The last few years definitely haven’t been easy for me… I have certainly not been myself. But I am trying to get back to my old self… well, sort of my old self, but vastly improved!

I took up dancing about sixteen months ago…which, although my new obsession, is not a subject for this blog. I hadn’t been crafting a lot at all, but lately, between a visit from my dear friend Opal, and a few requests for socks from some of my male relatives, I have vowed to get back at it.

With winter coming, I thought it would be nice to have some projects to work on, for those nights when getting out of the house is just not in the plan.

I completed one sock for Dad on Christmas Day and cast on the other one. While Opal was here, she and I worked on a Christmas quilt I wanted to do for my mom as her Christmas gift but never even started before now, as well as a bed runner that I was working on the in the fall. We picked up the backings for both projects in the Boxing Day sales (along with two more quilt kits but that’s another blog post), and I am now off to the races.

So to facilitate that…Opal and I started another one of our 30 Day Challenge cycles. 30 minutes a day, with the ability to make some up if need be. Life happens and sometimes it’s hard to fit the time in every day.

So far, in week 1:

1. I have finished the cuff and moved onto the leg of my Dad’s sock
2. I have sewed together a bunch of the strips for my mom’s quilt and
3. I have sewed the flannel back onto the runner

I missed two days but made up the time the next day in spades.

I am hoping that if I can get into the habit I won’t need to issue these sorts of challenges. I am super excited that I might actually get some things accomplished this time.

Wish me luck!

So I’m off to a pretty good start with this whole thirty day crafting challenge. I have wiped out several of the smaller items… including re-skeining the yarn from three projects I frogged last week. On Saturday afternoon when the list was prepared, they looked like this:

And as of this morning, they looked like this:

I also blocked my Sick Day Shawl:

I admit that blocking might be a strong word. Since I didn’t want points, I soaked it overnight, spread it on a towel and stretched it out and I let it try and trimmed the ends. It’s a lot larger than it was and I might eventually block it “properly”.

I had planned to sew last night and ran out of steam. But determined to do something per our challenge, I cast on my dad’s sock, made from my very own hand dyed yarn.

Now… I actually don’t know what I am doing with this yet. Plain knit, or Hermione’s Every Day Socks…? The other pair I did were Hermione’s and Mom has laid claim to those because they were a touch too small for Dad. So making them plain will make them go faster and it means they’ll be easier to differentiate from the first pair when they are in the laundry. Decisions, decisions!

So… I was chatting with my friend Opal the other day, and I mentioned that there were a dozen projects I needed to get to or get through, and I just couldn’t seem to find the motivation to do it. I wondered if perhaps scheduling crafting time on a daily basis was the way to go, and Opal told me that it was the way she got through a bunch of projects last year.

She suggested a 30 day challenge, wherein we both crafted for 30 minutes a day, at a minimum for the next 30 days. It sounded like a great idea, so in a FaceTime call today, we chatted about what we wanted to get done. Some of my projects are kind of small, but some of them are fairly significant, at least to me.

I made a list, and it ranges from writing up a pattern for my friend, Shireen over at The Blue Brick, to blocking two different shawls that have been finished for an embarrassing amount of time…

to putting together the top of a quilted bed runner…

to knitting socks for my dad….

to reskeining some yarn from some frogged projects…

A total of 12 items 13 items…I missed the completion of a quilted table runner.

I might throw some painting and drawing in there, just for the fun of it, but I think it will mostly be fibre and fabric. I would even like to get back at my spinning wheel.

I’m going to take notes and figure out how well this works… and hopefully there will be blog posts along the way, especially now that I have the app on my phone and can post this way!

Wish me luck!

Last night, for the first time in nearly a year, I finished a thing.  It’s not a project, because it’s just one sock.  But still…it’s a good sign, don’t you think?

Behold, a Knitpicks Felici Sport sock in Seaside!

And I nearly packed it in because I screwed up the Kitchener-ing of the toe and had to pull it all out; but I picked up the stitches and persevered.

And an even better sign…I cast on the second one immediately, and got partway through the cuff.

Maybe I am back…

I know….my second posts in two days.  A shocker to most of you, for sure but I am making an attempt to get back into the swing of things.

That being said, this will be a short one.  My friend Heather has started a knitting blog of her own, and yesterday, yours truly received an honourable mention.

In which I am compared to Obi-Wan Kenobi!

Go!  Check her out, and give her some love!

About a year ago, I received a text message from my friend Kim over at indigodragonfly.  We got to chatting about her upcoming Smart Assed Knitters/World Domination club year and she casually said, “This year, I am featuring new (or at least new to me) designers…you wouldn’t happen to know of anyone, would you?”

I gave it some thought for a few minutes and told her that since she and I ran in the same knitting circles, I really didn’t think I knew anyone she didn’t already know.

In retrospect, I can hear her rolling her eyes at my utter lack of taking a hint.  She messaged me back: “You just totally missed what I asked you, didn’t you?”.

I was flabbergasted.  And after flabbergasted I was honoured and more than a little chuffed.  Kim wanted me to design two new designs for her October club shipment.  Knowing that sock design is my happy place, she told me the socks were good and I set about creating something pretty to go with what Kim told me was going to likely be an autumn-y orange yarn.

The yarn turned out to be a stunning colourway…and that’s a big compliment coming from me….she formerly of the “I hate orange” club.  Not anymore.  Ron named it “The Cod Couple”, in honour of my Newfoundland heritage.  And the sock names followed suit.  I give you Helix and Oskar.

