Consolidating

In the past two days I have consolidated 4 bags and 1 basket of hat yarn into 1 basket and 1 bag. So I now have 3 empty bags that used to hold yarn. Progress. I also managed to finish 2 hats and 2 scarfs today. Yes, I did cast on 2 more hats, I don't want the knitting needles to get lonely. I also found this UFO hat and added 3 more inches to it.

It's Been Awhile

I have been busy deep cleaning and taking care of the guys. We have also had a nice visit from Teri and Tej. Eric had also received a very bad batch of vitamin D,  that was contaminated with bacteria. So tomorrow we will start another round of antibiotics to make sure it has cleared his system. Did I mention that the contaminated vitamin D has already caused one round on pneumonia.

So what did I do when both guys cleared the house today? Since I have a fundraiser coming up in October, all bets would be on , making some jewelry. Maybe tagging and pricing some finished pieces. Maybe even warping a loom or putting together the new loom. If you choose any of the above you would have been wrong. I was too tired to do any of it. Instead I took a 3 1/2 hour nap. It in no way makes up for all the lost sleep over the past month but I do feel better.

Blender to Tuesday

Monday evening as I wrote my blog I had such great plans for Tuesday. Well long story short, Eric shared his cold with me. I am not quite sure how Eric and I made it through Tuesday. Did I mention that this cold hit me like a brick wall, hard and fast? Wednesday was a little better, I even had the energy to watch Sesame Street with Eric after napping all morning. Eric was nice enough to nap all morning too.

Today Eric made it back to program and I slept for most of the day. On the sweater that  I am now knitting is about 1 inch below the arm holes in the mid 50's by row count. Now I know why some friends prefer to knit sweaters in the round, no purling every other row. I am also way behind on chores. I know that I will catch up 5 minutes at a time. I need to leave plenty of recovery time.

My sleep cycle is really messed up from Eric being sick and this silly cold. So the first thing I need to do is reset it. I figure with about 5 minutes of zenning the craft room tonight that I will be tired enough to sleep. Wish me luck.

Plans

My plans for Tuesday are already in the blender. I will be at home with Eric all day. Although the fever has broken from the cold, his asthma has kicked in with vengeance. So while Eric is busy watching PBS kids, I will get the serger out and make some more cleaning rags out of old cloth diapers. The cloth diapers last for about 2 years of Eric use and then become rags that last forever. I serge the old diapers in half so that they don't land up back in Eric's room.  Oh, and I love how the cloth diaper maker has raised the price about 5% in the last 2 years, but it is now a 5 pack instead of a 6 pack. So the price increase is actually much more. Can we say inflation?

While cleaning the craft room today, I finally added the charms to Teri's charm bracelet. So  instead of spending 20 minutes trying to figure out where to put the charm bracelet I spent 10 minutes getting the actual work done. Now the next time she comes for a visit she can take it home. I also have filled another box with craft supplies for Eric's day program, although I don't know when he will be well enough to go back. I am down to the dibs and drabs of the zenning and must resist the urge to stuff everything in a closet for later. Maybe I can fill another bag to go.

The sweater is coming along quite nicely. I am almost finished with the first skein of yarn and I am 34 rows into the pattern. The pattern called for 24 inch circular knitting needles. At row 18 I changed to 36 inch circular knitting needles. Tonight at row 30 I changed to 60 inch circular knitting needles. I wonder who goofed up on this one? In about 10 rows, I will take the sleeves and put them on stitch holders. Then finish the body and go back to do the sleeves. I am thinking at this point that it will take about a month to finish. I am also thinking that I might just have enough yarn to make it a long sleeve sweater. I bought enough yarn to make this sweater 2 sizes larger. This is my first me sized sweater. The 2 sweaters that I made for Elmo went much faster.

A Long Night

Eric was up most of the night. I managed to knit 5 rows of my sweater. Eric managed to make 4 loads of laundry. I did half last night and John did the other half while I took a nap. Eric is back on formula tonight, I will take this as a good sign. Eric will be home tomorrow.

I did manage to get a little cleaning done while Eric was doing his breathing treatment. As usual when Eric is sick, I fall behind on cleaning. Hopefully he will sleep tonight so I have the energy to finish the craft room deep cleaning. I also need to do laundry other than Eric's. Then I can knock off a few projects.

Raising the White Flag

I am rasing the white flag today. The household has not fully recovered from the last round of colds. Eric has been cranky all day. So before I went out shoe shopping I checked Eric's tempature to make sure that I could leave the house. 98.6, I was good to go. Two pairs of shoes and 1 1/2 hours later it was 100.5. So much for finishing the craft room today.

i have finished row 21 of the sweater. Hopefully I can find some knitting time for the sweater later. If not it will just be hats and scarfs for charity. Tight now it's just Eric time.

