The Great Craft Room Reorganization of 2017

My crazy-time at work ended at about 2:00 AM Friday, June 30, at least for a little while.  I've been working a lot of hours since March, but particularly in the last 2-3 weeks I was easily working 60 hours/week.  It's an annual occurrence, so in that sense I'm used to it, but when it's over I'm always exhausted and cranky and have the feeling that while I was working the rest of my life has spun out of control.  That last part is not usually literally true, but so many things get put off those last few weeks I always feel like it is.

I don't know about you, but organizing something always gives me a sense of putting my life back in order, so I've spent a good chunk of the past week rearranging and reorganizing my craft room.

First goal was to get the yarn and fiber out of the closet and into the room where I can see it easily and constantly.  This is in part to make it easier to see and find what I have, but also to remind me of how much I do have and hopefully curb some of the "oh pretty" impulse buying of more.  I bought some more cubes and successfully got all my yarn, including handspun in bins or on display.  There's very little room left for more.

All of my yarn

And most of my fiber is also out on display now.  The only thing left in bins in the closet is a couple of fleece-sized quantities.

Most of my fiber

I moved my cutting table to a longer wall.  This makes it easier to access the fabric and supplies in the cubbies underneath and it's also a better location for rolling it away from the wall if I need to be able to walk around it while I cut.  My ball winder and swift also stay attached to this table most of the time. The cart between the fiber bins and the cutting table holds all my current crossstitch projects (which have seen no love in recent months) and rolls easily out of the way when necessary.

My sewing table is now where my cutting table used to be.

 About the only thing that stayed in the same place is my desk.

The bookshelf that was full of fiction books got moved to the guest room.  I removed the shelf in the closet and moved the other two bookcases in there. These hold photos that need to be sorted, craft books, supplies and things I don't use as often.

The closet is now more for storage so I won't have to move things in there around as often trying to get to my yarn or fiber.  These two tall rolling drawer sets hold partial balls of yarn, buttons, smaller pieces of fabric like fat quarters, and other odds and ends.  My blocking mats are to the right of them, and my drying racks to the left.

Although it still looks like a bit of a jumble, the remaining shelves that hold more supplies and other odds and ends for various crafts are more organized as well.

Overall, given the limited space I have to work with, I'm pretty happy with where everything is and how functional it will be.  We'll see how long it stays that way!

Frolic Eve

 It's that time of year, and I'm working a lot of hours, but there has been some knitting  going on the past couple of weeks even if it hasn't been as much as I would like.

Tomorrow after work, I head west to Sapphire Valley and the Carolina Fiber Frolic.  I've been getting some things I finished a while ago blocked to take for "show and tell".

First I washed and blocked my Find Your Fade shawl, although blocking in this case just meant laying it out to dry without really stretching it, because it was already huge enough!

 

This picture shows the colors better.

 I also finished and blocked my Snowmelt Shawl MKAL.

And last in the just needed to be blocked category is the Moroccan Days/Arabian Nights shawl I finally finished at the end of 2016.  This is also a giant shawl, but I finally took the time to pin it out.  I couldn't figure out how to get a really good picture of this, and there are beads, but they are very similar in color to the yarn, so they're subtle, which is what I wanted.

As for the projects I was trying to finish in time for Frolic, the Cayambe is finished.

But the Sweet Chilly sweater is not.  I only have one sleeve and the neckline to do, so I'm hoping I can finish it up by Friday in time to give it a steam with the hotel iron Friday night and enter it in the "what I made with my door prize" contest on Saturday.

Pic of the body before I started the sleeves.

One sleeve done, second one started.

As usual, I'm sure I've packed way too many projects to work on at Frolic, but that's nothing new.  I'm looking forward to seeing friends, making new ones, learning a few things, and just hanging out with my people.

WIP Roundup - The Blankets

If you knit or crochet, you may already realize that "scrap" blankets are a popular project these days.  I appear to have bought tickets on the crazy train when it comes to blankets the past couple of years and have several in progress.  Some of these get worked on regularly, some sporadically.  I consider them all long term projects with no deadline (except for the one that will be obvious in a moment).

The crazy began back in January 2015 when I decided to start a sock yarn blanket. I use a lot of fingering weight yarn, for socks and other projects, but I always have at least a partial skein left over.  I'm doing 31 stitch squares on US1 needles, so each of my squares only uses about 3g of yarn.  I've been throwing more of the larger squares in lately because I've been using more self-striping yarn and it takes a larger square to really show the stripes.

