fun. But the rest of it? It's all too much, you know? Too much noise, smell, neon, flashing lights, all of it. It's like drowning in external stimulation.

And vaguely depressing. I'm not sure why, but both my friend and I were actually, measurably depressed after we got back from the Strip, both times. I'm not sure if it was because I had a different expectation of what the experience was, or if it was the people around me....I dunno. I just know that after we went the Thursday before we left for home, I started getting homesick and wanted just to leave. Not even the Grand Canyon (aka, the world's largest drainage ditch) could cheer me. I was wound up until yesterday, too, and I got home Wednesday last.

I did, however, find the time to visit a yarn shop in Vegas. I think it was something I should have done again after visiting the Strip -- all that yarn, acting like psychic insulation against the bright lights and floral stench of the gaming floors (if you visit Vegas and have scent sensitivities, be warned: the big resort/casinos put a fragrance into the air in their facilities. Most of them are floral in tone -- sort of like a giant, over-done Plug-In is somewhere in the lobby -- but the MGM is a gentler, musky scent, like men's cologne. It's easier on the sinuses.)

Of course I enhanced my stash.

And the crowning jewel:

None of them are locally made yarns, but they are all yarns I cannot find here. Well, aside from maybe the Sunseeker, but the sparkles made me happy.

That's my primary decision making heuristic -- does it make me happy? If yes, put it in my cart. There are worse ways to make choices, you know. Particularly when it comes to yarn.

Now I have to plan out the projects I want to make with all of these pretty, pretty yarns. Ah, the real joy of vacation!

Dah-ta-daaaaaaah!

Do you know what this is, friends?

That right there is an armscye.

Aw, yeah!
(dances around in circles)

I feel accomplished, and all I did was bind off 18 stitches in preparation for doing even more decreases and knitting the last few inches of this piece of the sweater. Once the back is done, I'm going to move the project to a larger, 2 gallon zippie bag. I keep most of my projects in a 1 gallon bag, but that's not going to be adequate. A full size sweater is going to be way more than a gallon.

Hark at me! Talking like the sweater is already completely knitted and done!

Not yet, but soon. Soon my pretties, soon.

So, so tired.

It's just the change in seasons. Finally, it's warm enough to leave the house without sixty-bajillion layers of clothing on, and I'm exhausted from the sinus fun and frolic.

So I've been working on my sweater panel, making progress. I haven't any photos, but that's not unusual for me. Never a camera around when knitting happens. Here, have a puppy instead:

Help! The couch is eating me!!!

I have a project upstairs for when I hang out with Yoda. We knit and watch tv -- well, I knit and he chews my yarn, I watch tv and he sits there and watches me watch tv. It works for us, as a thing.

Tomorrow there is probably no knitting -- my choir's performance is in the afternoon. All the practices, all the late Sunday nights, all that work finally pays off. I'm not at all disappointed. I'm exhausted by this point in the season. I may need to get back in shape something fierce if I was so glad to see the back of Easter because it meant that the performance was only a week away. I can't imagine how some of my friends do it -- they're in multiple choirs. 

Anyhoo. I'm hoping to be rested and ready for some serious creativity this summer, once I get a weekend that doesn't involve standing on my feet for three hours at a stretch and breath control. Maybe a few more naps than I've been able to manage of late. And maybe take some more walks, get some water and vitamins and eat some veggies or something, because just doing this much has me feeling like I've been slapped around. I mean, I've got stuff to do, things to plan. 

I have to finish up my Feeding the Fish, I need to design out my Meninius sweater and get it started, then I want to finish up some other projects that are on the needles and have been for far, far, far too long.    

I'm going to head up to bed now, knit some with Yoda, watch a video or two. I'm making some serious progress on my Nemesis shawl on nights like this -- that's my Yoda/TV knitting project. It's simple, there's little chance of my screwing it up (so knitting while half asleep is no problem) and I don't have to watch it while I'm knitting.

Then sleeping and then singing, and then sleeping some more. I love being in the choir, but oy. I will be so glad when this season is over! At least until next season begins, when I will forget how exhausted I am now, and join up enthusiastically. 

I never really learn, do I?

Knitting, Interrupted.

But at least he's warm and wiggly.

 That's my baby brother, Rex. We got him from a rescue group. If you look very closely, and I do advise it, because he's adorable, you can see that his fur is a bit thin in spots.

You can see it a bit better in that photo, around his eyes and on his muzzle. He had the mange, but we don't talk about that, or use the "mangy cur" epithet. He's very sensitive.

But I have been working on my Mr. Rogers sweater, now officially dubbed "Feed The Fish" (because Mr. Rogers had fish at one point and somebody wrote a letter asking about them, and that's just about painfully adorable in and of itself, but also because I got started while my brother was out of the country and I was, actually, feeding his fish), mostly while at work or relaxing with my Yoda. I'm afraid to test himself out on my yarn. He's bad enough about ducks.

So, to prove knitting happened, I took a picture.

