Resolutions

I don’t usually do New Year’s Resolutions.  I tend to think the newness of a new school year in September is a better time of year to get into new and better habits, instead of the middle of a New Hampshire winter.  This year, however, I do have a couple of resolutions.  

I think the trick to making the resolutions is the same as the trick to making goals: Specific, achievable and measurable.  Have I chosen specific and measurable resolutions?  Of course not.  The things I want to improve in my life are so nebulous that I don’t think you really can measure them except in how I feel and what I see, etc.

For example, my bureau seems to be a dumping ground for many things that I can’t seem to find a place for, or for items I know must have a home but I don’t have time to find that place. These are not limited to bedroom items, they are all kinds of things that go someplace else in the house!  I would like to get into the habit of taking care of those items right away.  Some might suggest a pretty basket where I could put these items until I have time and then just empty the basket and take care of them at one sitting periodically.  I’m not sure this would really work for me because I think the basket would just become what the top of the bureau is right now!

So what are my resolutions?  I want to keep better track of what needs to be done and the steps for doing it (I’m going to try using a planner again and making it work for me), I want to get our finances in order, and I want to get into habits that will mean the house is at least picked up nearly all the time, if not exactly clean.

I’ve been working full time for the last two years.  Before that I worked full time at an elementary school for two years, but that still meant that I was home by 3:30 or so, which meant I had time to throw in some laundry or do dishes, etc.  The house still wasn’t great, but it was better than it is now.  Now I don’t get home until  5:30 at the earliest, we have dinner, the kids do their homework, and we have a bit of time before they go to bed.  Then I sit on the couch.  Admittedly, I am often knitting or crocheting or surfing while I’m on the couch even if we are watching TV, but it does mean I’m not getting anything else done.  Then when I finally drag myself off to bed (usually much later than I should) I berate myself for not getting more done.  

There is often a pile of papers of various sizes and urgency at my spot at the kitchen table, as well as a mess of mail and papers on the counter.  At work I think of things that need to be done at home or something I want to look into when I get home.  So I write it down. Then I stick it in my purse or my lunch bag and add it to the pile on the table when I get home.  Repeat as needed.  I believe the way out of most of this is getting into the habit of dealing with things sooner (i.e. not just looking at the mail, but immediately putting it in the place where it belongs – bills into a spot, things that need to be dealt with later into a spot, that kind of thing).  The other part is getting out of the habit of thinking I’m too tired when I come home to deal with anything and using that as an excuse for not getting anything done.

Pinterest can be a complete Time Suck, for lack of a better term.  But I have also discovered many things on there not just that I want to make (quilt, sweater, shawl, paint projects) but ideas that will help me get organized.   One was having a bill binder.  A monthly calendar in the front where you write the dates each bill is due when it comes in, a pocket to put those pending bills into until the next bill paying time, and tabs for each bill.  Once a bill is paid it gets three-hole punched and goes behind the tab. At the end of the year, discard the stubs you no longer need and file the ones you need to keep for taxes.  Done.  No sticking the stubs in a pile somewhere and then dragging it and a lot of other sundry things down to the basement office and leaving them in a pile until either the husband or I get around to filing it.    How cool is that?!!

Yesterday I spent about a half hour or so on putting together the binder.  I re-purposed another binder I had (from when I went gung ho with FLY Lady a few years ago).  That was all it took to set it up, a half hour.  So now we just need to train ourselves to use the binder.  The husband and I are on the same page about having to do something about our finances, so hopefully we are at the right point that we can be retrained without too much angst.

I read a few blog posts about organizing one room at a time (also discovered on Pinterest), one per week for X number of weeks, but they seemed so involved.  I don’t have the emotional energy to take everything out of all my kitchen cabinets, sort, then put them away in an organized fashion.  One cabinet at a time, maybe, over a series of days.  But I have seen some good ideas.  The first one was to keep everything in a drawer visible.  

My bureau has three smaller drawers across the top row, then two columns of larger drawers below that.  I took about 15 minutes or so the other night and redid my underwear drawer. Exciting, huh?!  But boy the last couple mornings have been great!  I can see right off what is there and take what I want.  So last night I moved on to my sock drawer, which was a volcano.  I hated opening it.  It took about 20 minutes or so to sort through everything, finally find matches for socks that got separated in the wash, etc.  What a pleasure it was to open that drawer to find socks this morning!

