The Knitting Journeyman

Gathering Up One Thread At A Time As I Weave This Web Of Mine.....

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Wednesday Check-In Crammed Into Thursday


So, yesterday day I fell of my new writing plan wagon…but it was for a good cause.  I sat down, several times, to try to write, but kept getting distracted.  The urge to start unpacking and organizing is beginning to actually hit lately.  It’s still hit and miss, but at least it is pushing a bit.  It’s about time.
I think I wreaked more havoc in my packing yesterday than I brought order from chaos.  My file cabinets are out, the files neatly tucked inside them, mostly in an order where I can find everything.  However, in order to get to said file cabinets to move them about and get them where they needed to be, I had to move a now unused deep freeze (small chest), a dresser, or two, a wooden bench (it goes to my dining room table), a miscellaneous amount of ikea bags, suitcases (that are empty), random boxes, as well as a large pile of blankets we haven’t quite managed to figure out what to do with as yet. 
Amazing how much better I feel knowing I can reach some of my draft work and scribbles from previous years.  The bulk of my work is stored in several plastic storage containers, which are…somewhere in the basement.  At least this is a start.
I pulled all the yarn scattered throughout the house…did I not say I was not going to buy any more yarn, except for certain projects, for the whole year this year?  Uhm, yeah, that did not work.  When we went to Hobby Lobby the other day for the yarn for E’s jacket (explanation at bottom of post), there was this lovely wool on sale, and some nice cotton on sale…who am I to pass up a sale?  When I checked out at hobby lobby, the woman behind me had two carts FULL of the sale yarn, I mean two carts piled high and near to overflowing…I was envious, to say the least….I had limited myself to nothing more than I could carry.  Luckily, that was still eleven skeins of yarn and three packages of safety eyes (I need blue eyes for A’s cheerleader doll yet).  Some of the yarn, like stuff on the dining room table, on under the coffee table, and tucked into the one end table, that stuff came from my stash…so it’s not as if everything upstairs was brand new…not counting the yarn I recently ordered form knitpicks for my EZ seamless yoke sweater, nor the yarn I recently ordered from smiley’s for several sweaters, including my not Noro klaralund…of course…the real problem is not that I collected all the yarn and it’s all in one place; the problem is…it’s in a laundry basket that is sitting in my bedroom and I don’t know where else to put it all yet. 
That is the problem that erupted yesterday…it’s not horrible or anything…it all revolves around the whole, in order to do X, we need to do Y.  In order to accomplish Y, there’s R, S, T to be done first…but in order to do R, S, T…well…you get the picture.  I finally reached that point where I am saying, fine, I need to do this to do that…if I start doing this, I will have to do that…and eventually this circular conundrum will work itself out, even if all I feel as if I am doing for a week, or more, is sorting through one pile to create a different pile…which is really what it feels like right now.
I did not remove the one dresser from N’s room…but I did move it enough that we could get the other dresser into the room…that is a plus.  I have to change the clothes from one dresser to the other…and then move the smaller dresser to …somewhere…but…it is progress.  At least if I can get all his clothes out and put away…and his knick knacks and whatnot out of the bags in his closet…then I will really feel as if I am accomplishing something. 
R will be gone on a float trip this week-end.  I had a big melt-down this past week-end.  It’s the anniversary of our miscarriage, one year ago.  (I have the post written up…just have to type it yet…please understand why I keep putting that off…it was hard enough to sit and write it…but I needed to get it out.) Add into that, with the utter chaos that our home is in at the moment, on top of all sorts of other issues, and I decided that this is not the state I want to be in to go canoeing and camping with a bunch of people I don’t know all that well yet, with the thought that the ex-girlfriend may show up and show her rump all week-end…especially since she is still furious because  I ‘destroyed’ her relationship with R (do we want to go into the whole how he claims the relationship was dying and near death before I left MO for MD…much less before I ever came back?  Why was the relationship not important enough to her to save in 2006, which is when I left, and it still wasn’t important enough for her to save in 2008, when I came back…yes, he spent all that time trying to ‘fix’ her while waiting for her to leave on her own…it was easier than fighting her… it wasn’t important enough to her at all…not even after he broke up with her, but only after she hacked his email account and found out he was dating me—then the relationship became ‘important’ to her…so don’t get me going there…)…so I have plans and more plans for this week-end.  I need to know where the drill, the level and the sander are…I am hanging things up, including my ‘enchanted’ mirror…it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s lovely…and I bought it w R one day, when N was a baby, if not before N was born…and I know right where it is going…I also want to learn how to make our own yeast using the dehydrator…hmm…yummy plans indeed…
Some days I think this house is really too small for everything we want to do in here…other days, the potential I see is really quite vast…it’s all in how we pull things together. 
While unpacking yesterday, I came across the little spirit doll heads that I had hand-sculpted before this last move…I have three that are actual faces, and one that I made a pretty shape and planned to add the details later, if need be.  I am oft times of the more Waldorf persuasion that says to limit the facial details, usually to eyes only.  When I found the heads though, I knew exactly what sort of doll heads I am going to be making in the future…I am going to stop fussing with myself over the face, over getting the features right, or making the nose big enough, or slanting the mouth just the right way…one little almost diamond shaped piece of air dried clay was all I needed to tell me, the more open to Spirit that I am, the better my dolls are going to be…plus, my friend Kerry somehow triggered something in me during a conversation about me knitting her some jewelry chains, ropes to hang her pendants from, and so on, and I think I have some entirely new ideas as to how to make these dolls of mine, once I am more…unpacked and able to find the pieces to create said dolls…Kerry is always good for things like that…she’s more than an inspiration…
All right.  Let me run through my list from Monday to see what I have accomplished yet.  Oh, scary.  One dresser into N’s room…but as yet nothing out (except some yarn)…although that’s not right—I have moved blankets and some boxes out of his room this week already.  So that counts.  The dreamboard is done and posted.  I have not unpacked any more kitchen stuff, but I did finally unpack the rest of the bathroom closet from the old house…so now we have access to all the bathroom stuff, like the hair dryer we don’t use, the curling iron we don’t use, the steam facial bath that I live for in the winter to help my sinuses…that sort of thing.  I set up a new listing (details coming) for my work…that is a plus.  Except for yesterday, I have held to my writing schedule…and today I think I may be able to reconcile, maybe not all, but most of the writing I missed yesterday…
I call that progress…
Wait—before I forget.  E’s jacket.  E has this somewhat fitted denim jacket that she loves to death.  It has cool fabric buttons and it makes her feel all girly and special when she wears it.  The body is still a good fit…but the sleeves are way too short now.  We had seen this one jacket all winter in a store that had knitted …everything.  It was a lined denim jacket, with a knitted collar, knitted sleeves, a knitted hem, knitted lining for the pockets…E and I both loved that thing…but they never had it in her size, or even a small enough larger size that I would be willing to buy it for her to grow into…BUT we now have this little jean jacket of E’s.  We are going to cut off the too short sleeves…I am planning to knit new sleeves myself, probably in a ribbed stitch…and make them plenty long…because the way this jacket fits she can wear it for years…as she grows, the jacket will still look good when it becomes a cropped jacket…I am using ‘I Love This Yarn’ acrylic, which is a hobby lobby brand…it’s very soft, as acrylics go, with more body than some other yarns…and we like it.  We’ve used it before here and there…and I will take this yarn over red heart super saver any day…
More to come…