Springtime

It has been a long time since I have done anything with this blog and that makes me sad. The biggest factor in that is my job. It isn't a very hard job to do. I deal with a lot of people on a regular basis while having to keep on a friendly and positive demeanor, but it is very physically exhausting.

On top of that my job has also been getting me ill because I have not been getting proper breaks for a majority of the time I have been working there. That means that I don't really eat as much as I probably should and while not eating with a lot of moving around means I am losing weight (at a healthy 1-2 pounds a week), it also means that my acid reflux acted up badly enough for my doctor to put me on house rest for fear of appendicitis.

But it is springtime and the long winter up here in northeast PA is finally over. That means that I can finally try to grow the last of my cotton seeds. I probably planted them a month late, but I am planning to keep them as potted plants in hopes of getting at least one cotton boll from one cotton plant. Right now I am just trying to get them to sprout. The seeds are at least three years old at this point (maybe even four) and I am not sure if the last of them will even grow. Then again, I only planted them on Sunday, so they won't pop up with little sprouts overnight. I have to have some patience.

I have barely been knitting over the last several weeks. I only started knitting again two days before the end of my house rest from work. But in that short period of time I have been a monogamous knitter.

I have been working on a pair of gray socks for my dad. He picked out the yarn because he liked that there were two strands of grey and one strand of brown for a little contrast. They really just look grey unless you are looking at the fabric close up. I guess it does provide a little contrast, but not much. But a pair of vanilla socks have been really helpful recently. I don't have to think about it to knit them anymore which makes them a perfect pair of auto-pilot knitting.

Since I haven't knitted in a while, I have this urge to finish all of the projects I have on the needles. My list isn't to bad this time though. I only have four things on the needles and most of them are for me, but they all require some amount of concentration. I am hoping that if I just sit down and knit on one thing at a time then I will actually finish some things until I have nothing old left on the needles. Anything that pops up will be new for a while until I build up my stash of projects on the needles again.

The warm weather means that I have this new desire to go outside with my wheel to spin. I never thought I would want to take it outside to spin, but I guess that makes sense. And my little Sonata is a travel wheel, so I can fold it up to move it and take it with me.

While I haven't spun with it outside yet, I did have a meeting with my fiancee's South Asian history professor to show her how a wheel worked and how to spin. I took a bit of everything with me. Raw fleece, processed fleece, an alpaca batt, some raw cotton (since she has been teaching about India and Gandhi), spun cotton, a drop spindle, my tahkli, and my wheel. She had a blast watching everything and asking me questions about it.

It also got me back on a college campus and made me realize how much I actually miss going to school. What I thought was hard work isn't actually that bad. Sure, the reading is pretty intense and sometimes the classes can be a little bit boring, but learning new things every day is pretty cool. And I really do miss not having to wear a structured uniform to go to classes verses the uniform I have to wear on my job every time I work. It's the little things that really do count that we take for granted when we actually have the freedom to do them.

I did have a small break of insanity and decided to knit a tiny chicken from a free pattern on Mochimochi land. I used KnitPicks Palette that I had in my stash to make it. Except for the beak which is made out of a strand of orange from a variegated sock yarn I have (and which I suspect is really a striping sock yarn).

It is so tiny and adorable! The plus side is that it took me maybe a half-hour or so. It really is tiny. The ball it is sitting on is the very top of my french press that I use to brew tea in.

I do have two more posts to write in my Lolita Hobbies series of posts that I was writing. My goal is to have those posted by the end of May. I am really not sure how often I will be blogging right now because of how my life is going, but I do hope to share at least some knitting stuff every few weeks. So I might not be posting as often, but my posts might be longer. Either way, I hope to do some more blogging soon!