Time flies

First of all, thank you, everyone, for your concern about my Mum. It's very sweet of you to worry. She's fine. She always was fine. She's been a bit more time consuming lately is all. She has some toe issues that meant she had to have a procedure done before she can get the toe problem fixed. And that necessitated multiple trips to multiple doctors and a couple of days in the hospital. She wasn't really in any danger or even really all that uncomfortable at any time.
But she's not very good at being a patient patient, so in addition to all the ferrying about to doctors and hospitals, she also had to be entertained out of being certain she was going to die due to the hospital staff or someone making a mistake and so on. Mum can be, um, something sometimes. Anyway, she was able to come home yesterday afternoon and doesn't need much attention today so I can finally get this blog post up I hope. But soon she'll get to have the toes fixed and then I'll have to do more Mum care afterward so I'll probably disappear again for a couple of weeks soon. I really am trying to do better about regular blogging though. And of course getting in more knitting to accomodate that.

Confession time: I'm basically a lazy person in some areas. Pretty much all of my relaxation time errs on the lazy side as far as actually making an effort goes. But I'm also dreadfully curious. I love to learn things. So things I can learn incidentally I'll learn and then do. But if I actually have to hunt much for the info - I often won't do it until I need to.

Having been shamed by Sheepish Annie into actually looking poking one of the buttons on the post window (now that's lazy isn't it), I can now insert booming announcer voice here Control Time Itself! So from now on the post dates should reflect reality, not my laziness.

Since the last post with actual knitting content, I have learned again that "Never mock the Knitting Goddess" is a maxim to follow. Friday the 21st, just after I announced that Saturday the 22nd was still summer, I logged off the computer and began my second sock's toe. And to the immediate, sudden, accompaniment of thunder and raindrops I proceeded to knit, tink, knit, tink, knit, rip, give up. And Saturday morning? Rain. Not a lot, but enough to announce quite loudly that Fall was here already.

I know when I'm licked so other than getting that darned sock toe on the needles properly and a bit of the foot started so I could take it for a simple project on Mum ferrying errands during the week, I did not bother with trying to finish the socks before Autumn officially began. Less than a week later, of course, as happens every year around here, after a few days of Fall, Summer came back. And the sock is now 2/3 of the way through the foot section thanks to all those hour waits for doctor visits. No photo. It looks exactly like the other one so far.

I've also finished up the baby hat from DD's hand-dyed. It is a hat for a girl so the yarn being girly is fine and I went with a fairly girly look to the hat too. I was making the pattern up as I went along so it took forever to do. It's a top down hat with only two ends to weave in and no extra holes (only the ones I did as YO increases to echo the lacesque edging) with an unvented edging of my own.

Baby hat, pattern by me, yarn by DD, modeled by "Fluffy".

I am still inordinately proud of myself for figuring out how to pull all that off. I followed some advice from Ruth and did the edging so that it striped opposite the hat itself. So it is a knit on edging rather than a ruffle continued off the ribbing which was my first thought. If it's not obvious that is a flower on the top. I think the yarn looks great. I'm very impressed with how my DD's dyeing came out.

The hat held up by its stuffing of yarn cakes shows the dyeing off a bit better I think. I'm so proud of my little girl.

The room aide has already been given the hat (and says she likes it) even though she is supposedly six weeks away. If that's right, she's gonna be having a big baby if you ask me. But maybe it's just that she's a lovely thin thing normally. Unlike, say, me before I got preggers. My daughter is now working on some baby booties with the remains of the hat yarn. If there really is another 6 weeks and I nag a lot to remind her to work on them she might actually get those done in time too.

But the big thing (and I mean really big thing) that has delayed me from the more regular blogging I had intended to do is that I have been going through my stash. My immense stash. My "much bigger than I thought because the yardage summation cell on the spreadsheet was only summing about a third of my entered yarn" stash. And the entered yarn still isn't all of my yarn unfortunately. So I have been culling. And culling. And culling. But it's hard because I've never bought stuff I don't like. And apparently I like a lot of stuff. I'm trying to be good though since I have a good cause for the yarns I am giving away. I currently have 5 bags ready to go be donated to teachers looking for supplies to start knitting clubs in their schools.

And yet there is still more to go through. Plus I'm a little worried I might have more hiding in other places. I just know it's going to be horribly embarrassing to actually list it all on Ravelry. I think I might have more yarn than some small yarn shops. I'm hoping that I'm just over-reacting though. But this sort of image makes me a bit nervous...

"It turned inside out, then it EXPLODED?!?!?!?!?!"

Good thing I have help right?

The copper matches me best, let's keep that one.