My Body Won Today.

I have been super busy around here and putting in very long work days. Today my body said it had had enough and instituted mandatory naps three times today. I even slept through a round of Eric thumping a few feet away and I did not hear a thing. I do have to admit that after a lot of rest I do feel better. That being said my to do list for today might take me a few days longer to complete.

Even though I only put in about 30 minutes of deep cleaning, de-cluttering and de-stashing I was able to fill a box and a half of things to be re-homed. I have completely de-cluttered the top of the fabric storage cabinet. So even though the sewing room did not get finished today,  visible progress has been made.

I have also made progress on my first ever sweater. I started it about 10 years ago. Lost a bunch of weight and sizes so it did not fit when I pulled it out 6 months ago to finish, so I tinked it. I re-started it yesterday 2 sizes smaller and have made slow but steady progress. Pictures to come later.

More Zenning

Today was day two of zenning the craft room. There were some surprises along the way again, such as finding out that I had done enough knitting to move a lot of yarn to the closet yarn stash. Also 18 cotton yarn cones takes up about a cubic feet of space.

I am trying to organize the rack by fiber craft. This makes it much easier to see what I have lined up. Yes, I also found more yarn, please tell me that you are not surprised by this. I need to set up the wider loom to make some more rag rugs and summer shawls, yes I found a lot of supplies. A few quilts are in the line up too. Before and after pictures will be forth coming.

Today I sent 5 knitting looms to Ironwood Ridge Elementary School for their hat knitting project. One class makes hats for sick kids and baby's at the local hospital. A great project to support in my very humble opinion.

My hands are still tired and sore from last weekend so only about a half of an inch of knitting got done. I did however make a chicken tomatillo soup for dinner.  Cutting the vegetables was very interesting to say the least, no even cuts today. The best part is that we have enough for tomorrow too. Let me know if you want the recipe.

Toasted

I went to a fiber retreat last weekend and had a wonderful time. I think that I might have had too much fun. My hands are now toasted. I will have to take a few days of total hand rest with no fiber. My left hand is a little swollen.

So I guess that I will redo the craft room and do some more purging of things that I do not use. After all less is more, well maybe. I found a lot of knitting needles today where I did not expect to find them. So you know which room that I will be in tomorrow.

Deep Cleaning

My deep cleaning by the numbers today:

1 car load to taken Goodwill, thanks to John.

2 boxes ready to be re-homed tommrow. 1 box is full of art supplies. 1 box is full of carrier and gift bags and cfl light bulbs.

3 trips to the recycle bin. My recycle bin is now half full and it will not be collected until next Monday.

Countless projects were put together to be finished soon. I need to finish the deep cleaning of the craft room and its closet. I did manage to get about 3 cubic feet of closet back.

I also managed to get 2 loads of laundry finished. I also found time for a long nap.

The Quilt Front.

The quilt arrived safely. The person loves it. So here is a picture of the front of the quilt.

Busy

Today before breakfast I got Eric's laundry started. Then I spent 30 minutes picking up the dead branches that I removed from some bushes on Wednesday. I stopped when the trash can was full. I did not think that I had removed so many dead branches from the two bushes. The bushes look a lot better even with only a drizzle of rain.

After breakfast I spent the morning making some samples for next weekend. This was followed by lunch and 3 hour nap for the entire house. Everyone gets super tired when Eric is sick, so picking out a nap spot is very important.

This afternoon after my nap I cleaned my Woolie Winder for the Lendrum spinning wheel. It was the first time that I cleaned it. I layed all the parts down in the order that they came off. After scrubbing the grease and grime off, not to mention a few bits of very greasy fiber, everything went back together and is working. I wish that I had a magnifying glass for some parts of the process. Hen while dinner was cooking I spent time cleaning.

I think that I will spend the evening knitting as my hands permit.

Not As Planned

Today went into the blender by 7:15 this morning. Eric is feeling yucky and will be home for a few days. My hands were to tired to knit for most of the day, so I landed up doing some more deep cleaning. All kinds of things were moved to new homes or tossed. Two bushes also had some dead wood pulled off. It was a great stress buster. One bush actually perked up as the heavy dead wood was removed. I will have to play pick up sticks tomorrow.

What did not happen was laundry, weaving spinning or sewing.

25

I fell short of my goal of 31 hats in 31 days. Here are the 25 hats that are finished for July, with the last two hats in front of the other 23 hats. I will keep knitting hats because winter is comimg. I will keep knitting hats to use up the yarn my friends are giving me. I will keep knitting hats because the children like them. I will keep knitting hats becasue I like to knit hats and I have many heads to cover.