So I’ve done some little things, and I hope to just continue to do these little things and make it work.  I do not want to crash and burn like I have with so many other things.  I want to make the routines stick and make my life and that of my family better.  A great side benefit to this would be to teach my children that you can teach an old dog new tricks, and to pass some better habits on to them than what I have passed on to them so far!  (Yeah, you don’t want to see their bureaus…..)

Love this little wheel

So Much For That

Yep, finished the sweater, pretty much.

Yep, basically fit, though I would have had to redo the sleeves, as they were too tight (my fault).

Yep, looked awful on me. Not sure if it was the style or the yarn or what.

Yep, ripped it all out in a matter of minutes (OK, maybe it was an hour or so).

Yep, have started something totally new with the yarn.

Ugh.

Almost Done!

I am sooo close to being done with this sweater. I can't wait. And I sure hope it fits!!! There was something funky going on with the size of the shoulder - way more stitches on the fronts than on the back, so I had to bind off more of what was supposed to be the back necks. We'll see!!! I'm sewing up the seams today!

My New Contraption

OK, I am ridiculously excited about this thing.

It looks like some sort of medieval torture device, doesn't it?! Here is a less blurry picture.
I love that chair, by the way.

So what is it? It is a Mother Marion.

Oh, you still don't know what that is? It is a kick spindle. No?
Notice the adorable cat on the left in the picture. :-) Does that stuff at the top make it a bit clearer? It is used for spinning fiber, in this case wool.

I have been using a drop spindle to spin wool on, which is fine, but it does take a fair amount of time, and I was having trouble drafting out the fiber (pulling the fibers apart enough to thin them out for spinning) and keeping the spindle spinning. I really wanted to be able to use both hands, but I don't have the money for a spinning wheel.

I've looked into ways of making a spinning wheel, but I don't have any old bicycle tires hanging around, and that seems to be one of the main things I'd need. Yes, you can make a spinning wheel from a bicycle tire. I'd love to try it sometime. They are mounted sometimes on a PVC frame. Cool engineering, huh?

Anyway, somewhere on the web I found a mention of a Mother Marion, a kick spindle, where you can put the thing on the floor and use your foot to turn the spindle, thereby leaving both hands free for drafting out the fiber. So neat! There are people who make them and sell them online (Here is an Etsy shop where they make and sell their Mother Marion's, and HERE is a place where they make gorgeous ones!), but they can be pricey as well. I didn't have the money to buy one. You can also put them on a table and use your hand to spin the wheel, but that kind of defeated the purpose of wanting both hands available for me.

So I searched on the web for people who had made their own, and found a couple different ones. One was on YouTube, one was on a blog. I can't find the links right now. At any rate, the materials needed were very few, so I made a list and headed off to Home Depot. Here is what I bought:

a 3/8 inch dowel
a 'bun' foot
a piece of wood about 12 inches long and 8 inches wide, rescued from the bottom of that 'cutting center' cart in the wood trimmings aisle
a piece of wood doweling about 2 1/2 feet long with a 1 inch diameter, also rescued from the cutting center cart thing
a package of cup hooks
a large wood drawer knob

I spent less than $14. The flat piece of wood for the base and the 1 inch doweling cost me 51 cents each, because they came from the bottom of the cutting center cart! The cashier just kind of made that amount up, I think, based on something she looked up in the pricing chart. Worked for me!

You would also need some screws and nails, etc, but I had that kind of thing at home, thanks to my hubby's workshop and tool collection.[ I'm going to call it a collection, so that when I buy another shawl or more knitting needles or crochet hooks I can just say it will be part of my collection. :-) Just like his coin collection.]