 But...why, why, why has my camera washed out the color to that nauseating hot pink? The yarn is not pink. It is red. A very pretty dark cherry red, to be precise. Here's a better exemplar:

I'm not sure I could keep going if it was that hot pink color. It's eye-searing enough in bright red!

Cute Yoda story to end my post: I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier last night as a reward for not throwing a fit in a shoe store (long story, maybe one day I'll tell it). It was excellent, but the shaky-handi-cam produced headache and nausea as it usually does (grrrr, what happened to make steady-cam so down market?) I came home, snorgled Rex (because puppy smell is curative -- don't knock it, it worked a little bit), took my shower and turned in. Yoda could tell I had a massive headache, because he came over and gave me a Yoda-sage on the back of my neck, and patted on my face and hair with his paws while mewing gently. Then when we woke up this morning, he dug me out of the blankets to rub his face on mine.

Such a sweet boy!

Dilemma

Sweaters. Or scarves. Or shawls.

I was thinking at the beginning of the year that I was going to make a list and know ahead of time what I would knit. But I'm not sure that's going to work out. I mean, I started a Mr. Rogers Cardi-Along on Ravelry (don't ask, let's just say...I said something, then I made a sparkle gif at the sparkle gif generator and suddenly there's 30 odd people knitting cardigans together). I wasn't planning on a sweater this year. And then I went to see the second replay of Coriolanus and fell in absolute love with this:

Can you see it? Can you??!

It was all I saw, I'll tell you that. Oh, his performance was stunning, I enjoyed the whole thing immensely, but every time Mark Gatiss walked on stage, all I could see was that sweater. 

It's long, I can tell that much. You can see the bottom edge there next to his left knee, between his pant leg and that darker brown patch on his duster. It's got the sleeves -- I'll leave out the hole in the elbow (which you can't see in that picture), but what really got me? 

The scarf. 

That scarf around his neck is, I believe, attached to the back of the sweater. It never moved, not once, except when he threw the ends around his neck. Even then, it did not shift from side to side. Not at all. 

So now I'm thinking I need to reverse engineer a sweater like this. Long sleeve, long body, long scarf attached at the neck -- maybe buttoned to the neckline, so I can wear the sweater with or without the scarf. Maybe...five buttons, so the attachment point is very secure. I don't know what the front should look like (the sweater was never buttoned, and the front edges always fell under the duster he wore over it), but I can bodge something up.

Anyway, until I saw this movie, I had no plans to make a second sweater, much less the first one. If I'd planned out my knitting for the year ahead, I'd have to shelve both sweaters in order to keep to my list! 

I guess it's a good thing I never got around to it, isn't it?

I'm wilting in this weather.

Winter. Just...winter. I'm over it.

On the positive side, we had a local yarn crawl today. I went with some coven menbers. It was awesome.

Macro-photo of the swag:

Here's the yarn all on its lonesome:

 Freia Ombre in sportweight -- I had to show it colors on, intead of the label

 

I'm doing a Mr. Rogers tribute sweater, starting this March 20.

It's a Knit-Along. Join me!

  

 I also got some notions and doo-dads:

 

There's also some hand lotion I got but didn't photograph. Which reminds me, I need to take that out of my purse after I log off, before I go upstairs and collapse into bed in a boneless fashion. The constant cold and lack of outdoor time is making me feel very weak, and even though today was really nice (it hit 50 F today, and was sunny), I think it's going to take me more time in the sun to recover than just one day. And time away from the threat of snow and blech like we're having tomorrow. 

So, anyway. Ain't it all purty? Alas, I'm still doing a destashing game, so my score is now significantly negative. Not as bad as I ended up last year (I think I was somewhere around -145 at the turn of the new year), but still.

I should probably be ashamed of myself. But I'm not.  

Je ne regrette rien.

Oh, that was ugly.

The Super Bowl. Yeesh. I enjoy a good football game, but I don't think that bloodbath qualifies.

Anyway, I'm prepping my Ravellenics Games projects. I don't usually participate (deadlines on my hobbies and life's little joys sort of give me hives), but this year I found the only two teams that give me the latitude to work hard or not at all.

So I finally got my yarn out for the third and most interesting of my Ravellenics projects -- a pair of armwarmers I've been designing for ages. Here's the yarn:

To give you a hint of how old this project is, that yarn is discontinued. Not that it takes much, because yarn lines and colors go out of fashion all the time, but it's fairly standard sock yarn in kettle-dyed, mildly variegated colors.

Weep with me.

It's a stranded color work project, too. So what I needed to start this project up is a multi-strand yarn organizer. My local Big Box was remarkably short on that item, so I'm improvising my own in a fairly clever way, if I do say so myself. Wanna se?

First, you take two plastic shopping bags -- I went with fairly small ones for this project. 

Then you wedge your yarn in there and pull the center strand out of each of the skeins (making them all center pull skeins):

Then you thread one strand of each through each of the handle holes:

Hey, presto! Each yarn has its own little handle hole, and all tangling will occur outside the yarn bags.

Yes, it's a bit ghetto, but it'll work. You'll see. Eventually. When I get around to, you know, actually knitting on this thing.