Not too long after I started the sock yarn blanket, I decided to start a blanket that is truly from scraps of sock yarn.  These are bits that are too little to even make one of the small squares in the sock yarn blanket.  I'm making this one up as I go along.  I cast on 25 stitches and just knit the bits in stripes until that one strip was as long as I thought I wanted the blanket.  Now I'm working on the second strip of only 10 stitches, attaching it to the first one as I go.  Other than trying to make sure I don't do the very similar colors right next to each other, I'm not planning anything, just knitting until I run out of that yarn, then magic knotting the next color on and keep knitting.

Because it only takes a little over 50g to make myself a pair of socks, I still had a lot of sock yarn left after making a square for the sock yarn blanket, but more than I really wanted to use in the true scrap blanket.  So in June 2015 I started making blanket squares similar to those of the Barn Raising Quilt that a lot of people have made and called it my Bandwagon Blanket.  I start off my squares a little differently, but it's the same effect.  So far I've made 14 squares for this.  I'm a little more choosy about which yarns I use for this, sticking to ones I really love the colors of or ones that are colors outside my "norm" so there will be some variation in the end product.

I blame Diane of The Suburban Stitcher podcast for this next one.  She started a granny square blanket out of sock yarn, and after seeing it several times on her podcast, I had to have one too.  This is basically a big granny square that just keeps getting bigger.  I started it in December 2016 and I'm using a 3.00 mm hook and just crocheting around and around in whatever yarn I pick up next out of the bag.

So with all these "scrap" sock yarn blankets I've developed sort of a system for where my leftover sock yarn goes.  I knit my socks two at a time, so when I finish a pair there are 2 balls of yarn left over, usually about 20-23g each.  One goes into the sock yarn blanket bag and if I like the yarn enough, the other ball goes in the bandwagon blanket bag.  Whichever ball is biggest after those squares are made goes into the granny square bag and the other one goes into a bin where I keep leftovers for making mini skeins for swaps, etc.  Yarn only goes into the scrap blanket bag when it has less than 5g left and therefore not enough for making a mini skein.

The final blanket is the only one that's not a scrap blanket.  I did start it out of leftover worsted weight superwash yarn I had on hand, but I've already had to order some more of some colors, and I'm sure I'll probably need more before it's done.  This one is my 2017 Temperature Blanket, which I'm making using the Groovy-ghan pattern. This is also a crochet blanket, and I'm using a 4.5mm hook.  Basically, I do one stripe for each day of the year and the color of the stripe is determined by the high temperature for that day.  I'm about a week behind on this one because of trying to finish things for Frolic, but I'm generally trying to stay on top of it by working on it every 2-3 days.  It's going to be a large throw blanket when it's done, but not wide enough to cover a bed. This picture shows January and February.

So that's the blanket madness.  Sadly, those are not all my projects.  I have another group of projects that are hibernating.  I was going to post about those, but since it could be a while before any of them get any attention, I've decided I'll just wait until I actually work on them at some point and tell you about them then.

WIP Roundup - The Waiting

Today I'm sharing some of my other works in progress (WIPs). These are the projects I haven't worked on in the past week or so, but I plan to start working on again soon.

First up is my Rhapsody in Cables sweater.  I fell in love with this sweater as soon as the pattern was released and had to start it immediately!  I initially started it in the yarn I'm using for my Sweet Chilly sweater I talked about yesterday, but between the darkness and slight variegation of that yarn, the cables just weren't showing up well, so I ripped it out and started the Sweet Chilly with that yarn.  But I still really wanted to cast on this pattern, so I'm doing it now in some Morning Meadows yarn in a natural colorway I bought at SAFF in 2015.  I got started at the end of January, but then I started to realize I didn't have too long to finish all the things I wanted to finish before Frolic, so this one has gotten set aside for the past few weeks and doesn't look like much right now, but as soon as my Sweet Chilly sweater is done, this one is getting some serious attention.

 The next two projects that are getting ready to go back into the regular rotation are a couple of baby blankets.  My daughter is pregnant with her first child and due in June with a boy, so of course I'm making a blanket for him.  I don't think it will be any surprise to her if she sees this that I'm making him a blanket, but I will hold off disclosing the details until I've finished it and gifted it.  I'm hoping to get it finished by the time or shortly after he's born.