So I cut the 1 inch dowel into 10 inch long pieces, the DH helped me drill holes from the bottom of the flat piece of wood into the bottom of the dowels, and also a hole through each of the dowels. I put another short piece of dowel (3/8 or smaller) through these holes to make an H. You can see that better in the next picture. We unscrewed the screw that comes already screwed into the bun foot and then drilled a 3/8 inch hold through the center of that, as well as through the center (well, it's not quite perfectly centered on either one, but close enough!) of the wooden knob. The big H is screwed onto the flat base. There is a small hole (not all the way through the base) drilled at a 45 degree angle where the dowel sits (that did take a bit of maneouvering), and two little nails hold the dowel on the top of the big H. You push the dowel through the bun foot and through the knob. The knob sits above the H on the spindle, to keep the fiber from going down the dowel. I cut the dowel to about the length I wanted, just by sight, and we put the cup hook in the end. Voila!

Here is the other picture:
The fiber you see at the top is what I did the first night I had it. So exciting! :-) I have to work on my consistency, making sure there aren't thick and thin spots, but it was easier and so much faster to use than the drop spindle.

It has its issues. For one, it does tend to jump out from between the two little nails on the H, but not so often that it is a pain, and we can figure out some way to fix that. It slides away from me a bit on the floor, but that is easy to fix, with some cork or some of that rubbery drawer liner on the bottom of the base.

That dark brown wool is that last of the roving I had on hand. Last night I started using the kick spindle for plying the singles I have spun on the drop spindle (plying is taking two 'strings' or singles you have spun and spinning them together in the opposite direction from the way they were spun to make yarn. You can make 3 ply, too, or even more, but I'm not up to that yet! ). The plying goes very fast, and it very rewarding because you can see what the yarn is going to look like. Fun! Now I'm really looking forward to the fiber tent at the local fair this weekend!

Now I just have to make sure I don't stay up too late at night doing this stuff, because it makes it awfully hard to get up to get the kids off to school in the morning!!

A Few Finished Objects

I have a few finished projects. Nothing big, really.

I have a finished purse. I made it using Future Girl's Starling Handbag pattern. Great pattern, good instructions. Go look at her tutorials, too. She has a fabulous one on paperclip stitch markers, and an awesome one on lining a crocheted (or knitted or felted!) bag. Wish I had had that when I did the lining for my felted bag a couple months ago!

I also made a few dishcloths. Here are two I did with a double ended crochet hook. You can call it crochet, you can call it cro-hook, you can call it tunisian crochet, or you can call it crochenit. It's all really the same thing. No wrong side, two colors, a double ended hook. It was fun and quick!
I also made a hat and a scarf using the same technique. The scarf is done with Caron Simply Soft yarn, so it is, well, soft. The hat is done with some of the yarn I got free. I can't tell whether it was the yarn or the double ended hook (this one had a cable) I was using, but the hat took me forever it felt like.
Then I made a couple hats from a pattern from Laughing Willow, who was wonderful about answering my questions when I had them. I tried to do the brim/ribbing at the end, but it was just getting too, kind of wavy, I guess, and sort of belling out. So I left them as rolled brim, which looks pretty good. My daughter immediately decided she needed this one:
Which I had intended to give to charity. But it was a bit small, and it fit her, so that's ok. This one is not being kept here, though:
I should have taken a picture of the tops of the hats; there is a subtle pinwheel effect on the top, made by the colors as the hat is decreased. These are tunisian crochet in the round. Very easy and quick. The top one is done in Caron Simply Soft, and the bottom in Red Heart Super Saver (the black) and Lion Brand Homespun (the gray). You can wear these on the other side as well, and they have more of a stripey effect.

These pictures are of a scarf I did, also in tunisian crochet, also from Laughing Willow. It is done with some of my free yarn, which is kind of like the Lion Brand Homespun in texture. These pictures are before washing. If the scarf is anything like the afghan I made with this yarn, it is going to fluff up quite a bit after it is washed.
You can't really tell from the pictures, but there is a different look on the back and the front. Tunisian in one color is worked only from the right side, working the stitches onto the needle as you work from right to left, then working the stitches off the needle as you go left to right. I did this one with a big crochenit hook.

I'm having fun with the tunisian crochet. I want to get a pattern book I've seen that has 101 stitches for double ended crochet hooks. It would be fun to work up a scrap afghan with all the different stitches.

I've got another major project I am working on, though, one I'm very excited about. You'll have to wait and see......

