Well, I broke the slow spell. I finished two pairs of socks in two days. In the early morning hours of Monday, I bound off the Plassard Merinos fat socks with rolled cuffs. I wore them Monday when out and about. They were very comfy and very turquoise!

Monday before I left Threadbear, I bought two balls of Lana Grossa Bingo (fat washable wool) for more fat warm winter socks. I’m really into the washable idea right now, as most of my warm wool socks are handwash only. So when I got home I cast on for a pair of Bingo socks and got about 2″ into the first toe…

… when I noticed in my pile of “sort this someday” half-balls of yarn and half-knitted sample items, there was a nearly finished Toe Up sock footie in bulky Lamb’s Pride. The sock was my sample item for a sock class at Little Red Schoolhouse, a few months ago when it was not this cold out. I had forgotten about it. It’s basically a footie with about a 1″ rib for a cuff. At only 32 stitches around, this style/yarn for me is nearly an instant knit.

I put down the Bingo and by 2pm Tuesday I had finished the second footie. I do benefit from having small feet (size 6US Narrow). I can finish even skinny-yarn socks fairly quickly for my feet. But lately I’m so busy knitting for others that I have made essentially no socks in 2005.

My feet are still a tiny bit chilly at my drafty desk. However, with bulky Lamb’s Pride on them, they are happier than they have been in weeks.

My new hard drive is mostly working but I still do not have my PhotoShop installed so I’m without pictures again. Drat. Sorry, guys.

This falls into miscellaneous artforms, and Socknitting as well (there is a very fine pair of orange socks in many of the pictures). My ideal kitchen, though I never knew it until now. They call it tacky. Hmm. I call it funky, artful, fun, energetic, and wonderful. I guess I need to embrace the word Tacky, then.

For the record, I have a door that looks almost identical to theirs. Mine is purple with turquoise trim (a cropped pic is on the page for my Watercolor Bag pattern. We must be cousins!

This small-zigzag sock makes me smile.

Oh, my… the not knowing was worse than the final answer. I re-felted the Threadbear K1C2 Watercolor bag, using first my new washboard (thanks, Edna!) and then another long round through the washing machine. I also added my just-finished bag for Rae in the wash and it felted like a champ… better than the one I use myself.

I still need to sew D-rings inside the bags (to control the I-cord handle). After I do that, you will have some photographs! Finally!

I also had some good knitting time where I could not count or follow a pattern… a 75 minute conference call for starters. I have finished both feet of the Plassard Merinos socks and am just deciding what sort of cuff I want on them.

I’ve knit a fairly snug stockinette cuff for 30 rounds on one of the two, it’s just over three inches tall. I may just bind it off and it will be a rolled cuff. I like tight cuffs with rolled edges, they work over tight legging pants and also work as a second pair of socks (over a thinner pair for warmth)… and look fine underneath my baggy legwarmers on really cold days. The second cuff has only 13 rounds knit thus far, but with this fat yarn I can make them match soon enough and wear them. I’m ready to finish some knitting, you know?

Photo today is a pair of minisox I knit as decorations at holiday time in 2002, if I remember right. It’s an old photo but I figure eye candy, old or no, is better than no photo at all…

I just said here that I’m not lazy. Well, today I guess that is not true.

It was sunny for maybe an hour this morning, and Brian and I went to Pablo’s Panaderia in Old Town. He had a gorgeous breakfast that looked a lot like one we ate in Playa Del Carmen (on a road going south out of town where nobody in the building spoke English) back on our trip to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, about 10 years ago. His meal today looked really good. I had fabulous, hand-squeezed orange juice and a cup of green tea. There was nothing there I could eat but being there was enough of a treat for me. I’d never been there before, though Brian eats lunch there often.

I started a sock in the car on the way to lunch. It’s basically my First-Time Toe-Up Sock pattern. I’ve finished the toe and the foot, and am now working on the heel. Gotta love fat yarn! This is the Plassard Merinos (100% wool, machine wash air dry) which is supposed to be Aran weight but which is knitting up nicely at 5.5st/inch on size 3 US (3.25mm) Brittany needles. It sounds extreme (the yarn says to knit at 3.5 to 4 st/inch on size 6-7 needles) but it does not feel too dense at all, for socks anyway.

The yarn includes 3 shades of turquoise. Totally me. I already finished the foot of the first sock, so when I catch up with this one I can decide if they will be slipper socks with almost no cuff, or whether I want to knit up a while and make them out-and-about winter socks. We’ll see when the time comes.

I do have a few pattern orders that came in while my computer was down yesterday so I am filling those. I thought I’d also be felting 2 bags today (a new one for Rae and the Threadbear bag one more time) but that is where I’m feeling lazy. I am a bit cold phobic, the basement where the washer is, is not heated… and when I’m done I expect to be plunging at least one of the bags from cold to hot to cold to hot water. This is not my favorite cup of tea. I’ll get over it, but I’ve put it off long enough now that I won’t be delivering a bag to the boyz at Threadbear today.

The sun is significantly gone and it is 3:30pm. Brian says we’ll be getting snow for a while here. I just checked the National Weather Service for Lansing and it shows snowflakes and only snowflakes, for today through Thursday. Grump, grump, grump. Makes you just want to go back to bed and sleep for a week, you know???

Anyway I have had some great classes lately including polymer clay at Yarn Garden yesterday. I did take pictures, you know that. I’m the obsessed reporter when I need to just be in the moment, at times.