Helix.  Model: Opal Gamble / Photographer: Paul Sveda

Oskar.  Model: Me / Photographer: Shireen Nadir-Santana

I love socks that have lots of stockinette but have just a little something for both visual and knitting interest and I also love the offset panels that I had seen in other designs.

I wanted a lace sock and a cabled one.  There needed to be one for those of us who hate cabling and love to knit lace, and one for those who love cabling and feel that socks should not come with pre-made holes!

Overall, I was thrilled with how they turned out.

Really this post should have been made months ago, but life was more than a little complicated on the day these were released.  I will be allowed to release these to the public in a month or so, so if you are interested, stay tuned!

Wow.  That was, uhm, quite a year.

I am alive…but it’s been a rough last several months.  Without going into much detail, since this is a crafting blog and not a “here’s my personal life” blog, my marriage ended in October and I have been spending the past few months re-decorating (I kept the house) and trying to find motivation to re-start some of the hobbies I love.

Christmas was lovely.  Shireen and Tito came to see me as did my friend Opal.  My brother and his partner were home from Vancouver and I saw a lot of my parents and some family and family friends.

New Year’s Eve, after struggling for the previous few months, I made the decision to start the year on new footing, and have picked up my crafting again.

I knit a Bandana Cowl for me to go with a new jacket I bought because I lost so much weight over the past year that it was an embarrassment.

I finished this pair of mitts as a test knit for Kate Atherley.

I am on the gussets of the second sock for my dad, made from yarn I dyed myself a deep teal-y green last autumn before everything fell to pieces.

I have also signed up for dance classes that start tonight…and am contemplating a second dance class that starts Sunday.  I figure they’ll get me out of the house and back doing one more thing that I used to love, but inexplicably gave up.

And in the midst of all of this, I released two new patterns (they are part of the indigodragonfly SAK/WD club for the month of October) and didn’t even blog about them.  I was thrilled with how they turned out when I submitted them, but at the time they were released I had other things on my mind.  I will try and post those shortly.

Welcome 2016!  May you kick the ass of 2015 in every possible way.

So, it’s day 3 without Facebook and with decidedly less social media.

There have been stumbling blocks.

Last night, for instance, I was feeling lazy and merely substituted Twitter for Facebook.  It did the two things I was trying desperately to avoid: 1) wasted copious amounts of time and 2) made me aware of the horrible abuse of animals in another country, which upset me.  So, it seems this whole avoiding social media while still keeping up with the people I care about is going to take some tweaking.

On the bright side, I spent some quality time knitting yesterday morning, out in the beautiful sunshine, and the leg of my mom’s black Petty Harbour sock is growing a few 4-row repeats at a time. I promised them to her for autumn and I’ll never hear the end of it if they’re not ready! 😉

Today, I am very pleased.  I finally got my Lendrum outside on the back deck and did some spinning before I started my workday.

I, then, cleaned the kitchen and hung out a load of laundry on the clothesline.  Mmmm…air dried sheets.

And before starting work for the day, I put a skein of yarn on to dye.

Today’s experiment…orange.  This is following my last attempt at orange that wound up scarlet.  Insufficient yellow was my diagnosis so this is attempt number 2.

There really is something to be said for feeling like you’re accomplishing something.

This blog post started off as “Wow, I have been so busy” post.  Until I realized that, really, I hadn’t really been all that creative from a crafting standpoint lately.

Okay…not entirely true.  I’ve knit a few rows here and there, and I have spun up a batt and started a new braid of fibre earlier this week.  I bought a sewing machine and took up sewing, but I am pretty sure if not for the involvement of my Mom and my friend Karen, that the machine would still be collecting dust in the corner, and I’d have the most expensive pair of pyjama pants on the planet.

Otherwise, I haven’t really felt like I have accomplished much in recent weeks.  When I looked at my internet habits, I located a large part of the answer to the question, “Why the heck not?”.  I realized that I lose hours a day to social media.  And I wish to God I were exaggerating.  The worst (although not nearly only) time sink occurs in the mornings.  I wake up, reach for my iPad or iPhone and lose every bit of 60-90 minutes checking social media, before I even make it out of bed.  Instagram, Twitter, Ravelry, Pinterest, and by far the biggest time suck of all…Facebook.  Facebook, dear readers, is seriously killing my creativity.

First off, it’s the unbelievable amount of time it takes to read everyone’s statuses, and admire C’s artfully crafted café photo, R’s picture of her daughter at her recital and T’s picture of her beach vacation.  Then there’s the clickbait articles that take me down a completely different rabbit hole, from which it takes me ages to return.  And then…there’s the comments.  Internet Rule Number 1: NEVER read the comments.  A cardinal rule I break every. single. time.  A rule that, when I break it, seriously leaves me wondering about the future of humanity.

Then there’s the impact some of the stuff I read on my mood and psyche.  These are mostly sad animal stories, that, as an animal lover, just take all the good right out of me, but there certainly are lots of others that just leave me sad and morose.

I read a quote yesterday: “It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something we’re not working on.”.  So I made a decision.  I am seriously curtailing my Facebook use…in fact, for the next few days, I am avoiding it altogether.  Other media may follow, although I will likely stick with Instagram as it eats up far less time than the others and inspires me with all the pretty pictures.  And you’ll have to pry my Ravelry login out of my cold dead hands (brain?).  But I digress…

This morning was officially Day 1 (even though I signed off Facebook mid-day yesterday) and when I woke up, took 2 minutes to check my email.  Then, wonder of wonders, I actually got up, went downstairs, sat at my wheel and spun.

JulieSpins Braid of Merino Silk in Black Cherry Blossom

Amazing.

Who knew that actually working on something meant you’d, you know, get more done?