I've also got a blanket I started for my grandson (my son's son) when he was a couple of months old that's been hibernating way too long.  That's a Baby Dragon Blanket  that I'm making in Cascade 220 Sport.  I made him one blanket before he was born, but his older sister got two, including one with a castle on it when she was born, so I thought a dragon would be cool for him.  He'll be 2 in July so that's my artificial deadline for finishing it this year, and really 2 years old is the perfect age to appreciate a blanket with a dragon on it right?

I'm also planning to get back to spinning regularly as well.  I've currently got a gradient set from Three Waters Farm in progress, but I haven't spun in a while.  Here's what I've spun so far and the waiting fiber. 

Towards the end of last year I started working on counted cross stitch again.  I pulled out a couple of old projects that had been hibernating for years and started a couple of new ones, that are now hibernating.  But I signed up this year for the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery's year long Happily Ever After pattern.  They send a portion of the pattern each month, and I started out doing well in January, but that's fallen by the wayside as well.  I want to get back to working on it again regularly so I don't get so far behind.  I still haven't finished January, so it will take a couple of months, but if I start actually working on it sometime soon it's possible.

So those are the things I plan to try to put some work into in the next few weeks, but sadly, they're not the only things in progress.  Next time I'll talk about the blankets.

WIP Roundup - The Active

I keep thinking about writing here, and I keep not doing it.  So I've decided it doesn't matter if I have nothing "important" to write about, I'm just going to write about what I'm crafting, and if something more exciting happens, I'll write about that too.

As a starting point I thought I'd start a run through of all the various projects I have in progress.  As I've mentioned previously, I'm not a monogamous crafter, so there are a lot of them. Today I'm talking about the ones I've been actively working on recently.

The Cayambe poncho is the one I'm closest to finishing, and plan to have finished in the next couple of days.  When I went to Carolina Fiber Frolic in November, someone was wearing one and several of us decided to make it, so I want to have it finished before the spring Frolic the weekend of March 24th.  As soon as I finish the knitting I'll need to block the piece before I seam it up into the poncho and since I'll be busy the whole weekend of the 17th, I need to get it blocked this weekend.  I'm making this in Miss Babs Yowza in the Forever colorway.When I started this post yesterday I still had about 3 repeats of the pattern left to do, but I worked on it a good bit last night and finished the big rectangle.  I'm not going to have enough yarn to do the neckline as written (despite having almost 150 yards more than the pattern calls for) so once I get it seamed I'll have to decide whether to do something different at the neck, or nothing, or maybe I'll raid the stash to see if something I have would blend well or be a good accent at the neckline.

The other project I'm trying to get finished in time for the Frolic is my Sweet Chilly sweater that I'm making out of the Neighborhood Fiber Company yarn I won at last year's spring Frolic.  The yarn is their Studio DK base in the Dupont Circle colorway. Neighborhood Fiber Company will be vending at this spring Frolic, so I want to be able to show off what I made with the yarn.  I'm not quite half-way down the body on it, but once the Cayambe is finished this will take priority and I should be able to finish it up in time.

Also seeing some action this week are my March socks for the Desert Vista Dyeworks year long KAL. These are just vanilla socks for me and this month I'm using the Secret Life of a Snowflake colorway.  I chose this color for March hoping it would bring on at least one snowfall this winter despite the 70 degree days we've been having, and it looks like it might have worked, they're calling for snow here Sunday!

And I have a second pair of socks on the needles.  These are for a friend at work who is an ECU fan and I'm using the Hermione's Everyday Sock pattern although I'm doing them toe-up and will use a different heel.  The yarn I'm using for these is sock yarn dyed by the Friends and Fiberworks yarn store near Asheville in the Happy Ripper colorway.

So that's it for what I've been actively working on this week.  Tomorrow I'll show you what's waiting in the wings.

2017 Crafting Goals

I've set some new crafting goals for 2017.  I'll do an update on how I did on 2016's crafting goals later, but here are the new ones for this year.

• Knit 1 pair of Desert Vista Dyeworks socks/month
  
• 2 projects with handspun
  
• 2 projects with laceweight
  
• 3 projects with yarn added to stash before 2016 (this can cross over with handspun or lace goals)
  
• Reduce total number of stash entries (including trade/sale) to 540 or less (currently 554)
  
• Spin at least 12 fiber stash entries
  
• Reduce fiber stash entries to 65 or less (currently 70)
  
• 3 sewing projects of some kind
  
• Stay on track with Frosted Pumpkin Happily Ever After monthly pattern
  
• Aim for more yardage out than in on a quarterly basis (handspun created does not count as yardage in, but handspun knit counts towards yardage out)

I've got a few other goals that aren't crafting related, but they're still in generalizations at the moment, so maybe I'll talk about them at some point.