But for now I think I’ll go make another cup of tea and finish this bulky-wool sock. I may need it to stay warm on the way to the post office.

I got a new hard drive this week in the mail. Brian spent his entire day off, from Thursday night until Friday night, working on getting my new drive in and my old drive where I could copy things from it. He is such a gift to me! It would have taken me much longer… he’s better at hardware issues than I am by leaps and bounds.

I was unable to use my regular email program for a full day, where normally I’m online at least a few times a day (first thing, last thing) if nothing else. I’m behind the times, folks… and I still have programs to install, pay for, configure, you name it. If you didn’t hear from me Saturday I’ll do my best to write on Sunday. If you don’t hear then, I missed your email. Please write again, if that is the case.

I’ve been grumpy here while the hardware changeover has been happening. I have to keep reminding myself that I did not lose any data. Brian tried valiantly to use the Norton Ghost program that I have, to make ths process seamless. The equipment I have just did not want to go along with Ghost at all. So I’m reduced to manually re-installing, re-configuring, and dragging files over to the new machine one folder at a time.

I’m really grateful that so far the flaky hard drive has not crashed. In fact, if it should crash now, I’d lose only some configuration files. I am probably safe from the worst case scenarios. Unless the new and the old drives decided to stop working at the same time, that is, before I get the backup program working again.

I have wonderful knitting stories to tell, in particular the CityKidz Knit! program has been especially wonderful this week… there is much to say here and many photos on my camera to copy to the new hard drive.

But for now I need to be glad that my Sunday class somehow is not “a go” and I can spend the day at home working on the laptop, felting a few bags, and knitting. It could be much worse… especially since it is snowing. Snow is the perfect excuse for a Sunday at home!

Good Night.

When I was a kid, we would fold pieces of paper, cut with scissors, unfold and make paper snowflakes. I enjoyed the magic of opening it up to see what I had made.

I somehow had forgotten about this folk art form. Until Jacque M sent me the link to “Make a Snowflake.” You can make a virtual paper snowflake online. I found it enjoyable.

I don’t know what technology this uses, and whether all browsers will be able to do it… good luck.

I love quotations. When I have time, I collect them. I once put together several pages of favorite quotes, nestled inside my very plain-looking but bursting-with-words LDTH Poetry Collection (a web page I put together many years ago, perhaps 1997).

Lately I feel like my life is in flux, but I am not sure in which direction it is moving. I don’t know what to focus on next.

Things are good, I’m bursting with creativity, I have loved ones surrounding me and great places to work. Yet for some reason I think I can ***KNOW*** what I should do next. That somehow I can figure out the exact right thing to do today, tomorrow, the next day. But a creative person can never know anything for sure… probably no human can, creative or not.

One thing I am not, is lazy. I work myself hour after hour, almost the whole time I am awake. I love my work so this usually pleases me.

However, I am frequently not efficient, and I am often not well-focused. When I am in a good emotional space, this feels OK to me. I follow my muse, I do things like making a skirt from a sweater or sending embellished wig heads through the US mail system… and following that odd muse can give me much joy! Who knows, maybe it will inspire someone else to follow their own muse? I hope so.

On bad days (especially those gray-sky gloomy winter days such as we have had this week), I think I need to be more like someone else. I am sure that if I only could think like an accountant, if I could somehow see the balance of my life all at once in my mind, if I only knew what would be best… well, that my life would be manageable.

But passionate people always have more to do than fits in 24-hour days. And you can not buy passion! Which I say to others all the time, but when it is cold and dreary outdoors I forget my own advice.

So then today I find this quote from Alan Alda on my near-archival web page, Quotes on Artful Living:

Be brave enough to live life creatively

The creative is the place where
no one else has ever been.
You have to leave the city of
your comfort and go into
the wilderness of your intuition.
You can’t get there by bus,
only by hard work and risk,
and by not quite knowing what you are doing.
What you will discover will be wonderful.
What you discover will be yourself.
       Alan Alda

Dang! “…not quite knowing what you are doing.” I guess I’m just where I need to be.

Image today is a blockprint I made on soft blocks/erasers, many years ago. I used four different print blocks in all, to make this image.

I have been doing some clean up on my computer and blog. I can not help but notice the posts and emails I got from Max the American guy (as compared to Max the Canadian woman who also writes to me). He and I never met, but we corresponded because of my involvement as a “Friend of Men Who Knit.”

As part of my current focus on maintenance, I have been glancing over my past blog posts. When I wrote here just over a year ago that I was going on a trip to Africa, Max wrote to me in support. In fact, this is what he said:

“Ahh, Life is a banquet, and you my friend are definitely partaking of the feast!”

Life went on. I had my trip and returned.

Then I got an email from Max August 17 saying he had been diagnosed with cancer. He declined to go into detail about his diagnosis other than to say that it was terminal and his time was already near.

And he passed away in mid-October. He was buried October 17, only two months after he sent me the note. It seems somehow soothing to me to read his lively note of support today. He *did* truly get it, that life was a banquet.

Today I was in a moody state of mind (winter does that to me). Funny how Max could turn my thoughts around even though he’s not of this earth any more.

Thanks, Max. What a friend you can be. Even now.

Remember, my friends… life can be short. Tell someone you love them today. It may feel odd to say it if you haven’t said so before, but you do not want to wish you had said something, when it becomes too late for words. I only wish I did not know this firsthand.

Photo: Garden in Karen, Nairobi, Kenya. The passage opens into yet another garden. It seems the right photo for this post…