Now I need to count the rows for the one million row challenge on Raverly. I hope to see a jump in the counter. Then its time to tag and bag the hats.

A Quilt

The quilt is done. I am getting it ready to send the birtday gift out in tommrows post. I will only post the back of the quilt until it is received by the birthday person. It looks a little like a Tetrus Game to me.

23

Eric had a long and eyrpy night, followed by an early morning wake up for me. Which lead to an early morning snack of cheese and crackers at 4:30 am. Thank goodness he is now feeling better. Yes, he did make a pile and a half of laundry which with the new washing machine was only 2 large loads.

I did manage to get hat number 23 done today. This does not mean that I will go back to knitting a hat a day. I will knit as my hands permit me to knit.

Sewing

I spent the day sewing. This was a plan to give my hands a break. I tried to work around a BBD and had partial sucess. I finished one quilt, which is now in the dryer. Pictures of the quilt will be posted after the birthday person gets to unwrap it. I started catching up on repairs too.. one skirt is now in the wash and the next one will head to the wash tomorrow.

By lunch time my body won and got a nap. Everyone went to their own quiet place to take a nap. The nap did not seem to make a diffrence for Eric. He had a small sizure tonight followed by by wild eyrps an hour later. So we will be laying low all weekend. I wonder how much cleaning and sewing that I can get done this weekend. Laundry is a given, it just depends on how much laundry Eric makes. I am backing down on knitting until my hands feel better. This means that I will not get 31 hats knit this month but every hat that I have made so far will help a child. Let me know if you want to knit a hat, scarf or sweater for a child in Tucson. I have some donated yarn that you can use.

Have a great weekend.

22

You might have noticed that my knitting has slowed to a crawl. My hands are being very cranky. So I have been filling my time with deep cleaning. It is starting to take some thought as to what is going to get cleaned next. I have also taken out the sewing machine to catch up on repairs and make a few items for this October's Taglit fundraiser. I need to come up with new an exciting gifts that people have not seen before. I also want to use as many supplies from my art supply stash as possible. As I am organizing things, I have found that I have more art supplies than I thought I did. So look for some awesome new stuff in October.

With out futher ado here is hat 22 and part of the new quilt.

21

Hat 21 is done dispite a bad body day.

19 and 20

I finished hat 19 this morning and hat 20 just now. Now to start on tomorrow's hat. Knitting on a rainy night seems like the right thing to do. I am also hoping that Eric goes to sleep before 12:30 am tomorrow morning. I am a bit on the tired side.

Not Quite 19

I had a very busy hand day. So hat number 19 will be finished in the morning. With my hands at a throbbing level of pain, I thought it best to stop for the night. I will put on gloves to keep my hands warm tonight. I know they will feel better by morning. So tomorrow you will get to see 2 hats.

I am over 2/3 of the way through cutting the 360 squares for my quilt project. Hum, I wonder if that is why my hands are extra sore? I am cutting the lining squares now. I will have enough scraps left over to make an artisy quilt. I can't wait to see how they both turn out.

I even had time to go drop things off at Goodwill today. It seems to me, that the cleaner and less cluttered the house gets, less stuff needs to be rehomed. I guess that is a good thing since I now have more creative time.

I am still waiting for Eric to go to sleep. Hopefully soon. I tnik I might just get to sleep before tomorrow.

18 and Visible Progress

Today I finished hat number 18. I also emptied a 2.5 gallon bag of yarn that was on top of the hat yarn storage box. That yarn is now in the working knitting bag. I also cut 50 more squares for the quilt.

It was a light laundry day, with only 2 loads. I even found time to go to two specialty stores. I used the 5 minute rule for house cleaning to get a little deep cleaning done too. So dispite Eric being up until 12:30 this morning I managed to get a lot done dispite my body hating me this morning.

17 and Awesome

Hat number 17 is now finished. Hats 18 and 19 have been cast on and are in progress. I used the bulk of my energy running errands this morning. I purchased 4 rotery cutter blades so when the new blade gets dull it will not halt progress on the quilt. I hope tommrow I can be more productive.

Hat 16 and More

Today I finished hat number 16. I will give a row count at the end of the month for the one million row challenge on Raverly. I also started cutting out blocks for my next quilt project. I only need to cut 360 squares before I start the sewing. I have 56 squares cut. Then my rotary cutter blade went dull. So I will get more blades tomorrow, then finish cutting the squares.

It's time to do more knitting now.

15 and More

I got to go watch Sue Houseman of Sewing with Sue give a talk today. If you ever have a chance to see her talk, it is a must do. She had lots of wonderful ideas. I will be trying some out soon.

Hat number 15 is done. Hats 16 and 17 have been cast on.

14

even with abad body day, I managed to get hat 14 finished tonight.