As usual, I'm going to try to start posting here more, but we'll see how it goes.

Long Time Gone

The longer I go without blogging, the harder it seems to be to come back to it, primarily because I feel like I should tell you everything that's happened of any significance since the last time I posted.  But that's just not realistic, so here I am back again, and I'll hit a few highlights and we'll just pretend it hasn't been that long OK?

My son and his family are back North Carolina, at least for the next couple of years until the Army decides to send him somewhere else, so we've been able to spend more time with him, his wife and the grandkids.  I love my kids, I love my grandkids, but spending a few hours with the grands makes me glad I'm done with the kid-raising phase of my life.  The joy of being a grandparent is being able to enjoy some time with them then send them back home with Mom & Dad!

We took a trip to Louisiana in March to celebrate the 90th birthday of Rob's Aunt Sue.  It was good to see some of his family that we rarely see and my DIL was able to bring the grandkids down too even though my son couldn't get leave.  Sue is my MIL's sister and is quite a bit older than her, but you can see the family resemblance.

Rob & I celebrated our 16th anniversary last week, and I can't believe he's put up with me this long.  There are days it seems like our wedding was yesterday, and others when it feels like it's been forever.  But that's true of most marriages I suppose, but I'm glad he's stuck with me for yet another year.

I took a sewing class for a few weeks and have actually learned how to use my sewing machine, although it will be a long time for I feel like I have any degree of expertise. I've also attended a couple of fiber events this spring, but I'll talk more about those in separate posts.

Other than that, it's my busy time of year at work, so my hours are erratic.  Some days I work relatively normal hours and other days I work until late at night just to get things done that need to be done for the next day.  I've been in my current job over 20 years now, and although some days I would like to find something different, for the most part I still like my job, and every time I try to imagine doing something else I think of all the things I would miss about my current job.  I keep my eyes open for something else that might be interesting, but I've essentially resigned myself to being here another 9 years and 8 months at which point I can retire with full benefits, and hope to do so!

O.k. quick and dirty update done, more crafting and other tidbits to come, assuming I don't get totally distracted again right?

Fee Fi FO Friday

Sometimes I actually finish projects.  That's not accurate, I actually finish a lot of projects, but I go through spurts. I'm not a monogamous knitter, so I usually have many different WIPs at any given time, so unless I'm really focusing on one particular project I may go weeks without actually finishing anything and then suddenly I'll finish several things one right after the other.

In knitter-speak a finished project is an FO, i.e. finished object.  I'm designating Friday as the day to generally share FOs, so here's something I've finished recently.

I went to Southern Pines a couple of days before Christmas to do a little last minute Christmas shopping and after I got what I needed for everyone else, I treated myself to a little Christmas at the yarn shop there, Bella Filati.  It's a nice, friendly, yarn shop and I go there occasionally on Saturday afternoons for social knitting.  If you're in the area you should stop and check it out.

But the reason I mention it is that at that visit I bought a skein of Knitted Wit Victory DK yarn  in the Autumn Rainbow colorway.  I just couldn't resist these jewel tones jumbled all together.  Isn't it gorgeous?

I had the store wind it for me so as soon as I got home I could cast on.  I knit a pair of gloves for me, but because I have small hands they only took about half of the skein, so I made a short cowl to create a matching set.

Cowl pattern is Diamond Cowl, gloves I made up as I went.

I love them!  They're so fun and colorful.  I just bought a new charcoal grey dress coat, so they give me a fun pop of color with that.  I loved this colorway so much that I've ordered a skein of sock yarn in the same color from the dyer.  She has more in her shop if you want it, go on, you know you do!

I get many hours of enjoyment from knitting and other crafts, but wearing something you made at the end is also very satisfying.

Watch Me WIP Wednesday

I've realized that in order to post here more regularly, I need to have some recurring segments to fall back on when the brain is not cooperating.  So welcome to the first WIP Wednesday.

For you nonknitters, WIP stands for Work in Progress, so this segment will be related to projects I'm in the process of making using some form of crafting, most often knitting.

This week's WIP is my Jamestown Sweater, which I'm making out of Alisha Goes Around Bevy of Swans DK in a beautiful teal color.  I bought this yarn at SAFF in October and it is sooo luscious!