Sixth Time's a Charm?

So I bought some Vanna's Choice yarn with the intention of making myself a sweater (it was cheap at the box lot store!).

I have this v-neck cardigan I bought a couple years ago when I was working at Christopher and Banks, and I love it. I love everything about it, except sometimes wishing it had longer sleeves. I would love to recreate this sweater myself. I knit pretty well, I crochet, I've made sweaters before, how hard could it be?

Harder than you think.

First I had to find a pattern. Well, there are lots of patterns I like, but I wanted something very particular for this sweater. Found this pattern, which I really liked, with a pretty lace bit at the bottom. I've not really done lace, but I figured I could, well, figure it out.

It is worked with the bottom and sides done at once up to the elbows, so there are a lot of stitches to cast on. Well, I had to do it about three times, because I could not get that darn lace pattern to work out. It's only increases and decreases one after the other, but I kept getting to the end of the row and not having the right number of stitches. I am still not sure if this is user error or an error in the pattern. I choose to believe the latter.

So then I decided I would crochet the sweater. I found this pattern. The yarn I had was not the right size for the pattern, but I decided to wing it, using the stitch used in the pattern but just eyeballing the size according to the sweater I had that I loved. Crochet is so fast, I had almost half of the back done before I realized that the fabric I was creating was not as drapey as I would like. Back to the drawing board.

I have Doris Chan's book Everyday Crochet, and I love the patterns in it. I hadn't made anything in the book yet, though, so I thought this would be a good time to try it. I started working on the Haru pattern. It's a long cardigan pattern, but it would be easy enough to stop at the length I want because Doris's designs are worked from the top down. Perfect!

This pattern was working up quickly (all those shells!), but I had to rip it back two or three times to fix mistakes I was making (putting shells where there weren't supposed to be any shells). I had been getting gauge when I started, but when I got to the point where the arm holes become actual arm holes, I tried it on, and it was HUGE! Way too big. If I went down a hook size or two, then the crocheted fabric would be too stiff, not drapey like I wanted it to be.

I went back to my Ravelry lists and found this Drops cardigan. I liked the ones on Ravelry that people had made from this pattern, so I tried that.

I cooked right along with this project. Again, crochet is quick, and the stitches were big on this. I got the two fronts done, the back, and one sleeve, then I basted them together to try it on.


It fit beautifully. I had added a bit here and there to adjust the fit some, and everything I had done worked out perfectly (I'm better at this in crochet than knitting). I loved how it fit.

But UGH!! It looked AWFUL on me!! Talk about accentuating the negative! See where those fronts curve upward where they meet? My flabby belly was sticking right out there for all the world to see! Yuck! So I frogged the whole thing. Yep, I only had one sleeve left to go and I ripped it all back. So disappointing!

Big Sigh.

I hunted around again for a pattern I liked and found this one that might work, worked side to side. Meaning you start at the wrist, knit up to the shoulder, across the body, and down the other sleeve. Except I wanted long sleeves. So I worked out how many stitches to start with for the wrist (instead of the elbow like the pattern started with), and tried to figure out how many increases to make between the wrist and the elbow so I'd end up with the right number of stitches. Well, I got up past the elbow and really looked at it. Basically it has dolman sleeves, which I don't really like. So I pulled all that back out, too.

By now, I admit, I was getting a little irritated, wondering if I was going to have a sweater at the end of all this or not. Would I ever find a pattern I liked that would work AND fit?

I hunted through the patterns I had saved from the Knitting Pattern of the Day and Crochet Pattern of the Day calendars and found one that might work here.

So. I've been working on this one, in Purple Mist, and so far so good. I made it through the lace section at the bottom, which I made longer than the one in the pattern. Now I'm at the straight stockinette part, which I'll be working a bit longer, to make it as long as the C&B cardigan I have. It's almost time to start the armholes. We'll see how it goes. I like how it's working up so far, but I have to say, it's hard not to know if it's going to fit until it's done. I mean, I measured the sweater I have, I picked the right size of the pattern, I think, and I was getting gauge (or pretty darn close to it), so it should be ok. But you never really know until you try it on, do you?

I'm crossing my fingers.