Friday, February 29, 2008

Trying to keep cozy

Sorry. Its been awhile. sigh.

In the span of the last few weeks my knitting mojo has waxed and waned, ooohhhh 'bout 30 times, my sewing fever has bubbled forth and then receded, and believe it or not I got into another house shuffle. I basically have nothing to show for any of it.

I do have a teapot and cup cozy show you. Big deal a whole 3 hours worth of knitting. I like it though and it serves its purpose well.



The need for a teapot cozy was something I had never considered, that is to say until somewhat recently. We've been lambasted with a winter that brings back fond childhood memories, lots of snow and biting cold. So cold that after a brief time outside you couldn't feel it anymore, and your nose stopped dripping cuz, well, to be frank, your snot froze. I want to go sledding with my buddies, I want to build snow forts and igloos, but, David lives in AZ, I don't know where Lewis is, and I live in the middle of a corn field, no slopes in sight. Not to mention I don't like being cold and wet any more and I'd prob'ly break my neck. We did some really stupid sledding back then, the obstacle course through the trees and the jump off the cliff readily come to mind.....

Anyway, the need for a cozy was finally realized. My workroom is on the second floor. OK, it IS the second floor.------and if the truth be told, Joe would say it is the entire house. Sorry Babe, thanx for being you and looking pass everything. :-)------- I think I've mentioned this before, prob'ly last winter, there are only 2 heat vents on the second floor, neither of which is in my "main" workroom. It's cold up there. That's all well and good if I'm guzzling Mt. Dew, but I'm making a concerted effort to break my Dew addiction. Yes, I'm addicted to the stuff. I don't even really like it that much, but I am a slave to it's cold, readily available, drinkability. And that is why the need for a teapot cozy has finally come to fruition. The ambient temp of my workroom is at odds with a pot of hot tea.

Other knitting news around here? I've finished the second version of Dancing with the Devil. I'm calling it Boogyin' with Beelzebub. This version is slightly shorter and has a more traditional neck/shoulder, in other words, it fits higher more like a "regular" raglan. I'll have pix, perhaps later today, and another freebie pattern soon. I've put off writing up the pattern 'til my brain decides it wants to work properly again. The fact that I'm blogging is a good sign, unless this text is total gobblity goop, then all bets are off. :o)

Another hat flew off the needles, the "Tweedy Topper" from a VK a few years back. It's a cotton hat that reminds me of one of the those hats you'd see a fisherman wearing with lures stuck in it. I'll give all info and pix next time. Lots of changes will be forth coming for this pattern! There has also been several experiments with "string" manipulation, and tons of sketches for new things and lots of "what ifs" to keep me busy. When one of those "what ifs" comes to be I'll share.

I've done some dyeing too. Seven skeins of this:






And two orphan skeins.




All done with KoolAid, and food coloring.

The sewing fever I alluded to earlier in this post began as a couple new bags refashioned, one from a leather jacket and two from leather skirts. The fever came to screeching halt when I made the very first cut on a huge piece of leather and it was inexplicably wrong. I did measure twice, in fact I measured no less than 6 times. I hadn't trusted the level of brain function I had the first day I started planning the bags so naturally I measured again (3 more times) on day two when I was actually going to cut the leather. Um, yeah.....the measurements were right, the orientation of the leather was wrong..........gah. The leather has been in time out for a while.

I'm going to try something new. It's been years since I've had any kind of schedule, and if you know anything at all about me, you know that I never know, what the date is, and usually I don't know what day of the week it is, so having said that, keep your fingers crossed...

Beginning next week I'm going to have Weaving Wednesdays. I got out my giganto homemade weavette loom the other day and made another square for the patio rug I started last summer. The knitting mojo and the sewing fever were both ebbing very low and I can usually kick start one or the other by weaving a simple square. That's when the Weaving Wednesday idea hit me. I figure if I make at least one square every week from now until summer the rug will done when the warm weather hits. It also has the added bonus of making me aware of what day it is, it "forces" me to blog more frequently, and will hopefully keep the mojo and fever bubbling. Wish me luck in this endeavor, but if you know more than one thing about me, then you'll know schedules, time constraints and I don't get along. :o)