 I spent most of November knitting this sweater.  I had finished all the pieces and seamed it together, only to discover that I had made it too short.  I knew I needed to make the front and back pieces shorter than what the pattern called for because of my height.  Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking clearly and kept holding the piece up to my side to determine when to start the armhole, which means I didn't account for the amount of length going over my boobs and belly and hips would take up.  End result, I put it on & it's at least 2 inches shorter than I need it to be, and I don't think I'll be able to block it out those extra inches.

Since this is knit from the bottom up, I can't just take out the bottom and knit it longer, so as you can see above, I've ripped the back piece back down below the armholes and I'm in the process of getting the stitches back on the needles correctly so I can knit some more straight before doing the armholes.  Hopefully I'll get it right this time.

I love this pattern and the yarn though, so I really want to finish this sweater.  I'm just trying to stay motivated to get it done now so i can wear it a little this winter.

This sweater is being housed in my library card bag made by Amy Beth aka The Fat Squirrel.  I love this bag because the reading geek in me is thrilled by all the old library cards for books I mostly read as a kid.  Jane Eyre, The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew), Where the Wild Things Are, and so many more!

I've really become a bit of a knitting bag addict, so I'll try to make a point of showing my knitting bags with my WIPS as well.

Until next time....

2016 Goals

Unlike 2015, which was the year of no goals, I've set some goals for 2016, and one of them is to blog here at least three times per week, so I probably should get on that by actually writing a post huh?

I've done some serious thinking and planning about goals this year.  Who knows if I'll be able to achieve all of them, but I'm going to try.  I'm also trying a technique I've read a lot about of having a word and a mission statement for the year. 

While I will probably talk more about most of these in future posts, for the purpose of this one, I'm just going to give you the list, or as Joe Friday says..."just the facts."

My word for the year is....  

DETERMINATION

My mission statement for the year is....

 Determination and action lead to achievement.

Writing Goals

• Blog 3x/week
• Write 30 minutes 3x/week
• Journal regularly

Health Goals

• Make exercise a habit
• Lose weight (I've set a more specific number, but I'm going to keep it general here for now) 

Crafting Goals

• More yarn out (knit) than in (purchased)
• Knit 12 pairs of socks
• Spin the bin challenge
• 2 laceweight projects
• 2 handspun projects
• Finish Marigold Moroccan
• Steeked & Zippered Cardigan
• Learn to sew 

Office Decoration Day

In my little corner of office-land, we went a little overboard with the decorating this year.  As I mentioned in my last post, we decided to decorate our doors a la elementary school, so I'll just go straight to the pictures o.k.?

We started off the morning with a visit from Santa and Rudolph....

 A homemade hot chocolate bar kept us warm....

And let me tell you how seriously inadequate some of my coworkers make me feel sometimes.  Trina made all the hot chocolate mixes from scratch, and by "from scratch" I mean that for the salted caramel mix she made actual salted caramel, let it cool, and then ground it up with some cocoa and other ingredients.  And there were 5 or 6 different flavors to choose from. The woman's a marvel, I have no idea where she finds the time.

So here was my door...

 I thought it was funny because half of our suite is always complaining they're freezing and the other half is always hot, but I was amazed at how many of my coworkers, of all ages, had no idea who Snow Miser and Heat Miser were.  Just in case that applies to you too, they're from The Year Without a Santa Claus, and here's an appropriate snippet.

Wendy did one of my other favorites...

And Trina is rockin' Buddy the Elf, a movie I've never seen but have now been convinced I need to watch at least once despite my dislike of Will Farrell.

Kelly is pregnant, which made her door rather appropriate....

In case you can't tell, that's a bib on his chest and he has a pacifier in his mouth.

Heather got creative with old copies of the General Statutes that were due to be recycled....

Can you tell Jan is a horse lover?.....

And Jennifer just went for pretty and creative....

Giles added some ambiance to the end of the hall with his fireplace....

And we all did little stockings with our names.  Can you stand the cuteness?

Tawanda is still working on her door, but has her priorities straight and put up her UNC tree first....

And Wendy either had her kids working like slaves or bribed them with something, because they made us a bunch of snowflakes to string from the ceiling...

And I forgot to even take pictures of the tree after we decorated it, and the wall murals that Wendy and Trina lined the hall with.

Suffice it to say, we may have to work in December, but at least we'll have something cheerful to look at while we do!  Hope you're finding a way to get into the holiday spirit too.